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Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

the-scientist.com

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Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#101

Post by [deleted] »

krisoft wrote: post #54
harimau777 wrote: post #10

How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it. Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be ag…

[deleted]

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#102

Post by doctoboggan »

divbzero wrote: post #11

> The trouble with mirror cells is that they could probably evade most of the barriers that keep ordinary organisms in check. To fight off pathogens, for example, our bodies must first detect them with molecular sensors. > Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from…

Wouldn't the bacteria be similarly disadvantaged when trying to sense its environment, eat, and reproduce in a completely mirror world?

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#103

Post by anon84873628 »

doctoboggan wrote: post #102
divbzero wrote: post #11

> The trouble with mirror cells is that they could probably evade most of the barriers that keep ordinary organisms in check. To fight off pathogens, for example, our bodies must first detect them with molecular sensors. > Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from…

Wouldn't the bacteria be similarly disadvantaged when trying to sense its environment, eat, and reproduce in a completely mirror world?

From the article:

>The downside of having a biology that renders mirror bacteria ‘invisible’ to natural enemies is that they would not be able to consume many of the chiral nutrients found in nature. However, several nutrients, such as glycerol, are achiral (they do not have mirrored forms), and thus could be consumed by mirror bacteria. Well-intentioned scientists could also engineer mirror bacteria that can consume naturally occurring chiral molecules such as sugars and amino acids.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#104

Post by tivert »

harimau777 wrote: post #10

How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.

And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.

Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#105

Post by sitkack »

tw04 wrote: post #98
Filligree wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure it would attack it, and it likely would even succeed. The problem is the chiral molecules would be difficult to clean up. You’d have this anti-life bacteria torn to pieces, yes, but then the pieces get stuck everywhere and potentially jam things. Personally—not a biologist—it doesn’t feel like a huge risk, given we accept threats such as microplastics which do much the same thing. However, it’s a completely…

Do we really "accept" microplastics? It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics, while simultaneously acknowledging it's a problem that we almost assuredly can't realistically solve on any reasonable timescale. I'm confident if we had seen microplastics coming when we first started using plastics, science at least would have tried to prevent their use becoming as widespread as it has.

Humanity knew very well that lead and mercury were highly toxic and yet only recently are they being phased out in widespread use.

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sm1qxqdRyY

Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.

Scientists don't have much say in these things.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#106

Post by lawlessone »

aitchnyu wrote: post #12

So thats why we were made to extract fossil fuels and "dispose" plastic and research bacteria. Hope Life 2.0 writes footnotes about biped cities making plastic mines like we write about Jurassic shellfish providing soil suitable for US cotton.

I life has to completely restart on this planet, there probably won't be time for things as complex as us to evolve again before the sun turns into a red giant.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#107

Post by dekhn »

michaelmrose wrote: post #77
mr_toad wrote: post #14

I don’t understand why the innate immune response wouldn’t default to attacking an organism made of chiral molecules, since it attacks anything it doesn’t recognise. And while the adaptive immune response might not immediately recognise a novel organism, is there something that would prevent it ever adapting?

Stuff binds to other stuff because the magnetic domains and shape match up well enough. There is no way to effect something that attacks everything it doesn't recognize because a) there is no ooeration that represents not matching and b) if there was such a cell would be a short lived bomb that would blow up your body. You adaptive immune system learns to and antigen when a short lived immune cell is semi randomly ge…

Magnetism does not play a role in binding in biology. The primary determinants of binding are: shape complementarity, electrostatic interactions, van der waals forces, and some amount of hard to explain entropy.

(biomagnetism is a thing, but I'm not aware of any cases where binding occurs due to magnetic forces)

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#108

Post by ceejayoz »

gwbas1c wrote: post #67
ninininino wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand the meaning of your comment, it reads to me like "one time people worried about something but their worries were unfounded" with the subtext/implication that "therefore we don't need to worry" - about this? Or maybe need to worry in general? Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?

> Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition? Exactly. I suspect mirror-image molecule life hasn't evolved because it wouldn't be fit enough to be self-sustaining.

Many invasive species get into new ecosystems only with human help. They can’t do it on their own, but once they’re there… Asian carp and zebra mussels.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#109

Post by roenxi »

Doesn't sound very scary on the face of it. Apparently [0] the problem with Thalidomide was that the chirality could spontaneously reverse, so that sort of thing must happen frequently in nature. If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring under evolutionary pressure it probably doesn't actually have any advantages over following the herd.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#In_biology

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#110

Post by ltbarcly3 »

There needs to be an international body established to set standards and limitations on biological research, and it's edicts should be enforced very aggressively.

Unfortunately, even in the aftermath of a massive global disruption directly due to the creation of organisms which are supernaturally able to defeat human immune systems, it's still the wild west. There's effectively very little limitations on research that could quite literally end humanity and disrupt all life on earth, and the limitations that do exist are actively skirted, ignored with violations covered up after the fact.

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