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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

#221

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

There are already examples of immunosilent (to humans) lipids like in Moritella.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#222

Post by selimthegrim »

kragen wrote: post #213
achierius wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kazakhstan is by no means a Russian vassal state, and is in essentially no danger of annexation. It's worlds away from Belarus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Kazakh_unrest#7_January > Tokayev (...) went on to thank Russia for sending troops to help establish order. > Russia's Defence Ministry stated that more than 70 planes were flying, around the clock, to bring Russian troops into Kazakhstan and that they were helping to control Almaty's main airport. On the other hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93Russia_rela... >…

They can leverage China at this point. They have options. They told the extra Russian military to leave after the last unrest.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#223

Post by dhosek »

geysersam wrote: post #147

If this is such a powerful niche for an organism to be in, why haven't they already emerged naturally over the 3 billion year history of life on earth?

I remember learning about chirality from an Isaac Asimov article about “left-handed” sugar which, while it tastes the same as normal sugar, is unable to be metabolized by our digestive systems. I would imagine that something similar would come into play with a left-handed organism: it would be unable to consume right-handed nutrients so would starve to death. Overall, my assumption is that mirror bacteria would be unable to interact in any significant way with non-mirror organisms, but being somebody whose expertise begins and ends with reading an Isaac Asimov article on the subject as a 10-year-old, I’m very open to the possibility that I may be wrong.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#224

Post by tw04 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #116
tw04 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics Got anything you can point to? I haven't looked for a while but last time I did the evidence of harm appeared quite minimal. I recall that it was quite toxic in aquatic environments that had already been contaminated with (previously mostly harmless) low levels of heavy metals. PTFE is similar in that it too hangs around in the environment f…

Sure, here’s one that’s particularly disturbing and I can’t imagine long term is classified as benign.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/22/1252831...

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#225

Post by zusammen »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #171
philipkglass wrote: post #4

The full report is here: "Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks" https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036 The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads. https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/…

Peter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level

I got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#226

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

selimthegrim wrote: post #220
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mirror symmetry breaks down in counter-intuitive ways in physics, that probably bubbles up into the chemistry side of things too. Not always, and not often. Probably just often enough to be confusing, and in this case, starkly terrifying and spirit-crushing.

That is a completely different thing.

Prove it. Prove that there's not some corner case where a mirrored molecule stops behaving chemically the same towards other mirrored molecules.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#227

Post by cesarb »

kragen wrote: post #203
meiraleal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons Brazil holds the key technologies to develop it and the sixth bigger deposit of uranium (with only 30% of the territory mapped). The navy is even currently developing a nuclear submarine that will be totally based on local technology.

Yes, both Argentina and Brazil could produce nuclear weapons, given enough time and effort, but neither one of them has ever had them. Neither does either country currently have plans to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, as far as is publicly known. So they are not examples of countries that gave up nuclear weapons. A nuclear submarine is also not what is meant by "nuclear weapon", although it is arguably a weapon…

> Brazil already has many nuclear reactors that are in some sense "totally based on Brazilian technology" and has for decades.

I only knew of the three commercial reactors, the third of them under construction for something like four decades and still far from done (and they are also mostly foreign technology AFAIK). So I went looking, and it does seem there are a couple of decades-old research reactors I didn't know about: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_reatores_nucleares_Br...

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#228

Post by mintplant »

dhosek wrote: post #223
geysersam wrote: post #147

If this is such a powerful niche for an organism to be in, why haven't they already emerged naturally over the 3 billion year history of life on earth?

I remember learning about chirality from an Isaac Asimov article about “left-handed” sugar which, while it tastes the same as normal sugar, is unable to be metabolized by our digestive systems. I would imagine that something similar would come into play with a left-handed organism: it would be unable to consume right-handed nutrients so would starve to death. Overall, my assumption is that mirror bacteria would be un…

The article mentions that such organisms may be able to subsist on nutrients which lack chirality.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#229

Post by fastaguy88 »

kstrauser wrote: post #113
fastaguy88 wrote: post #111

The claim that mirror molecules would not be subject to immune surveillance makes no sense to me. The immune system is happy to react to non-biological molecules. It reacts to shapes, not chirality. It is a separate question whether the immune response could break into mirror membranes and break down mirror molecules.

Are you certain? The immune system detects molecules partly due to their shape, i.e. where binding points are on the proteins. I can imagine it being the case where the immune system's proteins no longer match up with the invader's because of the mirroring. If you 3d print a mirrored house key, the bitting may line up with the original, but the warding wouldn't fit anymore. I think that's a reasonable analogy to the…

Early studies (1970's and earlier) used the antigen (hapten) di-nitro-phenol (DNP) to explore antibody diversity (how many different antibodies might be raised against a simple small molecule). DNP is very simple (non-chiral) structure that generates a diverse set of antibodies.

Whether an antibody raised against one structure interacts with a different structure is irrelevant to the question of whether an antibody can be raised to the other structure.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#230

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

zusammen wrote: post #225
mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level

I got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.

Conversing with early GPT-4 (in the first days of Bing chat) was surreal beyond any non-drug experience I know of. The infamous negative behaviors are well documented [0] but every part was so... alien.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-...

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