Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
the-scientist.com
Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
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Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#2The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)
Related:
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#3The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-) Related: Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394
Grey goo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
AI paperclips
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem
Prions getting into food supply
Nuclear holocaust.
I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#4The 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/maelstrom_master.htm
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
https://rifters.com/real/author.htm
I see that a substack author has written about this "second kingdom of life" today, under the catchy heading "green goo":
https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished
And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#5Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose
Once the mirror creature is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#6Now we have another candidate to explain the Fermi paradox. Mirror Biology Armageddon. Even if life outside runs on alternative biochemistry, the odds are that some of its building blocks are chiral too, and subjected to the same risks in case the indigenous intelligent lifeform advances to the point of making mirror life.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#7If you have the technological proficiency to synthesize mirror chemistry cells from scratch, I'm hoping that implies you also have the ability to engineer e.g. bacteria that feed on reverse chirality molecules & turn them back into standard form, or create other mitigations. Safer not to make them at all though.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#8The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-) Related: Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394
Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.
Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].
The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#9Sounds like the warnings about GMO.
In the mean time, they tried using mRNA vaccines that did mimic our own mRNA, but they caused immune reaction. Substituting a different nucleoside and made the vaccine more stable. The way pseudouridine is used in mRNA vaccines isn't found in nature, ergo people who have been vaccinated are already carrying around bit bit of a form of life never seen before on the planet.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#10How 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.