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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 5 days ago by MicroWave to c/world

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Summary

Leading scientists, including Nobel laureates, are urging a halt to research on creating “mirror life” microbes, citing “unprecedented risks” to life on Earth.

Mirror microbes, built from reversed molecular structures, could evade natural immune systems, leading to uncontrollable lethal infections.

While mirror molecules hold potential for medical and industrial uses, researchers warn that mirror organisms could escape containment and resist antibiotics.

A 299-page report in Science advocates banning such research until safety can be ensured and calls for global debate on its ethical and ecological implications.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

you're missing the point so hard i'm not even sure where should i begin. thalidomide is synthetic, it didn't exist before it was made for the first time in lab. there's no way to tell which one is "right" and which one is "mirrored" this is nonsense. it is completely normal for pharmaceuticals to have different activities depending on enantiomer, sometimes one is weaker and one is stronger but both act at the same receptor/enzyme, sometimes one has one activity and one does something completely different, like slow down breakdown of the other, but most of the time one is active and the other does nothing.

the point of that thing is that maybe, perhaps, lifeforms based on d-aminoacids and l-sugars could evade immune response, and that's rather speculative. not to mention incomprehensible barriers to making this all work in the first place. d-aminoacids exist in nature, if not all of them, and normal organisms can metabolise them. proteins made out of d-aminoacids degrade slower, but it doesn't mean that there are no mechanisms to destroy these things. similarly i don't think it'll be impossible to generate immune response to wrong chirality bacteria, humans generate antibodies against things like PEG, important thing for antibodies is how external shape of these things looks like and this will be rather unique

[–] jpreston2005 2 points 4 days ago

i don’t think it’ll be impossible to generate immune response to wrong chirality bacteria

you know what they say about assumptions