from Hacker News

Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

by conqueso on 12/13/24, 1:47 PM with 246 comments

  • by philipkglass on 12/13/24, 1:29 AM

    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/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.

  • by divbzero on 12/13/24, 5:25 AM

    > 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 their immune systems.

    It’s clear that RNA wouldn’t be complementary to mirror RNA, but antibody binding is more complex than RNA hybridization. Is it a foregone conclusion that antibodies couldn’t bind to mirror antigens?

    (Degrading mirror proteins, as mentioned elsewhere in OP, does seem like a bigger obstacle.)

  • by mr_toad on 12/13/24, 7:58 AM

    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?

  • by geysersam on 12/17/24, 7:01 AM

    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?

  • by shaky-carrousel on 12/17/24, 8:26 AM

    That's sensationalism. Mirror bacteria would be at a severe disadvantage as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids. And there are much much more normal bacteria than any possible mirror bacteria. They would be wiped out pretty quickly.

  • by harimau777 on 12/13/24, 5:25 AM

    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.

  • by efitz on 12/17/24, 3:52 AM

    Maybe we should manufacture and stockpile mirror antibiotics, in case of accidental or intentional release of such organisms.

    This appeals to me both as a defensive/protective measure and as a deterrent to others who might look to weaponize such organisms.

  • by conqueso on 12/13/24, 1:51 PM

    Searching HN for "mirror cells", I see at least 1 article warning of the dangers from more than 10 years ago. So, this has been a thing for a while. Any biologists here that can chime in on just how big of a risk they do pose? Is there a general consensus throughout the community that this research should end? Is this something that could be developed for bio-terrorism? Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?

  • by aitchnyu on 12/13/24, 7:48 AM

    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.

  • by treyd on 12/15/24, 9:57 PM

    https://archive.is/5MhOW

    Why wouldn't it work in the other direction though? The mirror cells would be competing for the same ambidextrous resources (for my lack of a better term). Sugar is chiral isnt it? Would they be able to digest normal chiral resources?

  • by Qem on 12/13/24, 1:59 PM

  • by dmitrygr on 12/16/24, 8:35 PM

    A short story/cautionary tale on this very subject: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world

  • by scotty79 on 12/13/24, 2:11 PM

    How much achiral food would be available for these bacteria anyways in nature? They'd have to compete for it with all other life.

  • by Borrible on 12/17/24, 1:10 PM

  • by 00N8 on 12/13/24, 2:13 AM

    If 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.

  • by joshuaissac on 12/13/24, 1:59 AM

    Why 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.

  • by the__alchemist on 12/14/24, 2:02 PM

    This reminds me of the different foods in Anathem; the different people (Trying to keep this spoiler-free.) are unable to digest the the foods the others eat.

  • by ltbarcly3 on 12/17/24, 12:43 AM

    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.

  • by aydyn on 12/17/24, 2:42 AM

    I think it is reasonable to assume that the immune system would have to work harder against mirror pathogens. Straight toxicity might be another important consideration.

    On the other hands mirror amino acids already exist in nature, so I find the argument that a mirror bacteria would rampage the ecosystem unchecked sensationalist. Click-bait even. More likely than not, the mirror bacteria itself would be heavily outcompeted in the wild.

  • by d--b on 12/17/24, 10:19 AM

    Also: in all risk analysis you'd have to consider the upside. The upside here is none. We are 99.9% sure that there's nothing special about our side of the mirror. So with 0 upside besides "writing a paper" or "because no one has done it, so who knows?", it doesn't really matter that the risk may be small. It just doesn't make sense to do it.

  • by yawpitch on 12/13/24, 2:05 PM

    Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?

  • by skygazer on 12/14/24, 2:08 AM

    How about we make mirror prions that affect/infect mirror bacteria, but are inert to us? It becomes a targeted therapy.

  • by fastaguy88 on 12/17/24, 1:04 AM

    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.

  • by gwbas1c on 12/13/24, 3:02 PM

    Some scientists in the Manhattan Project worried that the first nuclear test could trigger a chain reaction that would annihilate the earth.

    These fears were unfounded.

    (Granted, atmospheric nuclear weapons testing has its own set of subtle consequences that are gradually becoming more well known.)

  • by aaroninsf on 12/17/24, 6:16 PM

    No discussion of Peter Watts' Rifters should omit a clear content warning.

    It's full of his own fetish, misogynistic sadism, and without kink shaming, I can say this makes these books—which are otherwise interesting and memorable—literally unrecommendable.

    Caveat lector

  • by XorNot on 12/17/24, 4:53 AM

    This is just Open Philanthropy laundering weird billionaire concerns again. The same people who decided they really needed to warn the world about garage borne designer pandemics (by totally misunderstanding what DNA actually is and does).

  • by odyssey7 on 12/13/24, 2:17 PM

    What’s more realistic in the near-term is that conventional gain-of-function research creates a terrible, conventional bacterium that’s more deadly than Ebola and resistant to all of the antibiotics that we mass produce.

    If there was an advantage to being opposite-handed, some bacterium would have done it by now. The article even says that researchers just found out that e-coli can consume different-handed food.

    I’m guessing that the first discovery in this area, the ambi-vory of e-coli, is not really all that unique. Medical and biological science is still just scratching the surface. They’re still cataloguing new components of human anatomy, things you could have found with a microscope centuries ago… It is highly unlikely that out of the universe of billions of years of bacteria, e-coli is the singular organism that went down this route to the furthest extent that was advantageous. The fact that they found one example with their limited resources tells me that this is not so improbable.

    The fear-mongering just sounds like a funding push to me. The basic research will be enriching for humanity, if it doesn’t create the very thing from which it purports to save us, though I’m thinking this messaging is a bit out there. Could you engineer a super-bioweapon this way? Probably. But there are easier ways to do that with information that’s already in the textbooks.

  • by ethbr1 on 12/13/24, 2:14 PM

    Basic biochemistry question (you can tell what I didn't study in uni)

    Is it possible to mix chirality in, say, a protein?

    I.e. have a portion of one chirality and another of the other?

  • by m3kw9 on 12/13/24, 2:39 PM

    So you are saying if by chance a normal bacteria was mutated into chiral/mirror we’d be wiped out? I’m sure there was such events in nature before

  • by roenxi on 12/17/24, 12:38 AM

    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

  • by Qem on 12/13/24, 2:12 AM

    Now 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.

  • by IWeldMelons on 12/17/24, 1:36 PM

    Gain Of Function research is far more pressing, non-hypothetical, issue which may have already caused a major pandemia.

  • by xolox on 12/12/24, 10:51 PM

    The 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

  • by bilekas on 12/17/24, 8:19 AM

    This is so impressive that it's achievable, I maybe morbidly was imagining if we were to be wiped out due to this and another species were able to evolve to study how we died, would they come across these mirror Bacteria and believe they were natural. It all has very "Death Stranding" tones but I'm not a biologist by any means.

  • by trhway on 12/17/24, 10:08 AM

    sounds like another NIH grant is going to be given to a shell nonprofit to move the research to a "BSL4" (honest, we don't reuse paper towels) lab somewhere in China.

  • by rstuart4133 on 12/13/24, 2:40 AM

    Sounds 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.