World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.
The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.
Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.
The fresh concerns over the technology are revealed in a 299-page report and a commentary in the journal Science. While enthusiastic about research on mirror molecules, the report sees substantial risks in mirror microbes and calls for a global debate on the work.
Just to put that in perspective for me, anti-vaxxers world wide have used the adverse effects the original covid vaccines could have to drum up support for right-wingers in many countries. In my mind, the covid cospiracies are one of the prime reasons why right wingers are so popular today.
As far as I understood, the reason why adverse effects could occure when being vaccinated (they could also occur if you get covid btw, so you are no safer not getting vaccinated), is because the spike protein was similar enough in shape to a protein the body uses. And if you are unlucky, your body develops an immunity response to the spike protein in such a way, that your body-own protein also triggers that immunity response.
So with covid, we already have an example of what could happen if similarly-looking proteins are used by viruses or bacteria. If I have gotten this correctly, the world would not survive an outbreak of the ‘mirror flu’.
I don’t see how what you wrote about spike protein and autoimmunity relates at all to mirror life. But I could be missing something.
Despite there being no evidence for what you’re claiming here, if you think about it for a second, you’d realize the spike protein isn’t some sort of artificial substance being put into your body by a vaccine, but is atom for atom identical to the spike proteins found on different variants of covid.
If you get sick with covid, your body contains unfathomably more spike proteins than you would get from a hundred covid immunizations. And, if you’ve gotten an immunization, your immune system can keep the amount of virus in your system much lower.
It’s ok to just not like the idea of the covid immunizations. Making stuff up to try to justify your belief, however…
Maybe I worded my post badly, I never claimed that you shouldn’t get vaccinated for covid. I just remember articles about researchers warning that ot may be a mistake to synthesize the entire covid spike protein for the vaccination, because there is a risk of the body developing immunity to the spike protein in such a way, that an endogenous protein is also detected, which then leads to an auto-immune disease.
This is one paper that I found that talks about what I heard back then.
But apart from that, I only brought up covid to underline that the long-covid symptoms are the prime example anti-vaxxers point to when defending their decision not to vaccinate. And those long-covid symptoms are likely triggered by an auto-immune disease, which is likely triggered because of malformed covid-detection proteins that erroneously flag endogenous proteins as malicious as well.
So my point is, if the long-covid symptons are responsible for pushing anti-vax into the mainstream, then an auto-immune disease triggered by mirror-pathogens will break humanity.
Reading their comment carefully, I don’t think that’s what they’re saying at all. They’re not advocating against immunization, arguing that it’s bad to inject synthetic substances, nor justifying their belief but rather guessing how the biology stuff works under the hood.
I get what you’re saying. Sorry people are misinterpreting and misconstruing your comment and making you out to be some sort of evil antivaxxer. You’re right in the way that pathogens exploit these quirks to their full extent and would be an invisible threat if they managed to mimic our molecules and become undetectable and indestructible to our immune system by their very nature.
Although you’re right about how autoimmunity generally works, the molecular mimicry causing autoimmunity that you mentioned is the exact opposite of the experts’ concerns. For example, left-handed pathogens’ topology (the molecular surface that the immune system “feels” for and detects) would be a mirror image, so there’s probably no risk of autoimmunity since it’s entirely different to your own proteins from your immune system’s point of view.
But the main concern is how our immune systems are simply not be equipped to handle the mirror molecules once detected. It’d be unable to break them down via precise enzymatic degradation, which in turn would limit recognition via antigen presentation from one cell to another down the line, rendering our body unable to coordinate. We’d need to evolve an entirely new set of enzymes and strategies to handle this.
Here’s a better article that makes a better job at explaining the experts’ concerns:
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-mirror-bacteria-pose-global-health.html
Reading comprehension, even in a place like this where most people are relatively educated, has completely gone down the shitter.
I just skimmed their comment, and it was clear to me from the first couple sentences that this person isn’t anti-vax…
Thank you for that explanation and extra source.