The human race really can't catch a break, and now, scientists have given us a brand-new fear to look out for. As the likes of Elon Musk continue to reach for the stars in an attempt to take the human race beyond the Moon, it's becoming increasingly obvious how little we know about the cosmos.
In the spirit of exploration, mankind seems destined to dive deeper into space, and whether it be colonizing Mars or trying to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang, we're determined to go where no man has gone before.
Away from warnings we could bring back a deadly pandemic from the surface of Mars, and how the incoming 3I/ATLAS comet could be an alien mothership, synthetic biologist John Glass has told the Financial Times that we need to look out for a lifeform that doesn't even exist yet. Worse still, we're likely to manufacture it ourselves.
Although the piece is speculative, it won't help us sleep any better at night as Glass foreshadows the birth of 'mirror life'. This synthetic organism could pose a great risk to the whole existence of natural biology.
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It's all typically confusing, but in layman's terms, mirror life contains DNA structures that are the exact opposite of all known organisms. All lifeforms currently on Earth have a right-handed double helix, with the strands composed of a sugar-phosphate backbone twisting to the right. Our cells' building blocks are made of left-handed proteins. In mirror life, things (unsurprisingly) go the other way.
Glass explains: "We should choose not to build mirror life and pass laws to ensure nobody can. The question is not whether we are able to prevent this threat — it is whether we will act while we still can."
There's already work underway to build a mirror ribosome, which is a cell's protein factory. When it's possible to build a mirror cell, the simplest thing to engineer next would be mirror bacteria.
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Referring to it as a Pandora's Box, Glass suggests that mirror bacteria poses 'extraordinary risks' and could "evade our immune systems, confound our medicines and escape many of nature’s checks and balances."
It sounds a lot like the plot of Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and while they're obviously science fiction, they're worryingly close to becoming a reality.
Glass reiterates that from what little we know, our bodies would produce very few antibodies to mirror molecules: "Having even one immune deficiency can cause a patient to die of overwhelming bacterial infections; a mirror bacterial infection might be like having many immune deficiencies at once."Perhaps the biggest concern is that we simply don't know what mirror life could do to us.
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Glass points to a June conference at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where over 150 scientists and ethicists from the likes of the World Health Organization and United Nations came together to discuss mirror life for the first time.
Even though most agree that the technology to create mirror life could be between one and three decades away, he maintains there's a distinct sense of urgency to tackle these fears before it's too late.
Glass compares the mirror life situation to when researchers banned chlorofluorocarbons after recognizing the ozone crisis, concluding: "We have an even rarer opportunity now to prevent a global threat before it causes any harm."