The risks of mirror life research

As Jonathan just mentioned, dozens of scientists - including prominent figures like Harvard geneticist George Church, whom we’ll hear from next - recently published an article in Science called "Confronting risks of mirror life." Whilst the immense potential of chiral drugs cannot be denied, they expressed concerns about the potential creation of mirror-image organisms - particularly mirror bacteria. And as we heard from Jonathan, the means of creating self-replicating mirror life is fairly readily available already to any biochemist seeking to do so. And while opinions vary as to how long it might take to make such an organism - some say 5 years and others 30 - these aren’t all that far apart in the grand scheme of things. So what are the biological risks that need considering before going further with creating chiral life? And how can this be enforced? George Church…

George - There are risks to almost anything biological because it replicates. You can have invasive plants and animals, for example, and they're much riskier when they replicate than if you'd bring in a sterilised plant or animal. And hence, any responsible synthetic biologist who's doing this kind of work is going to do what's called biocontainment, and sometimes physical as well as biological containment, to make sure that that organism cannot replicate outside of the lab and whatever laboratory facility they're using is commensurate with its risks.

So, for example, people work on very serious pathogens in what's called a BSL-4 facility, which has very high physical risk mitigation, people wearing moonsuit type things. But in addition, there's biocontainment that can work quite effectively. So, I think that would be the mitigation.
And then the worst case is you get somebody who undoes that biocontainment intentionally so that they can develop it further and make it something that would be an existential risk for everybody. At least the theory that is worth considering, I wouldn't say it's proven by any means, is that most forms of life are unprepared for dealing with mirror forms.

Chris - Indeed, because most of nature's recycling system is a biological one, isn't it? You've got microorganisms, including fungi and bacteria that break stuff down. Chemistry and ultraviolet light help, of course, but one could foresee then if we made stuff that was the wrong-handedness that the biological recycling system couldn't see, would we end up with the biological equivalent of plastic pollution, where we're making things that will just go out into the environment and have a really, really long lifetime in the environment? And they could have all kinds of biological effects because of accumulation.

George - Well, that's one way of thinking about one of the risks. But I think a much more serious one is that these could invade every tissue in plants and animals and effectively act as pathogens for which there's no immune system. So, long before you start accumulating tons of mirror bacterial waste, you're going to have them eating the food that is floating around in your blood and in the plant fluids, making them less healthy as a result and eventually killing them.

Chris - In the past, when we've had dangerous technologies, there's been some safeguard because in some cases they were so hard to work on - or so hard to do - you needed to be a superpower to do them. Like the atomic bomb, for example. Are we not in an era now where you can do quite a lot in your garden shed if you buy relatively simple, relatively cheap bits of kit? So is it going to be quite hard to regulate this? Once this genie is out of the bottle, people could start just doing whatever they wanted.

George - Yes and no. For example, with ammonium nitrate you can make explosives in your garden shed and similarly you can make poisonous gases like they used in World War I. But I put a white paper out in 2004 that suggested a specific way that one could regulate and, in particular, do surveillance. Up until then, it was kind of popular to say, we're going to have a moratorium where everybody says they won't do it. Well, that doesn't help you with the people that are doing it surreptitiously. We need surveillance and there are specific choke points where you can see that they can't practice a lot of most synthetic biology without being able to synthesise DNA. And we've got almost complete industry agreement on checking all the DNA orders, whether it's on a desktop machine or whether it's over the internet. And I think that would help.

Also, monitoring all of the mirror image precursor molecules, whether it's for DNA synthesis in machines or whether it's just using it in other experiments. All of that could be regulated. Now, it's not perfect, but it's a step that we can take.

Also, just developing more widespread diagnostics would see these things the instant they arise. Having secure facilities which would exclude them would be another thing. There are things that can be done in advance and probably should be done if we really take this seriously.

Chris - And where do you stand on it then, off the back of all that? Are you in favour of we just don't do this with mirror life at the moment? Or, do you think it's one of those things that is worth pursuing, if done safely, in the right hands, notwithstanding the risks, because there might be a lot of benefit from doing it?

George - It depends on what the ‘it’ is. So I think mirror image molecules are extremely valuable and have been for decades. Like the difference between the thalidomide that caused a lot of damage to infants and other thalidomides that are useful is based on its chirality. So, chirality is important.

Making non-replicating mirror DNA RNA protein is fine. I think we should be very cautious about replicating molecules, but we certainly should have a programme in trying to detect them. So if they do exist on Earth, we should understand how they're being kept in check. If they occur on a planet, we should find that out before we send anybody there and so forth. So, I think there's three ‘it’s’ here. One is mirror molecules that don't replicate. There's mirror life, which we don't want to create. And then there's detecting mirror life. And I think the first and the last are very promising and important.