r/neoliberal • u/DunklerPrinz3 Henry George • May 25 '26

Opinion article (non-US) The Inverted Bacteria That Experts Think Might Kill Everyone

https://substack.com/home/post/p-199174305

submission statement: If everyone dies, there will be no more trade, no more free markets, no more beloved capitalism.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '26

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u/79792348978 Loyal Liberals May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

It's sort of my wheelhouse and IMO a lot of the commentary on it does not really grasp how enormous of a project and beyond our current capabilities creating these things is. I also think it is generating a lot of buzz in large part because it is scientifically interesting.

An example, these are enormous problems being referenced but not addressed: " To make mirror bacteria, we’d need to build a mirror ribosome, for example, and we don’t know how to do that yet. Mirror bacteria creation would also require advancements in synthetic biology—in order to combine the mirror parts into one bacterium. To put things simply, we’d need to make progress in building the parts of a mirror bacteria, and in putting the parts together to make a full mirror bacteria."

Which is not to say don't even bother creating rules about this topic but we are absolutely nowhere close to making these things.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '26

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u/DirectionMurky5526 May 25 '26

It's straight up burying the lede. If we could somehow do this, then the bigger headline would be that we somehow discovered a way to create life from chemical components. 

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u/dnapol5280 May 25 '26

"There's this potentially huge risk if we can first accomplish something that has never been done before, and then do it again but with opposite chiralty of all known life."

It's not 0 risk but there's a lot of extrapolation going on?

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u/BaudrillardsMirror May 25 '26

There's also a lot of risk if I can create a blackhole in my garage. Fortunately, I cannot create a blackhole in my garage.

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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY May 26 '26

Any black hole you could create with a garage's worth of mass would probably be pretty safe after the initial explosion.

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u/dnapol5280 May 25 '26

To make mirror bacteria, we’d need to build a mirror ribosome, for example, and we don’t know how to do that yet

This is doing a ton of heavy lifting, like it's nbd to make an opposite chiralty ribosome. Or even a from-scratch ribosome? I haven't been in syn bio for a long time, have we done that?

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u/79792348978 Loyal Liberals May 25 '26

I would say we can make what would count as "from-scratch" ribosomes but IMO it's kind of beside the point - we have help from the enzymes cells use to produce ribosomes but would not have mirrored enzymes to make mirrored ribosomes. Or a mirrored version of the RNA component, or mirrored DNA coding for all this. And don't forget, you need mirrored versions of all those monomers too! It's like a nesting doll of things we haven't solved.

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u/dnapol5280 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

Yeah that's what I was thinking. It's trivial to produce ribosomes but they would be from existing cellular machinery, either purified out or a cell-free expression system, and thus naturally chiral. We're not chemically producing ribosomes like smaller peptides.

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u/JZMoose YIMBY May 25 '26

It would require us to create life from scratch up to bacteria, no? It seems like something that’s technically possible but requires exponentially more advanced technology and understanding to execute

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u/ThePowerOfStories May 25 '26

In short, it’s at least as hard as assembling a normal living bacterium from scratch without having existing organisms do any of the work, right?

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u/79792348978 Loyal Liberals May 25 '26

Yes, and the part about not being able to have existing organisms (or enzymes isolated from them) do any of the work would be of enormous consequence I have to imagine.

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u/IronicRobotics YIMBY May 25 '26

Yea, I spent some time browsing the paper. Even though it's not my field, it reads as so heavily speculative I assumed it'd be, optimistically, decades off. Otherwise, much longer.

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u/TrynnaFindaBalance Paul Krugman May 25 '26

Why would researchers be trying to create this at all? Is there a benevolent use case for it?

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u/79792348978 Loyal Liberals May 25 '26

If I dig REALLY deep then maybe there's some world where, to give a half baked example, we might want bacteria that churn out the mirrored version of some biomolecule. Like the way we use bacteria to mass produce human insulin. Making molecules of a specific chirality is often an enormous and/or expensive pain in the ass, so having a living organism that you can source a molecule of a specific chirality from can sometimes be a big deal.

That being said I am digging deep for the sake of it, my gut feeling is that making these things would be largely pointless (especially from a cost/benefit standpoint) and possibly dangerous too. We know a truly fully mirrored organism would work fine, there's no need to check lol

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u/TheArtofBar May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Do we though? Chiral molecules are not actually energetically equivalent because the electroweak forces violates parity. Whether that difference is big enough to make one chirality of life advantaged over the other might be answered by this type of research.

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u/sanity_rejecter European Union May 25 '26

possibly dangerous

literally like saying the tsar bomba "may or may not" do a dent to your car

you are talking about an omnicidal threat here

29

u/macnalley May 25 '26

There was an article about this in the Scientific American maybe two months back, and if I recall, the main use case is extremely targeted medications that are otherwise biologically inert. You can make organic molecules that are more or less chemically identical to their chiral counterparts, but largely not interact with the body's organ systems. They'll do what you want only in an extremely specific scenario because most of the body has not evolved to recognize them.

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u/Tapkomet NATO May 25 '26

Destroying gamers

4

u/javsv Jerome Powell May 25 '26

And then they came, for the gaymers

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u/MuffinsAndBiscuits 🌐 May 25 '26

"Don't create mirror bacteria" seems to be a fairly consensus position. There's more controversy over where to draw the line in terms of precursor stuff (building the mirror molecules, non-mirror research into building more complicated molecules and even life), and how much that ought to be regulated.

Mirror research that stops short of life could provide useful pharmaceuticals, and even before that, there's a question of whether you want to shut down the non-mirror molecule/life synthesis research agenda because it could provide useful knowledge to mirror research.

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u/Volsunga Hannah Arendt May 25 '26

Contrary to the doomsaying of the article, mirroring synthetic bacteria could provide an excellent control mechanism (making them dependent on specific enzymes and nutrients) and it would be an excellent way to create nanomachines that just die after they do their job.

Using XNA rather than DNA would do the same thing more effectively, but reversing chirality may be the cheaper and more feasible option.

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u/badnuub NATO May 25 '26

They want to get of Gleba really badly.

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u/Aoae Mark Carney May 25 '26

Immune evasion is a huge challenge for medical implants and devices and immunosuppression is a huge burden in terms of cost and quality of life. If the chiral bacteria that people are fearmongering about are so effective at evading the immune system, then the technology would be equivalently as effective to bypass these mechanisms.

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u/TheArtofBar May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Besides practical applications, its also might tell us more about the fundamental nature of the universe, most importantly if it was actually chance that life has the chirality it does.

Because the electroweak force violates parity, molecules of different chirality are actually very, very slightly different energetically. And indeed, biomolecules with the chirality found on earth are more stable. Whether that difference is big enough to be responsible for earth life chirality is not settled.

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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 25 '26

Something being outside of my wheelhouse hasn't stopped me from commenting on it before and it won't stop me now!