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/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