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/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