Mirror Life: A Scientific Revolution or Biological Gamble?
Why a Ban May Fail and What We Can Do Instead.
Introduction
You have two hands, both with the same design but mirror images of one another. This means they require different accommodations: for example, your right hand has a hard time using left-handed scissors.
This phenomenon exists in biology and chemistry and is called “chirality.” All molecules—such as DNA, RNA, or proteins—have evolved with one configuration, one chirality. But last week, scientists published a paper and a technical report showing it might be possible to engineer mirror versions of respective molecules.
This has good and bad potential. Mirror drugs could be harder for natural enzymes to break down, prolonging their effects (like a left-handed person trying to use right-handed scissors). On the other hand, it’s also possible that they could evade detection by our immune system, disrupt existing ecosystems, or introduce unforeseen molecular interactions.
In this article, we discuss the benefits and risks of mirror life and the challenges of a ban. We provide alternative recommendations for responsible approaches to the research. We also highlight the organisations currently working in the space, and propose practical steps, such as strengthening biosafety networks, implementing detection mechanisms for misuse, and introducing policy addendums to condition funding on meeting containment standards.
Mirror Life: Fire from Prometheus, or Pandora's Box?
Mirror organisms, isolated from natural life due to their opposite chirality, could offer containment advantages but also pose risks like immune evasion and ecosystem disruption. The recent paper in Science as well as the accompanying technical report outline the following pros and cons.
Possible Benefits:
Possible applications in creating long-lasting, nonimmunogenic therapies
Advancement of synthetic biology and molecular engineering techniques
Potential scientific insights into fundamental biological processes and the development of a new understanding of molecular chirality
Possible Harms:
Potential to cause lethal infections across multiple species
Ability to evade immune systems in humans, animals, and plants
Risk of uncontrollable environmental spread
Resistance to natural predation and antibiotics
Possibility of irreversible ecological damage
Limited practical benefits compared to extreme potential risks
Difficulty in developing effective countermeasures
Potential for accidental or intentional misuse
Challenges with a Ban
A ban is not entirely feasible in the first place. For a ban to be impactful, all countries conducting this research must be in agreement. This is unlikely for two reasons:
“Mirror life” is still hypothetical, so leaders may remain unconvinced of the need for a ban. Just like when scientists pursued the Manhattan Project despite believing for a brief time that the atomic bomb could set the world on fire, many countries may be willing to roll the dice on mirror bacteria.
Countries have to trust that nobody will secretly continue research. The trust would require intrusive verifications. Such efforts in the Biological Weapons Convention have stalled for decades. It’s difficult to believe a ban on mirror bacterium will succeed where the UN has repeatedly failed.
Even if feasible, a ban comes with inherent risks. Namely: scientists dedicated to their work might move to other countries with lax restrictions to continue their research, making oversight impossible. Walter Gilbert did this with his recombinant DNA research, dodging U.S. restrictions.
Similarly, CRISPR technology has sparked ethical controversy over human germline editing. The U.S. and EU have enacted various bans on this kind of research (such as in the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, or under the Oviedo Convention). But CRISPR research continued elsewhere, such as in 2018 when Chinese scientist He Jiankui used the technology to allegedly create genetically edited babies resistant to HIV.
Alternate Recommendations
Current biosafety and bioethics frameworks may already mitigate risks from Mirror Life, thus a more viable alternative to a ban alternative would be either strengthening current frameworks or creating a specific mirror life oversight body.
Strengthening FSAP or DURC in the US: The U.S. Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) or the Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) regulatory programs are examples of legislation that require certain biosafety levels of particular kinds of research (usually BSL-3 and 4). Novel legislation could make federal funding for mirror life conditional upon meeting heightened biosafety standards, or could even outright demand it irrespective of funding. This way, safety, containment, and oversight are promoted without pushing research underground.
Create funding incentives to limit research to only safer organisms: Adjusting funding to incentivize companies to pursue mirror-life research in organisms with low generation times or that have difficulty replicating in natural environments (such as extremophiles, halophiles, spore-forming bacterium, etc.) could promote normal research progress while mitigating public health risks in the event of containment breach. For example, some scientists conduct research solely on “auxotrophs” that cannot survive outside of the lab to prevent containment breaches.
Create a specific monitoring body for Mirror Life research: The Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund supports global conversations on the risks and governance of mirror life by organising events such as workshops, seminars, and symposia. Its goal is to foster collaboration among researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders to address challenges and develop practical frameworks for the responsible oversight of mirror biology. This fund is a first step. A specific monitoring body with expanded capabilities could also be set up.
Create a mirror life safety and awareness conference: There are biosafety conferences that promote brainstorming and networking, such as the ABSA conference. White the MBDF is hosting side events at conferences but is not funding standalone events on mirror life. Hosting a conference aimed at biosafety and responsibility for mirror life that invites regulators and innovators specifically could promote international consensus, making a ban more likely in the future, while also spreading good ideas about containment and responsible research practices. There also could be downsides to such a public event as this, thus the benefits versus the risks of such an event should be further considered.
Conclusion
While the realization of mirror life certainly possesses inherent risks, trying to unilaterally ban research would be ineffective if not self-defeating. This is due to the high unlikelihood of achieving needed consensus, as well as the risk of backfiring by sending research underground and away from oversight, as demonstrated by past instances with the Biological Weapons Convention. Therefore, we should get creative (and fast) on how to shepherd this research into more controlled pastures that guarantee safety moving forward.
We believe that the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund (MBDF) is leading the way in creating spaces to further the dialogue around mirror life. The International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS) and the Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) also seem well-placed to act further in this area.
Instead of focusing on proliferating a ban, we recommend:
Strengthening existing biosafety networks and warning systems
Identifying detection mechanisms for mirror life misuse and ensuring that the relevant stakeholders are implementing them in their networks.
Writing white papers for addendums to FSAP and DURC where they limit, revoke, or make the funding of this research conditional upon meeting certain containment standards.
 | A guest post by
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I'm skeptical.
1. I think the benefits of mirrored life research seem a lot smaller than the risks, which is some reason to think it is not worth doing. This post's list of benefits and harms seems in line with this, the 'better drugs' and 'more basic science' pros seem pretty small in comparison to the human health and ecosystem risks.
2. A ban doesn't need to last forever or be foolproof. If the report thinks that a business-as-usual pathway might lead to mirrored life being possible in a decade or few, then surely if mirrored research is limited to rogue underground labs or countries this will be a very major brake on the research. Yes Jiankui CRISPR edited the two embryos, but without a ban this practice might be fairly common. Likewise the example they cite of human cloning the ban seems to have been rather effective. US or allied scientists moving to other jurisdictions to pursue controversial research also seems very rare.
3. Biological weapons in general, but mirrored life in particular, seem to be lousy strategic weapons. Plausibly a rogue government would want to pursue a bioweapons program to create viruses that target humans with only particular genetic markers. But mirrored life weapons seem indiscriminate and quite unlikely to be able to be targeted just at your enemies. So I think this isn't a situation where a rogue country can defect from a global ban and gain a big strategic advantage. Which in turn means we don't need an intrusive monitoring regime.
4. BSL-4 labs are a good start for doing dangerous research, but there are still many leaks from them, so if mirrored life is actually very dangerous we should probably treat it more like smallpox (not handled in even BSL-4 labs beyond being stored in a few secure facilities).
5. The main technical barriers to creating mirrored life seem to not be organism-specific, so the suggestion to preferentially give funding to creating safe mirrored life seems flawed, as unsafe mirrored life will thereby become far easier to create. The main defensible point at which we can limit tech progress here is in synthesising mirrored genomes and ribosomes etc at all, not which specific mirrored cells to create.
(6. As a final meta point, I assume our all-things-considered view should rely significantly more heavily on the big academic report, so I think even if I found the arguments in this post persuasive that would only move me slightly away from the default view of the report being correct. But I think disagreeing with experts is valuable and important work so I salute this post even if I disagree with almost all of it.)