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.)
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.)