Mirror life and biological risk

1:00:26We'd like to make even more complicated molecules, but we need to be careful, okay? We do not want to make mirror life. And in the recent times, we've had a lot of like alarmist news coming out about mirror life. We have more doomers? We have a lot of doomers. There's AI doomers. The mirror life doomers have been around for a while, okay? Ever since we figured out that life is chiral and we've been able to make asymmetric catalysis happen, there have been AI, there have been mirror life doomers that are telling us not to do it. This is just a few of the headlines. Mirror life is still hypothetical. Here's why it should probably stay that way.

1:01:07There was a news article in Nature that said, how should mirror life research be restricted? The debate heats up. My favorite one is mirror life is a mass extinction risk we don't need to take, okay? I wanna go a little bit into some of this because so what is mirror life? What it means is the molecules and the proteins that make up these organisms would be completely mirrored from the ones that we have. This would require mirrored sugars, mirrored DNA, mirrored proteins, like everything, literally everything that this particular life form that we create would have the opposite version, okay? Now,

1:01:48this has issues if it is created and if it escapes the lab. Some really, really bad issues, okay? Because suppose you create a mirror bacterium, like a bacteria where everything is the opposite chirality from normal life, okay? So that means the amino acids are right-handed, that means the sugars are left-handed, everything is opposite. What that means is that you can have a bacteria that proliferates but there is no defense mechanism on the earth that is suited to combat this thing.

1:02:29The viruses, like the bacteriophages that prey on the bacteria, they require chiral mechanisms to get into the bacteria. Well, if the bacteria has the opposite-handedness, the virus can't really screw itself into the bacterium and kill it. The Lego blocks don't. Yeah, a lot of our antibiotics are chiral in nature and they require the specific chirality of the bacterial proteins to attach and then destroy. Now you've got, there's no predation, there's no effective predation and the accompanying increase in the bacteria would create this runaway reaction because the bacteria would just start eating. Suppose it's photosynthetic, right?

1:03:10It doesn't, it would just, like all it needs is water, which is not chiral, carbon dioxide, which is not chiral, and sunlight, which is not chiral. And it would just create the opposite type of glucose, the opposite type of proteins, boom, you get a runaway reaction, right? In humans, we've got an innate human immune system and the first line of human defense in the immune system against microbial threats relies on a pattern of recognition where you've got antibodies reacting to the invaders or you've got antigens, no, the antigens are the invaders, the antibodies react to them, recognize, and then you've got the second line of defense that characterizes, okay, we need to start an immune response.

1:03:52Well, if our antibodies do not recognize the antigens and they have no hope of recognizing the antigens. Because they can't. Because you literally can't make the opposite chirality antibody. Yeah, that's dangerous, right? That's dangerous. Yeah, this is getting weird, right? So immune systems will go bad. instead of causing standard infections, the mirror pathogen is gonna act more like a cancer because we're not gonna even have an immune response to this thing. The mirror pathogen is just gonna go in and it's gonna start occupying space, it's gonna start reproducing and creating a runaway reproductive reaction that's gonna use bodily energy

1:04:37resources and there's gonna be no existing countermeasures. This is a very scary prospect, right? Yeah yeah. So image mirror life is really quite a danger. OG doomers might be onto something there. Yeah, yeah, this is from way back and they've been calling for bans on this thing for a very long time. Now, what's the current status? Now, mirror life does not exist and it can't form naturally because natural biology prefers one-handedness and mirror life is necessarily the other-handedness. Should we put a qualifier there that says on Earth? On Earth, we should. It just says not that it's-- Yeah, we haven't seen extraterrestrial life at this point in time

1:05:21but that's also a reason why bringing stuff back is not a good idea. Is not a good idea as well. Yes exactly. And that's also a reason why bringing stuff there is not a good idea as well, right? So that's why when we go to places like Europa to look for life, we better know that all of our equipment is sterilized in some sense, right? Because Europa could have the other-handedness of life. Now, it's challenging to build mirrored life, right? You need to create a central dogma that is a mirrored central dogma. Like for example, nobody's created a mirrored ribosome where all of the amino acids and all of the RNA are exactly the opposite type, let alone some major components like the tRNAs that are

1:06:03required for protein synthesis and things like that. You would need a mirrored DNA, you would need a mirrored RNA, you would need mirrored RNA polymerases. So all of this stuff needs to happen and you'd really need to try. Yeah yeah yeah. You know? Yeah. There's so many similarities with the ongoing AI safety conversation just in terms of like there being two camps, people are like, this shouldn't happen. And then other folks saying, well, we don't even, we're not even close, right? It has that same dynamic. Part of the challenge with things like this is because we are increasing in our ability to do scientific innovation generally, AI enabled or not,

1:06:45the gap time between we don't have any of the component parts to having the component parts, it's not necessarily the time compression there is non-trivial. Exactly yeah. And so right now the best we've got is like a scientific moratorium. Okay, in 2024, there was an international coalition of 38 leading scientists, including some Nobel laureates. They published this landmark call for a halt. And what they're effectively doing is like a taboo strategy. I'm not gonna review papers that forward mirror life. Maybe we don't fund research that forwards mirror life. There's major international bodies that recently issued critical reports like the UNESCO

1:07:25International Bioethics Committee, the World Health Organization, the UN Secretary General's Scientific Advisory, but like, you know? Yeah, we've seen how in the current world environment, geopolitically and otherwise, unfortunately, these entities that are meant to create collective action have struggled. Yeah yeah. And we've seen a breakdown, unfortunately, in the ability to get global collaboration on a lot of different things. So we're kind of in a tough spot. Yeah, and it's complicated by the fact that not everyone even agrees that we should just like sweepingly ban this thing. There's some synthetic biologists that argue that a blanket ban would be premature because we're

1:08:06so far away from it. And mirror image peptides and biomolecules, they can currently be used to design safer, highly stable drugs. Beneficial mirror molecules can make better drugs effectively and that's very far away from living, self-replicating mirror cells. Sounds a lot like Sam Altman. Right yeah. I don't think there's a whole USA versus China debate here, because I think everyone agrees that let's not do this. But there's no supremacy, mirror life supremacy going on. But there's some debate about maybe not a blanket ban. It kind of reminds me of when we were talking about

1:08:50Sudhi Parikh, the CEO of AAAS. He was talking about how some of the advice that he gave the Senate Scientific Advisory Committee was used on the floor of Congress to steer legislation. One of the examples that he gave us, and we'll have the interview coming out soon, he said that there was a ban for any chimeras of human, animal, or animal organisms. Well, the blanket ban would stop any genetic modification from happening, right? And that's a huge ban, right? So there's like room to do this, but at the same time, like

1:09:35animal-animal chimeras are not an existential risk for all life on Earth. So the fact that like right now we're just, oh, it's taboo, like let's not do it, guys. I think we should have a little, I think we should get our act together here, guys. Like the more I researched this, I was like, how are we just like, let's not do it, guys. That's like our best strategy. Doesn't make any sense. And it's fascinating, because once you get into the details to understand what's functionally happening, it's clear where the risk comes from. Exactly. It's a lot easier to see the risk than some of the RSI debate, although I am more doomer than

1:10:16non-doomer on recursive self-improvement, but I think it requires more infrastructure around it. This is like once it's created and it's out. No, it's like, it's really bad. It's really bad. All you need is like one bacteria. Right exactly. Right? Yeah exactly. So I'm gonna end on a lighter note than existential dread.