“Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

This is a link post.

Science just released an article, with an accompanying technical report, about a neglected source of biological risk.

From the abstract of the technical report:

This report describes the technical feasibility of creating mirror bacteria and the potentially serious and wide-ranging risks that they could pose to humans, other animals, plants, and the environment...

In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images. Mirror bacteria could not evolve from existing life, but their creation will become increasingly feasible as science advances. Interactions between organisms often depend on chirality, and so interactions between natural organisms and mirror bacteria would be profoundly different from those between natural organisms. Most importantly, immune defenses and predation typically rely on interactions between chiral molecules that could often fail to detect or kill mirror bacteria due to their reversed [...]

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First published:
December 12th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9pkjXwe2nFun32hR2/technical-report-on-mirror-bacteria-feasibility-and-risks

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