The Dangers of Mirrored Life

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There are many fundamental bottlenecks that slow biology research down. Many of them are so basic that we rarely talk about them. One example is DNA delivery. In other words, after a scientist synthesizes a gene, there’s no guarantee that they can then get that gene into an organism! In fact, the overwhelming majority of lifeforms on Eart… Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin is unlikely to have happened in the way he described. It's almost certainly a myth. For decades, scientists and historians have puzzled over inconsistencies in Fleming’s story. The window to Fleming’s lab was rarely (if ever) left open, precisely to prevent the kind of contamination that suppose… Even a single bacterium has a form of “memory.” And these memories work at the scale of genomes, molecules, epigenomes, and entire ecologies. A new review by researchers in Cork, Ireland explains bacterial memory at each of these levels.But here are a couple examples: CRISPR is a genetic type of memory. When a phag

The creation of a “mirrored” organism could “trigger severe ecological disruptions,” according to a 300-page technical report released today. Its authors claim such organisms could quickly spread across the world, fatally infect humans, and “directly drive vulnerable plant and animal species to extinction.” The report accompanies an article in Science, also released today, entitled “Confronting Risks of Mirror Life.” But what, exactly, is a mirrored organism? To answer that, let’s consider how extant life works. Proteins, sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids — key molecules used by cellular…

The Dangers of Mirrored Life

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