Mirror Life’s Doomsday Potential

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Jaume Llorens

Credits

Joe Zadeh is a contributing writer for Noema based in Newcastle.

Seasoned bioethicist Laurie Zoloth has a trick she likes to play in her seminars at the University of Chicago. She tells each student to pick up a pencil, then she gives them a series of instructions about how to maneuver it in their hands. At some point, nearly everyone drops the pencil. And that’s the point she’s trying to illuminate: “Humans always make errors,” Zoloth told me over Zoom. We drop things, we forget to switch things off, we lose our focus, we get tired. “Being human is like driving in a snowstorm, all the time,” she said, the hint of a smile emanating from beneath her round glasses.

I was interviewing Zoloth about events that had taken place a year earlier, in late 2024, when she virtually attended the monthly meeting of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium security committee, where synthetic biology professionals from academia, industry and government meet and discuss security implications in the field.

John Glass was also on the call. Glass is one of the most prominent biologists in the U.S. and the leader of the Synthetic Biology Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). “I’d never seen him really worried about stuff before — he’s always smiling,” Zoloth told me. On this particular day, however, no smiles. Nobody was allowed to share publicly what Glass was about to tell them. It was embargoed for another few weeks. And then he began to explain what, for some time, had mostly been discussed privately in small meetings between increasingly concerned scientists.

“I was horrified,” said Zoloth.

A few weeks later, on Dec. 12, 2024, what Glass had spoken about that day became public knowledge. A group of 38 prominent scientists from around the world — including 16 members of national academies and two Nobel Laureates — called for a halt on the creation of of a novel synthetic bacteria that, if realized and accidentally leaked into the environment, could dodge typical ecological checks and lead to an uncontrollable spread of deadly infection that posed a threat not just to humans but to many forms of life upon our earth and in our oceans, from the animal to the vegetal, from the micro to the macro. They provided a robust 299-page technical report to legitimize their worries.

The organism of concern is an artificially created mirror-image form of bacteria, known popularly as mirror life. For decades, biologists have been trying to imitate what, so far, only nature has been able to do: build a living self-replicating cell from scratch. And many believe they are getting closer. But the work to create mirror life, while adjacent to this field, is different, stranger. Mirror life would be the genesis of an organism that does not imitate nature but contradicts it. It would have a molecular structure opposite to that of all existing life on Earth. It would be something completely new under the sun, and its creation would commence the beginning of a second tree of life.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The initial interest in creating mirror biology promised wonderful things: never-before-seen drugs, entirely new biomaterials and profound answers to the origins of life. The U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the European Commission all supported work in this direction. But in recent years, many of the biologists working on its development have come to realize the potential worst-case-scenario consequences of their work. A mirrored organism would be essentially invisible to the immune systems of humans, animals and plants, bypassing the biological defenses that we and other living beings have evolved. Many natural predators, viruses and diseases would be unable to recognize it and therefore powerless to limit its reproduction. As Ariel Lindner, research director of the Systems Engineering and Evolution Dynamics Unit at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, or Inserm, told me in an interview: “Living systems know how to deal with invaders, but not with space invaders. Mirror life is a kind of space invader.”

“I think it takes a moment to understand what we are talking about here,” Sebastian Oehm, an adjunct assistant professor at the JCVI and CEO and founder of synthetic biology company SynX Therapeutics, told me over Zoom. He is also one of the report’s authors. “This would be in the environment basically forever, because there is no real way to get rid of it. In our report, we settled on the words ‘unprecedented risk,’ but that is maybe too weak. There is really nothing else like it. It is its own class of danger.” Unlike in Zoloth’s classroom, there would be no picking up the pencil and trying again.

"For decades, biologists have been trying to imitate what, so far, only nature has been able to do: build a living self-replicating cell from...