On Thursday, a group of notable scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and global health experts, issued a warning against researchers synthesizing a type of artificial cell that could rampage through life on Earth with practically no barriers to stop it. “Mirror cells,” as they are known, could one day compose “mirror life,” a type of synthetic organism that, on the molecular level, is the complete reverse of the life forms we know. But the 38 co-authors of the warning article published in the journal Science recommend that research into mirror life be blocked immediately, before it spirals out of control.
To understand mirror life, consider good old-fashioned life. The building blocks of life, like DNA and proteins, all have a property called chirality . Derived from the Greek word for “handedness,” chirality means that these fundamental biomolecules come in two varieties: with either a right-handed or left-handed orientation.
DNA, for instance, is made up of a right-handed double helix of sugars, like a ladder twisted only in a certain direction. Proteins, by contrast, are made up of left-handed amino acids . “The opposite hands for both amino acids and sugars exist in the universe, but they just aren’t utilized by any known biological life form,” Danielle Sedbrook wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2016.
That selection is “one of the strangest aspects of life on Earth.” Right- and left-handed molecules are not interchangeable, just like how your le.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/48/cd/48cd8c49-1f65-489c-909c-2d128448d16a/gettyimages-1703790414.jpg)
