Scientists have issued a huge warning to billions of people around the world over lab-made life that could completely wipe out mankind.
This ‘mirror life’ is synthetic organisms made of mirrored versions of naturally occurring molecules, detailed in a new paper by Nobel laureates.
Experts have said that these organisms could be “invisible” to life on earth, meaning they could slip past the immune defences of natural organisms.
They have warned that if this artificial life were to escape from the lab, they could establish themselves in the wild and give lethal infections to all forms of life.
Mirror bacteria is yet to be made, but it’s creation is only a decade away with rapid progress being made, according to a 300-page technical review published in Science.
However, a group of 38 Nobel laureates and other experts, including some who have previously tried to create mirror life, are calling for a pause on all new research into the topic.
As far as scientists can tell, the fact our DNA is right-handed is an evolutionary fluke and there is no reason that life might not have evolved out of mirrored components.
So, although mirror life cannot evolve from life as we know it, scientists believe it is possible to create an organism in which all the biological molecules are mirrored.
What would make this so risky is that life on Earth has only evolved to deal with one shape of molecule and would not recognise the mirror form.
Co-author Professor Gregory Winter, a Nobel prize-winning biologist from the University of Cambridge, told the MailOnline: “The risk of mirror life, in particular mirror bacteria, is that living organisms would not recognise their mirror counterparts as ‘foreign’ and would not have the natural defences to protect themselves from attack by them.
“For example, humans would struggle to make antibodies against the mirror bacteria and be unable to control an infection. Similar arguments apply to all other living organisms, including plants under attack by mirror bacteria.”
The authors said in the paper they “cannot rule out” a scenario in which a mirror bacteria acts as an invasive species, causing “pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans”.
They note that there have been significant breakthroughs in the creation of mirror molecules and the construction of artificial cells but it will take enormous amounts of funding and time to progress.
