Reacción a "More than thirty scientists warn in Science about the dangers of synthesizing 'mirror bacteria'"

There is an intriguing new world on the other side of the looking glass whose properties we are only beginning to glimpse and about which we should be very cautious. This call for a halt to experimentation on future mirror cells follows a tradition of similar calls on other biotechnologies with potential real-world impact: from the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, to the recent editorial on controlling the construction of new proteins designed by AI techniques, signed by George Church and David Baker (recently awarded the Nobel prize precisely for the construction of new proteins).

The current debate on mirror cells adds to these precedents also promoted by leading scientists, far from sensationalism - nothing like the AI debate - and reveals the pressure of the accelerating pace of scientific innovation when the distance between research and application is dramatically shortened, together with the great difficulty of estimating its impact in the real world, for example, how a new variant of an infectious disease, say covid, would spread.

In this case, early publications describe steps to create proteins with D-amino acids, mirror copies of natural proteins made of L-amino acids. These proteins can have special properties such as being more resistant to degradation, a property that can be useful in industrial applications but can also make these proteins very difficult to destroy by systems operating in the real world, such as the immune system or proteolytic enzymes, with the consequent danger if they were to operate outside the laboratory.

Beyond these new proteins, the next challenge must be to synthesise complete cells with a mirror DNA/genome (natural DNA is D-conformational). These synthetic cells might be able to reproduce and evolve, creating a symmetrical world that could come to compete for resources with our ‘real’ world. While this possibility is by no means immediate, it does represent a danger of sufficient magnitude to stop these experiments in the opinion of the authors of this statement.