Biologists Urge Pause on ‘Mirror Life’ Investigations

You might be aware of the notion of handedness—while a glove designed for your left hand resembles one made for your right hand, it won’t fit. This is a mirror image effect. Several essential molecules in life, such as proteins and DNA, exhibit chirality, indicating they can appear in either a left-handed or right-handed form. However, on Earth, nature employs solely one variant in living beings. For instance, all your proteins are in the left-handed form, whereas your DNA is entirely in the right-handed form.

With progress in synthetic biology, it may be feasible to create an artificial organism that inverts that configuration, featuring right-handed proteins and left-handed DNA. In a publication in the journal Science, a global team of scientists recently warned against attempts to develop this so-called mirror life, stating it could bring about “unprecedented and irreversible damage” to human health and planetary ecosystems.

Dr. Drew Endy, a researcher in synthetic biology at Stanford University and one of the authors of this alert, speaks with Ira about the idea of mirror life and why a collective of scientists felt it necessary to advocate for a pause on mirror life experiments.

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