Potentially catastrophic risks to life as we know it have prompted dozens of eminent scientists to hit the brakes on their research.
Scientists have slammed the brakes on research into “mirror life”Mirror life would be constructed from molecules built in the mirror image of their natural counterpartsA perfect bioweapon. The ultimate pandemic. Unprecedented ecological meltdown.
Early-stage research into mirror life has already been funded in China, America and Europe, although the creation of a mirror cell will be virtually impossible for at least a decade and would require the synthesis of at least 100 mirror proteins. We can’t yet build a normal cell from scratch. Picture it like this: hold up your hand to a mirror. Take a snapshot of your real upraised palm, and a snapshot of its reflection. If you printed these two images out and laid them over each other, palms up, they wouldn’t match – the thumbs would be on opposite sides. That makes hands “chiral”; a word that means “hand” in Greek.
For the chemical compound carvone, used in fragrances, one orientation smells of crushed caraway seeds; the flipped version binds to a different olfactory receptor and smells of spearmint. “From a drug discovery point of view, you get a molecule that doesn’t get deactivated as quickly,” Payne said, adding his lab was focused on discovering mirror-peptide and protein drug candidates that could treat inflammatory lung and bowel disease, psoriasis and eczema.
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