Jeemes Akers
MIRROR-UNIVERSE
“The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’”
Psalms 110:1
“If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing … one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.”
Conor Oberst
“Driven by curiosity and plausible applications, some researchers had begun work toward creating lifeforms composed entirely of mirror-image biological molecules.”
Warning in the Journal Science
December 12, 2024
“When I was a boy, I used to pull a big cross saw with my dad. He’d use his right hand, so I’d have to use my left.”
“Smokin’” Joe Frazier
“We are made out of stardust. The iron in hemoglobin molecules in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.”
Jill Tartar
I was thinking this morning about why Jesus is depicted as being seated in the heavenlies on the right hand of God.
Why not God’s left hand? Or in front? Or behind? Or below?
Or, better yet, why does it matter?
As it turns out, this notion of “handedness” in the universe matters a lot to today’s AI-armed scientists and medical researchers. For starters, it seems that all of God’s creation has an in-built sense of handedness. Groups of molecules of the same type tend to have the same handedness. In today’s scientific parlance, this characteristic is called chirality. In other words, the nucleotides that make up the DNA and RNA found in Earth life forms are made from “right-handed” molecules, while proteins are made from nearly entirely “left-handed” amino acids.
I find that fascinating, not only from a biological perspective but a spiritual one as well.
Okay Jeemes, so what is the big deal?
Creating “mirror life”—the lab-made counterpart to this natural “chirality”—could become one of science’s greatest breakthroughs. Mirror-image biology inverts a fundamental property of life: which way molecules point. In “mirror” biology, scientists aim to create living cells where all the chirality is “flipped.” For example, where natural life uses a right-handed peptide, to build proteins, “mirror” life would use the same peptide in its left-handed form. Mirror molecules could be turned into therapies for chronic and hard-to-treat diseases, while mirror microbes could make bioproduction facilities bug-free.
Quite an impressive accomplishment.
Correct?
Not so fast my friend.
If this is true, why are the leading researchers involved in this effort now calling for a halt to such research? Indeed, 38 scientists warned in a paper published in the journal Science on December 12, 2024, that if someone created such a mirror microorganism in the lab (to our knowledge none now exist), and it escaped the lab, it could cause a catastrophic multi-species pandemic. These research scientists, originally skeptical that mirror bacteria could pose major risks, have changed their tune completely and have become deeply concerned.
Why?
In short, a manmade mirror microorganism could end up being a major pathogen because our immune system wouldn’t recognize it. Or as one scientist in the field put it: “We’re basically giving instructions of how to make a perfect bioweapon.”
Immunologists point out that for humans, other animals, and plants, immune system activation depends on chirality. Immune cells wouldn’t recognize the inverse versions of pathogenic proteins that “mirror” cells would use. In other words, a “mirror” pathogen does not interact with the host but would use it as a warm incubator with a lot of nutrients. In a worst-case scenario, a “mirror” bacteria would multiply endlessly, unfettered.
I don’t know about you, but that is a nightmare scenario worthy of the death-bearing pale horse depiction in Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
Certainly, there will be no shortage of exotic molecules to work with in the petri dishes of today’s synthetic biology research laboratories. As just one of many examples, in late August, we learned that a glacier core in western China contained over 17,000 viruses we have never seen before, some dating back over 41,000 years and survivors of three major climate shifts.
All of this sort of reminds me of my teaching days at the College of the Ozarks. I was approached one day by a fellow faculty member in the cafeteria who told me one of my students had approached him and said I was scaring her in class. At the time I was telling my classes that we were due for a major change that would dramatically alter the lives of every student in class. A few months later the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“Sigh.”
My intention here is not to scare you but to warn you.
Why am I so concerned? After all, the leading scientists in the field have warned about the dangers inherent in “mirror” microorganisms research and urged a halt to this specific type of research. Besides, other insist, achieving such an organism could be as much as a decade away.
I am not convinced that scientists can police their own. Perhaps it is the memory of how the scientific community, using social media platforms, tried to convince the rest of us that COVID-19 was purely a zoonotic event—an all too natural spillover from a Chinese wet market—rather than a military-related Wuhan lab leak using questionable “gain of function” processes applied to coronavirus research.
It is no small point. The virus killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million worldwide and stopped the world in its tracks. At the same time, proponents of the lab leak theory were branded as conspirators and targeted by social media censors.
Or perhaps I am one of the few who remembers the stunning announcement of He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher who helped produce genetically altered twin girls in November 2018. He Jiankui justified his actions by claiming to protect the babies from contracting HIV in the future as well as opening a door to research that would advance medical research in the Third World. The fact that he violated an international, scientific community ban on applying gene-editing technology to human reproductive medicine, was of little consequence in his decision-making process.
Maybe it’s just me. But I have little faith that scientists can, or will, enforce technology-related regulations and restrictions. It is a human heart issue rather than one of professional ethics or good intentions. There are probably more researchers and scientists alive now than in the entirety of human history. Many of these all-too-human scientists, now equipped with no sense of moral responsibility beyond their own conscience, seemingly can justify any violation of commonsense norms in pursuit of fame and recognition, almost always under the guise of helping fellow humans avoid future medical issues.
I originally intended to approach this issue through an allegorical prism. I was walking the reader through a new feature in my theater of the absurd: a hall of mirrors. The last mirror pane in my allegorical setting had a saying etched on it. It was by Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who had guided the Manhattan Project in developing the world’s first atomic weapon: “when scientists see something that is technically sweet, they go ahead and do it.”
Regardless of the consequences.
In this vein, I stumbled across this idea from a TED talk about proteins by Geoff von Maltzahn:
“Even with generous assumptions around everything Mother Nature has ever had the chance to build and test throughout the entire history of evolution, all of her lab has tested less than the expanse of one drop of water relative to all of the Earth’s oceans of possible protein sequences. Think about that for just a second. Everybody in this room, every protein that makes our lives possible, every one of our ancestors and everything else in the living world that has ever been, fits into that one drop of water … if everything we know is in that one drop of water, if we find one more drop of water, that’ll be a really big deal. But there really isn’t a reason to believe that it’s going to be limited to that, just imagine what it could be.”
Imagine indeed.
Buckle up.
We are in for a wild ride.
