Summary
Leading scientists, including Nobel laureates, are urging a halt to research on creating “mirror life” microbes, citing “unprecedented risks” to life on Earth.
Mirror microbes, built from reversed molecular structures, could evade natural immune systems, leading to uncontrollable lethal infections.
While mirror molecules hold potential for medical and industrial uses, researchers warn that mirror organisms could escape containment and resist antibiotics.
A 299-page report in Science advocates banning such research until safety can be ensured and calls for global debate on its ethical and ecological implications.
“mirror sugar”. Just dropping some trivia. The first “no calorie” sweetners were actually mirror sugar. They’d activate tastebuds but couldn’t be adsorbed in the gut. Only problem was people crapped their brains out because the osmotic balance went to hell.
edit: I think technically the first zero calorie sugar would have been literal lead (as in Pb) back in the ancient roman days, but I’m not really counting that.
See I didn’t know that, cool thanks
you bet! I just remember that because we were learning about glucose is taken up (it’s an active process swapping sodium and potassium). Another fun bonus for you: thats what they figured out at university of florida (or at least implemented). Someone had the bright idea that if you gave athletes a beverage with not only glucose but the specific K+/Na+ they needed to run the enzymes that took up the glucose, they might perform better.
So the football team, the Gators, got a special concoction of “Gator-aide” at their games. It smelled kinda like sweat, wasn’t sweet (glucose isn’t actually that sweet), so the formula was eventually tweaked, the branding changed to “gatorade”, but the university still RAKES in the money for that license.
edit: Just to add another cool layer. The money to date has nothing to do with the innovation, that patent would have expired (which is fantastic because that concoction is basically how you treat all sorts of things like cholera where the body dies of dehydration despite having clean water, the UN, FEMA, etc basically hands out off-brand gatorade mix). The reason U of florida still gets the money isn’t formula, it’s the brand. Pepsi pays them for that “gator-aide” name. It’s rare IP perfect win; hydration mix for all, and if you there’s a business to be made selling it under a specific name so be it, doesn’t matter much to the person whos life is saved because of “generic hydration mix”.