Hi Nnaemeka, yeah I totally agree about not doing something potentially advancing the creation of dangerous mirror organisms. I am commenting just to iterate what I said about “defense-favoring”—I know little of microbiology but thought I would mention just in case there might be some way to very lightly modify an existing non-mirror phage to “hunt and kill” mirror microbes (e.g. just altering their “tracking” and “ingestion” system). But this is probably an incredibly naive idea but thought I would put it out there as there is a whole chapter on phages in the mirror bio report. Also, my impression from the report is that there is scientific uncertainty about how bad mirror bio would be. It might be worth solidifying this by e.g. taking single parts of plant or human immune systems and exposing them only to simple, single mirror molecules that would likely be present on mirror organisms. This might show definitely that mirror bio might be catastrophic. But I would do any such work in really tight cooperation with the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund and others and definitely not act unilaterally. It might at least be worth it to read at least the most relevant parts of the mirror bio report if you might have time.
Hi Nnaemeka, yeah I totally agree about not doing something potentially advancing the creation of dangerous mirror organisms. I am commenting just to iterate what I said about “defense-favoring”—I know little of microbiology but thought I would mention just in case there might be some way to very lightly modify an existing non-mirror phage to “hunt and kill” mirror microbes (e.g. just altering their “tracking” and “ingestion” system). But this is probably an incredibly naive idea but thought I would put it out there as there is a whole chapter on phages in the mirror bio report. Also, my impression from the report is that there is scientific uncertainty about how bad mirror bio would be. It might be worth solidifying this by e.g. taking single parts of plant or human immune systems and exposing them only to simple, single mirror molecules that would likely be present on mirror organisms. This might show definitely that mirror bio might be catastrophic. But I would do any such work in really tight cooperation with the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund and others and definitely not act unilaterally. It might at least be worth it to read at least the most relevant parts of the mirror bio report if you might have time.