A Firebreak for Mirror Life

In “Building Decision Points Into Research’s Slipperiest Slopes” (Issues, Summer 2025), John H. Evans, Craig Callender, Neal K. Devaraj, Farren J. Isaacs, and Gregory E. Kaebnick make a valuable contribution to the mirror life debate by looking more closely at, if not “red lines,” then possible “stop and think” lines. However, the article does not sufficiently recognize the potential for actors who would deliberately seek to inflict catastrophic harm by developing mirror organisms and releasing them into the wild.

The deliberative procedure the authors outline is an excellent way for legitimate researchers to debate which mirror-life-adjacent technical activities should be permitted and which are too close to the creation of mirror organisms to be allowed. However, the resultant governance system for these technologies, like any other governance system, must anticipate that not everyone will follow its rules. This is a critical point. In all other areas of potentially dangerous technology, the harm from regime violators can be bounded through multiple layers of policy protection, including resilience measures to deal with adverse health or environmental consequences. Failure might be serious, but it would not be the end of the world.

For mirror life, it literally could be.

Fortunately, those seeking to deliberately inflict catastrophic or omnicidal harm are not now capable of doing the extensive and expensive foundational research to create mirror organisms all by themselves. The way to stop them is to not do their work for them. Without the road being paved by legitimate organizations—which will follow the rules—actors seeking to do catastrophic harm will not be able to create and deploy mirror organisms.

Therefore, it won’t be enough for a mirror governance system to establish breakpoints that require a deliberative process to pass beyond. The system has to establish a firebreak that is large enough to make the attainment of mirror organisms by illegitimate actors essentially impossible. This raises the prospect of accepting one bad outcome to avert a far worse one, since such a firebreak may foreclose scientific or other beneficial applications in a manner that might seem excessive when compared with the governance of other hazards. But given the potential cataclysmic risks from mirror life, this may be a necessary trade-off.

Gerald Epstein

When I first got the opportunity to work on mirror cells, which have a molecular structure that is the reverse images of their natural counterparts, I was excited about the possibilities. It combined long-term implications for improving biotechnology and developing new medicine applications with the immediate challenges of thrilling basic research. And it was a big puzzle, requiring joint effort by researchers in multiple fields to create the foundational technologies that would, one day, let us build a living cell from mirror components.

Modern science is very compartmentalized. We can’t fully understand all aspects of a project we’re working on. I focused on solving a corner of the mirror life puzzle, fitting the pieces together to enable synthesis of mirror biopolymers that would one day enable gene expression in mirror cells. I was not equipped to consider the ecological or human health implications of this work.

Luckily, since I was doing biosafety work, analyzing implications of other emerging synthetic biology technologies, I was included in the early conversations exploring the concerns about mirror life. We were unable to imagine a definite way to safeguard mirror life, so we concluded such organisms should never be made. Convinced by the evidence, I started advocating against pursuing this work.

I’m just one researcher with an odd set of expertise. Most people in this work are either brilliant experimentalists or expert policy, safety, or security analysts. It’s rare to find someone like me, combining at least average proficiency in both benchwork and the art of worrying. But even with those two hats, I wasn’t able to catch the early warning signs of mirror life. I started speaking up against mirror life only when others presented evidence supporting the environmental and medical concerns about this technology.

The case of mirror life shows that the system works to self-regulate: We did discover the concerns and stopped the work before it was too late. We were lucky to catch the problem in time and avoid building something that cannot be controlled.

But relying on luck should not be standard procedure. We need to be confident that researchers are trained to either spot emerging safety and security concerns of their work, or have a colleague with the relevant expertise looking over their shoulders early on. There are many exciting, potentially transformative technologies emerging from the lab every year, with the highlight of the technology often being presented as little more than a good idea (as our mirror cell project started). Our team excitedly pursued this work, because there was no mechanism in place to caution us against implications coming from areas we had no expertise in (in this case, environmental science and medicine).

Now there is more help. John H. Evans, Craig Callender, Neal K. Devaraj, Farren J. Isaacs, and Gregory E. Kaebnick describe the processes needed to decrease our reliance on luck, and to increase certainty that the right expert might raise the alarm as soon as a concerning idea approaches likelihood of becoming reality. This will result in an overall safer and more productive research enterprise worldwide.

Kate Adamala