Potential of ‘mirror life’ technology has Doomsday Clock scientists alarmed. This is why
Potential of ‘mirror life’ technology has Doomsday Clock scientists alarmed. This is why
Publish Date: 2026-07-11 15:00:00
Source Domain: www.abc.net.au
After they made the atomic bomb, scientists came up with the Doomsday Clock.
The symbolic clock, launched by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, warned how close humanity might be to destroying itself in the form of “minutes to midnight”.
Since 1947, its hands have been moved closer and further away from midnight in response to major events such as nuclear weapons proliferation, the emerging understanding of climate change, or new and dangerous technologies.
This year, for the first time, a theoretical biological technology called “mirror life” was included in the list of threats that prompted scientists to move the clock’s hands closer to midnight.
David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University and a member of the board of experts who advises clock movements, says such life has the potential to be calamitous.
“This might be as close to an existential threat of a biological sort as we have considered so far.”
The catastrophic risk of mirror life
Mirror life is the name scientists have given to a theoretical type of synthetic bacteria that, if made, could grow with almost no hindrance.
It would do this by being chemically identical, but geometrically different, to naturally occurring bacteria.
Many of the molecules that make up life, including proteins and DNA, can be formed in two separate ways, with one the mirror image of the other.
Chemists call this property “chirality”, which comes from the ancient Greek word for “hand”. Hands, in fact, share the same mirror geometry: your left hand is the same shape as your right, but it still won’t fit into a right-handed glove.
The molecules which form proteins are all “left-handed”: it’s possible to make proteins from identical “right-handed” molecules, but they don’t exist naturally. (NASA via Wikimedia Commons)
All life on Earth has just one type of chiral DNA and proteins. DNA is always “right-handed”, while most protein components are “left-handed”.
Researchers can make DNA and proteins with the opposite handedness in…
