Beware the backwardteria

Indignity Vol. 4, No. 222

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

17 Dec 2024 — 6 min read

From the novel Spock Must Die! by James Blish. The Organians had been enforcing a peace treaty between the Empire and the Federation, and the planet's disappearance is a threat to the peace. As the Enterprise is a long way from Organia, Scotty develops a modification of the transporter that uses tachyons to create a copy of a crewman that could be transported to Organia long before the ship can reach the planet. Spock is chosen, but a permanent duplicate is created unexpectedly upon transport, as something at or on Organia has functioned as a perfect, impenetrable, mirror for the tachyon transporter beam. The crew is unable to distinguish between the two Spocks. Kirk arbitrarily designates one as "Spock One" and the other as "Spock Two". Spock Two soon argues that the duplicate will be operating on a pro-Klingon agenda, since, being physically reversed, he is also ethically reversed as well, and he states that the duplicate must therefore be killed, "even if it is I". After faking a mental breakdown and barricading himself in sick bay, Spock One escapes in a stolen shuttlecraft which he has adapted to warp drive. This offers strong evidence that he is the duplicate and traitor. The crew find corroboration of this when they discover that Spock One used the Enterprise's science facilities to manufacture chirality-reversed amino acids. He had undergone a total left-to-right inversion down to the atomic level during his creation. To survive, he had to infuse the inverse forms of amino acids into his diet. McCoy explains that such a meager diet would have induced deficiency diseases in a human, but that a Vulcan is able to endure it indefinitely. Image: Memory Alpha, fair use via Wikipedia.

DON'T CREATE THE TORMENT NEXUS DEP'T.

Researchers Say Mirror Life Looks Like Mirror Death

ARE THE MIRROR bacteria going to kill everyone? People aren't doing so well with the regular bacteria and viruses right now. Polio, for instance. Suddenly there's a not particularly long or improbable series of events that could bring back polio, if everyone just goes along with the dumbest idea that's about to be laid before them rather than fighting against it.

The arrival of mirror bacteria would take more work. On Thursday of last week, a team of two dozen researchers put out a technical report about the potential for the bacteria to become a problem. It's been making the news some, but there are a lot of more immediately pressing things in the news. (Polio, for instance.)

Mirror bacteria are—or, for the moment, would be—living things built out of molecules that bend the opposite way from how our standard worldwide building blocks of life bend. The direction that the molecules bend is called their chirality, and the chirality of all living things in our ecosphere matches up. "DNA and RNA are made from 'right-handed' nucleotides, and proteins are made from 'left-handed' amino acids," the researchers wrote.

But there's no inherent reason the atoms that make up a nucleotide or an amino acid can't be rearranged so the structure bends the other way. Left-handed nucleotides can be assembled into left-handed DNA and RNA, and that left-handed DNA and RNA, given right-handed amino acids to work with, can build right-handed proteins. And if you built enough pieces, and kept putting them together the right way, eventually you could end up with a whole bacterium that replicated a regular bacterium in every way, except for being completely opposite at the molecular level—that is, being "antichiral," or "mirror."

There is one considerable obstacle to actually doing this. "It is not yet possible to create a living cell from non-living precursors," the researchers wrote. They continued: "Despite major technical challenges, it appears plausible that this feat could be achieved within as little as a decade given sufficient resources."

Not every scientific possibility is a scientific plausibility. Are biologists really going to clamber over one of the great longstanding barriers between humanity and God within the decade? Unlike the engineers presently raising money and publicity off the commingled promise and threat of omniscient, omnipotent computer intelligence, though, the people writing about the mirror bacteria aren't trying to convince the world that the bacteria are inevitable. They are trying to convince the world it's a bad idea to make the bacteria and that everyone should do something else instead.

If reverse-directional bacteria were brought into the realm of regular-directional living things, two different things might happen, hypothetically. One is that the new bacteria, surrounded by material that bent the wrong way, would find nothing to support them. The other is that they would find nothing to stop them.

Regular E. coli is able to nourish itself on nondirectional molecules. Some iloc .E bacterium, then, should also be able to find things to eat on this side of the mirror. "Unlike previous discussions of mirror life," the researchers wrote, "we also realized that generalist heterotroph mirror bacteria might find a range of nutrients in animal hosts and the environment and thus would not be intrinsically biocontained."

And while the antichiral bacteria were spreading and growing, immune systems—built around chiral molecules, to respond to invading chiral infections—would be unprepared to respond. Here are the subheadings in the long-form report's Chapter 4, "Risks to Human Health":

4.1 Innate immune detection of mirror bacteria could be significantly impaired

4.2 Mirror bacteria would likely be resistant to most innate immune responses

4.3 Adaptive immunity to mirror bacteria would likely be impaired

4.4 Mirror bacteria could plausibly pass barrier surfaces and translocate into the bloodstream and tissues

4.5 Mirror bacteria could plausibly replicate in blood and cause lethal systemic infection

(Chapter 5, "Medical Countermeasures," begins with "5.1 New antimirror compounds could be developed to target mirror bacteria, but most existing antibiotics would not function.")

"[I]n the absence of compelling evidence for reassurance," the researchers wrote, "our view is that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms should not be created."

Don't do the hard work to produce the dangerous thing. Simple enough! Somewhere, right now, if current events are any guide to current events, several generative language programs are assembling and publishing false statements about the mirror bacteria, to insert into future discussions.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, December 16, 2024

★ The sky lightened a little, but the blackness in the street below took a long time to develop into dark blue. Even the short jaunt to the trash cans got meaningfully rained on, and the water rushing along the gutter was braided. An archipelago of dissolving dog turds extended along the sidewalk. What was coming down on the afternoon was rain and drizzle and mist all at once, soaking in as much as it was falling. Car exhaust stuck to the sidewalk. Clear beads of water hung at the tips of every twig on the streetside lindens. The droplets covering the surfaces of the parked cars gathered into spreading rivulets, diverging as they traced the particular slopes of the bodywork.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

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ADVICE DEP'T.

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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Hygienic Cook Book: A Collection of Choice Recipes Carefully Tested, by Jacob Arnbrecht, published in 1914 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

ONION SANDWICHES
Spread thin slices of bread with butter and then with very thin slices of onions between. Cut into any shape desired and serve at once.