Belinda Smith
speaker
2,440 appearances
25 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 6d ago
Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
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.
This year, the clock's hands moved from 89 to 85 seconds to midnight.
This latest jump has been driven in part by a theoretical biological technology called mirror life, synthetic life in the form of a self-replicating cell.
This is David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in the US and a member of the board of experts who advises if the hands of the doomsday clock should move towards midnight.
An example of this handedness or chirality having devastating consequences is thalidomide.
It was widely prescribed to pregnant women as a treatment for morning sickness, but it was later discovered that while the left-handed molecule of thalidomide was effective, the right-handed one was extremely dangerous to fetuses.
Research into mirror life goes beyond single molecules and into synthesizing whole cells like mirror bacteria.
But a mirror bacterium might fly under the immune radar in any life form it infected, even humans, because our immune systems may only recognize the non-mirror version of the bacterium.
What was it about this that concerned you and your colleagues?
So the conclusion that mirror life could escape and replicate in the world, that's the conclusion that you reached?
Biologists have made other very dangerous things before.
I'm thinking about nucleotides and recreating smallpox 10, 15 years ago.
Why is this particularly dangerous?
Or is this particularly dangerous compared to other things?
Is it possible that this could be less of a threat than we're concerned about?
Not everyone shares Professor Relman's concerns that mirror life may be inherently dangerous.
Ricard Solé is a researcher in synthetic biology at Pompo Fabra University in Barcelona.
His lab is interested in understanding the origins and evolution of complex life.
So mirror organisms, you could treat them similar to another invasive species or another invented species.
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