James Smith

You could make a basic mirror ribosome, but a mirror ribosome that's really good at making proteins might be quite a bit harder to make than that.

And that's probably the sort of thing you'd need to be able to make mirror life.

I think we could learn more, especially from experiments on natural chirality cells.

So there are kind of these two areas that we've talked about, mirror biochemistry and synthetic cells, both of which ultimately you need to have progress in to be able to make a mirror cell.

And we might learn things from natural chirality synthetic cells that tell us either that it's very easy to go from

a basic system with a membrane to life or very difficult but there are hard questions that need to be answered on the synthetic cell side of things too the challenge there is synthetic cells is a much bigger field at least by some definitions and there's a lot more interest in pursuing that so any kind of restriction or regulation there might impact more ongoing research and that is a trade-off

I mean, one intuition here is that if you get good enough at making synthetic cells, if you could make a completely artificial cell in the lab, then you could use the same methods to make a mirror cell, because the chemistry would all be the same.

So if this got really advanced, then you might be quite close to making mirror cells.

But we're not really very close to that at the moment.

In reality, when people are talking about synthetic cells, they mostly are using some parts that are derived from life.

And if you're using parts that are derived from life, then you can't immediately replicate that on the mirror side of things.

Yeah, in mirror life, at least from the bottom up pathway, you have to make everything from scratch.

And that makes it a much more difficult problem.

And in some ways, there's not a great reason why you'd want to make everything from scratch on the natural chirality side of things.

So that helps you to some extent.

But I think it is a long-term goal of science to be able to make

life completely artificially right and so eventually we are going to have to think about what's an appropriate line there i think we can probably get a lot of the benefits of synthetic cells without making them completely artificially and so i think we need to think about what lines there would neatly delineate the things that get us too close to mirror life and don't but this is a topic that a lot of people need to weigh in on yeah is it

Yeah, I think this is mostly an area of Blue Sky's research.

We've been having discussions with a lot of the people doing this work.

over the last few months.