James Smith

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

And I think it would be great to have people thinking about what that would need to look like.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this is about getting it physically to the place where it would be needed.

So if you imagine that you want to try and protect the rainforest or various wild animals or all different livestock, you have to physically get the antibiotics to all of these species.

The other thing is just giving it to them once is not enough.

They have to receive it continuously because if myrobacteria are in the environment, you could get infected directly from the environment.

So they'd need to be taking antibiotics every day to prevent them from getting infected in the first place.

And that would mean you need to make loads of it, basically.

And so we might need just much more manufacturing capacity than we actually have.

I think the basic idea is that you...

need to try and avoid getting infected in the first place because your immune system is so bad at dealing with it that once you're once you're infected it's really hard to clear the infection antibiotics help you go kind of below a threshold after which your immune system can take over and like do the job of clearing the infection right but that might not work in this case

Yeah, I think it's a good question.

So one way we could understand this is by making mirror life and then putting it in an environment and seeing if the environment is toxic to it.

Another way you can study that is by looking at normal life and kind of putting it in a mirror environment.

And you get exactly the same information.

We actually already have some data on that that shows that at high concentrations of

mirror compounds will be toxic to normal life.

And so the reverse would be true.

But those concentrations are higher than what you typically find in the environment or in the blood, the places where you'd expect mirror bacteria to be growing.

So there are more experiments that could be done here.