James Smith

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922 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 13 Jan

James Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe · 13 Jan 2026 podcast

I do talk to a lot of people about this who think we should reject the kind of risk benefit framing for an issue like this, where you have catastrophic risks, you know, that could...

that could kill a large fraction of multicellular life, like they'll ask, okay, what is the benefit that you can actually imagine that would justify doing that?

And I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, but I think it is also important to get into the benefits to some extent.

And in this case, I don't think it ultimately makes any difference in terms of what we should do.

So what are the benefits?

The key benefit that people talk about for making mirror life would be making mirror molecules, which can be used for therapeutic purposes, more efficiently.

But we can already make a lot of these mirror molecules without mirror life.

So it's specifically focused on large mirror molecules.

Yeah, so the properties of mirror molecules in general that make them interesting for therapeutics are the fact that they tend to not produce an immune response and they don't get degraded in the body so they can last for longer.

Those are the exact same properties that make mirror life dangerous.

I see.

Having said that, mirror molecules, there are already quite a lot of these in use, at least in early development.

So this is an area where there's some investment and some interest.

Big mirror molecules, it's a little bit unclear to me what exactly you'd want to use them for.

Maybe if you wanted to make a mirror enzyme that could...

cut something up, then you might want to do it.

Most of the mirror molecules at the moment work by binding to something.

So they don't need to be that big and complicated.

If you want a molecule to have lots of, if you want it to have a complex function, then it needs to be a complex molecule that can kind of move around and have like different pockets and things.

And so maybe there would be applications for those mirror enzymes, but I'm not really sure what they would be.

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