James Smith

It's probably not.

But the difference here is the amount of work that went into really thinking through this in detail.

So I think

two things really convinced me.

One was the fact that some of the best scientists in the world, some of the best immunologists, ecologists, synthetic biologists, but also biosecurity experts and others had been looking into this, specifically being asked, what's the problem with the analysis?

Where is there a hole in this?

How can we rule out this catastrophic risk?

And they hadn't been able to.

And that I found pretty compelling.

And then the other thing was just imagining what it would actually be like to live in a world where myrobacteria existed, if this analysis was right.

Any exposure to the outside world could end up being fatal.

You could catch it from plants.

Whole ecosystems could be destroyed.

It just, that kind of blew my mind.

And I thought, okay, this is something I need to get involved in.

Yeah, it was pretty wild and is pretty wild to get to work with all these amazing people.

We're used to thinking about the immune system as being able to deal with kind of any arbitrary threat that's thrown at it.

And that's kind of the case for most things that actually do get thrown at it.

But the difference with mirror life is that we haven't evolved to be able to deal with mirror life because so much of the immune system depends on specific binding between molecules that need to have a certain shape.

And with mirror life, the molecules that matter are going to be reversed.