80,000 Hours Podcast
Why I quit everything to work on a biothreat nobody had heard of | James Smith, Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What convinced James Smith to work on mirror bacteria?
Myrobacteria might be able to persist in the environment directly. So they might be able to grow in soil or in oceans. It could be like living on Earth today without an immune system, or even like living on Earth today with an immune system, but where you could catch Ebola from trees or from your pet cat. To cause harm, all a myrobacterium needs to be able to do is grow.
How much would it cost to make Mirror Life from where we are today? People estimate something like 500 million to a billion dollars would be sufficient. That motivates the need to have these discussions now. I think at the moment, the marginal impact of an extra person working on Mirror Life is huge.
You could probably become the expert in policy around Mirror Life in your country within a few weeks or months.
Today I'm speaking with James Smith. James is the co-director of the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund and an adjunct associate professor at J. Craig Venter Institute. James was also one of the authors of the kind of bombshell science paper that drew attention to the risks of mirror life last December. Thanks for coming on the podcast, James.
It's great to be here.
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Chapter 2: Why are mirror bacteria considered a significant biothreat?
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so in the science paper, you and your co-authors basically make the argument that we're reasonably close to creating what's called mirror life. And mirror life is basically like normal life, but the molecules are arranged backwards, kind of in the mirror image. And despite the seeming like actually quite a trivial difference, it makes these
life forms, which could be bacteria, extremely, extremely dangerous to not just humans, but like most species, including animals and plants. What exactly makes them so dangerous?
Yeah, it might seem like a trivial difference, but actually this is a really fundamental break from normal biology. So ever since the last universal common ancestor, four billion years ago of all life on Earth, all of our DNA has always been made up of right-handed building blocks, meaning that it makes double helix that twists to the right. And mirror bacteria would have the opposite.
They'd have DNA that twists to the left. So introducing it to earth would be a bit like introducing an alien invasive species that nothing on earth has evolved to deal with. To take one specific example, our immune systems need to be able to recognize pathogens when they get into the blood to be able to mount an effective response.
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Chapter 3: How does mirror life affect the human immune system?
The way that it does that is through receptors that you could think of like gloves. Now, putting a right hand into a right-handed glove, it fits well. It activates the immune system. But if you try and put a left hand into a right-handed glove, it doesn't work properly. Mirror life would be a bit like that.
A lot of the interactions that are so fundamental to biology are not going to work in the same way.
Chapter 4: What risks do mirror bacteria pose to nonhuman animals?
Yeah, I mean, it's wild. It just doesn't seem intuitively like this should matter. It's like it's the same molecule or the same life form. But because there are all of these mechanisms that most of us never think about that actually are like, yeah, the glove has to fit inside, the hand has to fit inside the glove, actually really, really important. Yeah.
Chapter 5: Will plants be affected by mirror bacteria?
Is there more we should talk about in terms of what mirror life actually is?
Yeah, mirror life would be a type of artificial life that you'd make in the lab. A mirror bacterium is what we're mostly going to talk about today because that would be the simplest form of life that you'd make. And it would literally have exactly the same components as a normal bacterium.
So it would have DNA, proteins, ribosomes, a membrane, but all of those would be made in their mirror image form.
And you think that this problem is kind of on par with some of the most pressing global problems we know of, like AI safety and also kind of other biosecurity threats. Why is this comparable? I think a thing that's surprising is it feels very new. This paper was quite recent. It feels quite surprising that we've discovered a new kind of science that
happens to be one of the most threatening things to humanity and, like, the Earth.
Yeah, people have actually posited the existence of mirror life since the 1800s, so it's not a completely new thing. People have mentioned the risks of it in passing in the literature, but it wasn't until last year that anyone looked into this properly.
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Chapter 6: What impact could mirror bacteria have on ecosystems?
And I think this is the worst bio-threat that I've seen described. And I think it can be on par with AI safety for some people, depending on your skill set. That's driven a lot by the fact that there are literally probably 10 people working full time to think about the risks from neurobacteria and what could be done to address them. So it's incredibly neglected.
I also think it's really tractable. We're used to thinking about technologies like artificial intelligence or nuclear, where you have massive risks, but also potentially massive benefits. And MirrorLife seems to be an exception to that. The benefits that we can foresee are really quite minor, whereas we have these massive risks.
And I don't think there are going to be strong commercial drivers to want to make MirrorLife. And that means I think we have a really good chance at kind of cutting off this risk.
Okay, so to make this a bit more concrete and kind of... Yeah, drive home the importance of this issue. You've been trying to raise the alarm about it, but imagine that you fail and kind of your worries about what would happen if mirror life were created and released into the environment kind of came true. How would that play out?
Chapter 7: How close are we to creating mirror bacteria?
What would it look like?
Obviously, this is skiffing out a lot of nuance, but it could be like living on Earth today without an immune system or even like living on Earth today with an immune system. But where you could catch Ebola from trees or from your pet cat or from a carrot that you eat or something like that. So it could be could be really crazy. More concretely, I'd break it down into two categories.
areas of risk. One is immunological and the second is ecological. So myrobacteria could infect not just humans, but a wide range of different species because they have this property of broad immune evasion.
We're used to thinking about something like COVID or influenza that can spread from human to human, but it doesn't also infect plants and insects, livestock, whereas myrobacteria might be able to do that. And the second area is around the ecological risks. Myrobacteria could grow and might be able to persist in the environment directly. So they might be able to grow in soil or in oceans.
And that opens up another transmission route directly from the environment to multicellular hosts. So you might be able to get infected by myrobacteria from dust blowing into your home that has bacteria on it that you inhale or something like that. And we don't really have the tools and technologies to deal with a threat like that at the moment.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What governance policies are needed for mirror life research?
Just to make sure I understand, when you say living without an immune system, that is really, really importantly different to kind of living with a normal immune system, but encountering a new pathogen that we haven't seen before. So COVID, I guess, is a kind of example where...
like we're exposed to new kind of versions of pathogens all the time, but our immune system is able to figure out some kind of response that allows us to, for the most part, defeat those kind of infections. In the case of mirror life, is there an analogy to understand how exactly it's different from that? Like it's not that. It's living without any immune system at all.
Yeah, I mean, there might still be parts of the immune system that work. But there are examples of people that have had immune disorders that essentially replicate what it would be like to not have an immune system. There was, for example, a guy in the 70s called David Vetter, who was also known as Bubble Boy.
When he was born, he had to be immediately put into a sterile plastic chamber where he lived all 12 years of his life. All of his food, any of the toys that he used, anything like that, before entering that
plastic chamber needed to be sterilized so there's a proof of concept that we could live in a world like that but i don't think it's a world that we should be aiming for yeah i mean that is that is horrific um and the thing there is like yeah it's not that we we have to kind of like learn the specific immune response that's going to work for this particular pathogen it's like
most likely we are fundamentally not going to be able to. And so in this case, this person, Bubble Boy, lived in this environment for the duration of his life because his immune system was never going to figure out how to tolerate bacteria and respond to them effectively. And that is what mirror life would be like because it would be so...
immune system would be so kind of just like completely ill-equipped to dealing with it.
Yeah, that sounds about right. There's a lot of nuance here that we're going to unpack for sure. But I think this is a reasonable analogy. And we know from a lot of people who have defects in just one major pathway of immunity that they're similarly really susceptible to bacterial infections.
So even if one or even many parts of the immune system do work, that's not enough to be confident that you're going to be protected from an infection.
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