Nearly 50 years ago, Democrats wanted to ban recombinant DNA technology while scientists wanted to make insulin without needing a pancreas from a steer. Both sides won. Beef pancreas is no longer needed and the FDA still treats GMOs like they are a ‘cure for cancer’ claim in the 1970s while using high costs and bureaucracy to prevent small companies from getting into the insulin market.

It was therefore odd to see the same Democratic party in America that a few years earlier had tried to put warning labels on “GMO” food suddenly claiming gain-of-function virus research – boosting transmissibility and virulence – was one of the pillars of science; until you remember it was an election year and if a Republican said it was bad, they said it was good. And if a Republican fast-tracked approval of a vaccine, he was killing people.(1)

Today there is concern about “mirror bacteria”, reversing the chirality but it is hard to know how much is anti-science hype, like a Democratic President banning federal funding for any embryonic stem cell research, forcing the investors of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) technology to go outside Washington, DC(2), or legitimate concern, like gain-of-function work in sloppy Chinese labs on a coronavirus that had already caused two pandemics in 16 years.

In “Star Trek”, mirror universe versions of well-known characters might have a goatee. It is less obvious in biology. Image generated by Meta AI.

Much in biology is “one-handed”. Sugar in DNA is “right-handed” nucleotides proteins are “left-handed” amino acids and a lot of our defense mechanisms against real pathogens (real as is in not bizarre lawyer claims about trace amounts of PFAS in water or formaldehyde in floors) evolved based on those natural positions. Creating “mirror” images would bypass our innate defense mechanisms. 

Science for the sake of science is a good thing. We don’t need another Senator Ted Kennedy or President Clinton wanting to proactively ban a scientific endeavor because of irrational need to invoke the Precautionary Principle and there is no feasible way to create a “mirror” organism that could spread in nature. Yet the authors of a new editorial are right to argue for safety mechanisms. There is little doubt that COVID-19 originated due to work in a lab nearby, especially when we know their BSL ratings are fake and a researcher went to jail for selling lab animals in the nearby wet market. Even countries with stronger protocols, like presumably Australia has, had 323 vials of Hendra virus, Hantavirus , and other infectious diseases, go missing from Queensland’s Public Health Virology Laboratory but didn’t tell anyone for the same reason the NIH hid knowledge about China and COVID-19; to prevent panic. The mystery disappearance occurred in August 2023. 

When regulations can’t be foolproof, it is certainly a bad idea to let someone out there tinker outside a closed laboratory system. Yet we don’t need to create hysteria first and then look at science later. Back to hESC, that was a technology that was over-hyped for political gain, California even threw $5 billion at it to stick it to the Republican who funded it for the first time but didn’t allow a Wild Wild West Anything Goes scenario, and it ended up achieving nothing while iPSCs made the real breakthroughs without being a political football at all.

NOTES:

(1) Until they won the election and the vaccine worked and they took credit for it.

(2) Until President Bush took office and approved NIH funding for stem cell research for the first time. Democrats are just better in media, though, because when President Obama was elected they declared he lifted the Bush ban that never existed. It was created by Clinton, who then pushed off requests to use the technology so he wouldn’t have to undo his own law, and President Bush funded existing lines while lawyers examined the issue.