The Unmitigated Horror of Antichiral Bioweapons

Babe wake up! New man made horrors beyond our comprehension just dropped!

In a fresh expose in Science, 38 researchers have come out to warn against the danger of so-called “mirror organisms.” All naturally existing life on Earth, as far as we’re aware, is either made from “left handed” or “right handed” molecules.

Your DNA, your mom’s DNA and even your great grandpa’s DNA all form a right handed spiral. Conversely, all your amino acids are “left handed.” This special property of using the same handedness is known as chirality, and the fact that it’s universal in all known life is called homochirality.

As early as 1992 we were making mirror images of enzymes. By 2002 we had expanded to peptides and proteins. By 2016 scientists from Tsinghua University in Beijing successfully engineered a mirror-image DNA polymerase, a molecular machine for replicating DNA.

Scientists speculate that mirror-image bacteria or viruses would be able to replicate uncontrollably because natural predators, drugs, and even our immune system could be unable to interact with such “antichiral” organisms. These same scientists also say these organisms might not be able to survive in nature because they could be incompatible with their usual sources of food, but they agree it’s not worth the risk of finding out. If they did survive, the results could be apocalyptic.

Even if they can’t naturally survive, of which there’s no guarantee, there’s equally no guarantee that creative genetic engineering couldn’t grant them the ability to do so.

As such, antichiral* organisms are a sublime area of research for any aspiring bioweaponeer. Imagine a strain of ebola that antivirals don’t work on, that your immune system can’t fight, and whose only hypothetical treatment at this point would be injecting you with a bunch of antichiral antibodies- something that doesn’t yet exist and could potentially be dangerous in its own right.

A critic might point out that Ebola is too deadly to serve as a good biological weapon, but there are cases where you might want something that spreads well in a small densely populated area without too much risk of blowback, and hey … It’s vivid imagery.

Paris, London, Tokyo, Beijing and New York would all be prime targets for such a weaponized strain of antichiral Ebola, provided it could be made to survive in nature. It’s the kind of thing that could turn a city’s population into worm food long before we could develop and deploy suitable treatments.

While nation-states will be tempted to research such antichiral bioweapons, I really cannot overstate the dangers. This is the kind of thing we shouldn’t even be entertaining for curative research purposes until we’ve come up with several plausible treatments. This isn’t a situation where the greatest danger is the enemy getting there first, but us getting there first and accidentally unleashing it on ourselves.

Studying antichiral BW agents would be much more dangerous than the defensive research we do on classic BW agents like Smallpox and Marburg Fever, because at least with those we know how to make vaccines. Not only is there no antichiral vaccine, we don’t even know how to start making one or whether such a thing would be compatible with our biology.

For all the above reasons Geostrategy Magazine is joining the voice of those 38 scientists in calling every nation and research institution on Earth to pump the brakes on antichiral organisms** until we have a better understanding of how to deal with them.

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• * A much more technically correct term is “Enantiomorphic Bioweapon”

• * * While full scale antichiral organisms are incredibly dangerous, antichiral molecules in and of themselves are relatively safe and have various benefits that should be studied.