The Institut Pasteur will host an international conference on June 12-13, addressing the potentially unprecedented risks of mirror life and policies to mitigate the potential risks.
In December 2024, an interdisciplinary group of 38 researchers from France, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S., published a paper in Science, accompanied by a detailed Technical Report, warning that “mirror bacteria” could pose novel risks to people, non-human animals, plants, and ecosystems. The group—including many researchers who previously pursued the creation of mirror bacteria—argues that mirror life should not be produced, a position that the scientists say has met with broad agreement from the scientific community.
Louis Pasteur, building on Leonardo Da Vinci, was the first to underscore the importance of molecular chirality in biology—discovering that most biomolecules exist in just one of two possible mirror-image forms. As a young chemist in 1847, Pasteur investigated why two seemingly chemically identical substances—sodium ammonium paratartrate (produced abiotically in a lab) and sodium ammonium tartrate (produced by life)—affected polarized light differently.
