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In a mirror organism, many important molecules would be in opposite-handedness of those in regular life.

So why is that troubling to researchers?

Why would you ever make a microorganism that's resistant to most of our antibiotics? That's a really bad idea. It's Wednesday,

January 8th, and this is Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Charles Bergquist. In so-called mirror

life, proteins would be right-handed instead of left, while DNA would

be left-handed instead of right.

Recently, an international group of researchers argued that work toward creating that kind

of organism should stop.

Just don't do it.

Synthetic biology researcher Drew Endy spoke with Ira about the concept of mirror life

and some of the concerns in the research community. Here's Ira. Dr. Drew Endy is one of the authors

of that warning. He's also an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. Welcome to

Science Friday. Glad to be here, Ira. Thanks for having me.

Nice to have you. First of all, why might a researcher want to create some kind of mirror

bacterium or other kind of life? It's like research in general. The motivations range from

it's cool. Doing something new is unbelievable. There's that element of it. And then it's also practical. Like,

what's it good for? There's a lot of things that can be beneficial if you can make mere molecules.

They have different properties that might make a medicine last longer or have different

better impacts, fewer side effects. So it's everything from just pure basic science and the love of

science to some fairly, you know, useful possibilities. Right. Well, you certainly have my

interest now. So I want to delve a little bit deeper into this, for example, would a mirror

...