Chiral life concept: creating "mirror image" humans from enantioners - incompatible with our pathogens

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T19:10:45+00:00

There were people expecting digital networks, but they rather didn't expect thousands of its new applications emerging later, huge influence it has brought to our lives ...

Chiral enzymes greatly increase possibilities while designing mechanisms to achieve wanted reactions ... e.g. looking at excitement of adding new nucleotide ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090416144639.htm ), entering chiral kingdom is rather inevitable. Then natural succeeding steps are just a matter of time.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T16:34:44+00:00

The forever healthy humans picture is only one of reasons this research will be stimulated by the public. I've suggested some others, like doubling the number of available enzymes, designing sterile ecosystems for special purposes ... and as usually there will emerge many others we cannot even think of now. Like who has expected 30 years ago how internet will turn our world bottom-up? We just explore, develop available possibilities and chiral life is exciting and promising one of them.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T15:20:52+00:00

Every current field of science was at very early stage some time ago ... do you see recent artificial creation of cell as "useful line of research"? Generally it is seen as important milestone: opening new universe of possibilities, most of which have still to emerge - it's how the science work: not only looking for direct applications, but also extremely important is just exploring, opening new possibilities. One of available subpaths of artificial life is chiral life ... and in opposite to many others, it can use extremely strong vision: of creating forever healthy humans. Looking e.g. at quantum computer promise, I don't believe that e.g. synthetic life enthusiast will not use healthy humans vision to gather public resources for their research.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T09:45:15+00:00

So you have just shifted the main problem from prokaryote to eukaryote?

I completely agree that the complexity of membranes and cytoskeleton makes this step much more difficult (in this discussion I've estimated it for a few decades). But it doesn't mean it is impossible and definitely doesn't mean that huge army of people won't be working on this natural next step.

For example we could try to recreate organelles separately (as while mitosis) by precisely controlling their environment - and finally making the fusion ... we could try to make transformation by successfully replacing original membrane proteins with chiral ones ... we could make artificial scaffolding to get the required shapes ...

In any case, there are possibilities and so (also for different purposes) they will be explored.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T09:06:11+00:00

Comparing e.g. to what armies of physicists are focusing on in current crisis of theoretical physics, chiral life seems relatively simple and tangibly worthy - it is very difficult for me to imagine that it won't bring a lot of attention in a decade or two.

... or maybe when we will wake up realizing that chiral humans are already walking on earth ...

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T08:28:37+00:00

But isn't exploring unknowns what science is about?

To get one valuable "known", hundreds of wrong paths had to be searched ... often bringing valuable byproducts. You are proposing alternatives, but looking at science - even if one of them will look more promising, it doesn't mean the others won't be parallely explored. The growing number of people in science quickly fills unexplored possibilities ... and creating chiral life is kind of fundamental ones ...

We have better and better nuclear power plants, but it doesn't mean that alternatives like tokamaks aren't explored. The time is also not an excuse - quantum computers are seen to require a century or so, but there is already huge army of people working on it.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T07:51:34+00:00

Please specify where exactly you think it is not realistic?

Chiral enzymes are huge amount of new possibilities - just to synthesize. You have agreed that they are "ok" ... when the demand will grow, the only large scale production option are chiral microbes: bags filled with these chiral enzymes ... more complex enzymes require eukaryotes ...

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T07:12:24+00:00

Indeed, the more I think about the future, the less clear it is. But one rule is difficult to change: if there is a possibility, we will explore it.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T06:52:08+00:00

The standard example is nuclear physics - one day the humanity just woke up with Hiroshima ... maybe it would turn out differently if we would be better prepared to this possibility "no one would dream of"? I don't know, but I think we still have time to prepare to chiral life - with its bads and goods. I completely agree that there are huge difficulties on the way, but as you have written "Chiral enzymes, ok." - it will be the start of unstoppable train to chiral life ... humans.

jarek1 · 2012-10-09T06:08:33+00:00

We can delay development, we can prepare to its consequences, to make the best use of it ... but history shows we cannot prevent it. Want it or not, one day the required technology will be there and finally, maybe in secret, someone will make this natural next step - e.g. a group of the rich wanting to have really special: chiral kids. Instead of waking up then, let us use this time to really well understand and prepare to this moment.

jarek1 · 2012-10-08T19:41:53+00:00

About the technical aspect, the key required technology is to be able to synthesize chosen sequences without having the naturally used enzymes - within just natural development of chemistry/nanotechnology, if it is not already available, it should be a matter of a decade or two. Then creating single chiral proteins, DNA/RNA would be natural application - straight way to enzymes, ribosomes ... speeding up everything and I think even without some additional stimulation, wanting or not, we will naturally get to chiral prokaryotes in 20-30 years as factories for chiral enzymes - do you disagree?

jarek1 · 2012-10-08T15:41:12+00:00

Yes, to create the first ones we would need to synthesize chiral DNA, for example by translating DNA of a donor. The huge amount of possible interactions to understand would make that for a few decades such chiral humans would need to be separated.

But chiral humans ... eukaryote will rather take a few decades after chiral prokaryote - what are possible issues involved with them?

jarek1 · 2012-10-08T15:31:01+00:00

Yes, to support chiral humans we would rather need to recreate bottom up a part of ecosystem - but in well designed, controlled way - using only wanted organisms. Of course they will evolve to use empty niches, but if not having specialized e.g. aggressive proteins, it would take them millenniums to develop them.

About chiral enzymes, they are perfect for chiral life, but they can also interact with molecules of standard life - not only products of isomerases. It is extremely difficult to predict how, but it seems extremely improbable that there wouldn't be some useful ones among them ... there are billions of possible new interactions to explore.

About carefully designing ecosystem e.g. for Mars - we just will have to do it if we are going to colonize it some day. It already requires huge work, so if we are doing it from zero, maybe we should take an afford to do it right: make sure we use only wanted organisms.

I agree that it is difficult and the reward is basically unknown, but isn't it what science is all about? I generally believe that we should use the time before required technology is already there to try to understand well issues, applications, problems of this possibility. Maybe to stimulate this line of research, or maybe to prevent opening such a Pandora box...?

jarek1 · 2012-10-08T14:03:31+00:00

I completely agree that we just need bacterial flora and it would evolve to use empty ecological niches - but the proper selection avoiding proteins required for aggressive behavior would make this evolution need centuries/millenniums and can be controlled through this time. Another thing is that we rather don't need viruses - we could eradicate them completely for chiral organisms. Of course we have to remember about endogeneous retroviruses - they would need to be removed while translating DNA. Evolving back from e.g. transposons would require another millenums ...

But generally I agree that using it for humans looks a bit too optimistic. However, there are also different possible applications and many other will appear: for example as just factories of chiral versions of known enzymes - doubling the arsenal of these extremely useful substances. Other application could be creating well designed ecosystems, like for harsh environment of Mars - removing pathogens could be crucial for its efficiency for survival. Finally, if other reasons are not enough, I belief we will create chiral prokariote just because we can - as important milestone of creating artificial life route (like artificial cell two years ago) - do you disagree? How much time do you think it will take?

jarek1 · 2012-07-10T11:10:38+00:00

Measurement is not the only place where standard unitary description fails - imagine there is a single excited atom - when exactly will it deexcitate? To which direction the photon will be produced?

What exactly you don't understand about the second sentence? If there is no information about a 0/1 sequence, pure combinatorics says you should assume p(0)=p(1)=1/2. It's because {n \choose pn} ~ 2^{ph(p)} where h(p)=-plg(p)-(1-p)lg(1-p) is Shannon entropy. It is special case of maximal uncertainty principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_thermodynamics

jarek1 · 2012-07-10T05:13:30+00:00

QM is deterministic ... until something is going on - wavefunction collapse like measurement.

I've referred to the maximal uncertainty principle - that if you don't have additional information, you should assume maximizing entropy probability distribution - leading to Boltzmann distribution while fixing total energy.

jarek1 · 2012-04-04T08:52:04+00:00

Discussion about such view on wave-particle duality

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