The scientists warned that an organism created with the new technology could cause extraordinarily damaging consequences for the environment, agriculture, and human well-being.
Jack W. Szostak stressed in a 299-page technical report that creating such microbes could lead to an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems.
To make a dangerous microbe, researchers would need to build a cell that defies the fundamental properties of life, specifically the mirror-image forms of DNA and proteins.
The combination of left-handed amino acids in proteins and right-handed sugars in DNA is foundational for life on Earth, making such synthetic organisms extremely risky.
#synthetic-biology #pandemic-risk #environmental-consequences #agricultural-impact #molecular-biology
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