What is ‘mirror life’ and why have scientists opposed it?

In a mirror, left and right become swapped. Scientists have been making and studying enantiomers in the lab for a long time, but recently a few of them have started on the road to creating ‘mirror microbes’ -- synthetic bacteria whose building blocks are enantiomers of their natural counterparts. “Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria would likely evade many immune mechanisms mediated by chiral molecules, potentially causing lethal infection in humans, animals, and plants,” the commentary read. “Countermeasures such as mirror antibiotics, crops engineered to be resistant to mirror bacteria, and mirror phages appear very unlikely to be sufficient to stop or reverse the spread of mirror bacteria throughout global ecosystems or to prevent unacceptable loss of life and irreversible ecological changes that could result,” they added. “The primary challenge with these countermeasures is our inability to deploy them throughout the ecosphere at sufficient scale to prevent or counter dissemination and evolutionary diversification of mirror bacteria in the wild.