as Adamala and her colleagues talked with biosecurity experts about the project, grave concerns began brewing. "They started to ask questions like 'have you considered what happens if that cell gets released or what would happen if it infected a human?'" Ultimately, they concluded, mirror cells could inflict "unprecedented and irreversible harm" on our world.
“We cannot rule out a scenario in which a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans,” the scientists wrote. "A mirror cell poses a level of threat that is well beyond anything that has ever existed on this planet because, again, it has never existed on this planet," Cooper said. "And it's simply not worth the risk that biosafety mechanisms be built to control it."
