"A sufficiently stereochemically alien pathogen could, in principle, place essentially all of its important antigenic determinants outside the effective recognition repertoire of a conventional adaptive immune system."
With perfect knowledge of the immune system and the capability to create the pathogens of our dreams it would most likely be possible to create this pathogen of our dreams.
Making an entire self replicating mirror organism that would both have this property of "being invisible to the specific immune system" and AND being an effective pathogen is far from a solved problem though. It's further away as useful quantum computing!
We don't even have self replicating mirror cells, just some synthetic Frankensteins.
I find it really hard to believe that you can make a whole organism that doesn't have any molecules that can be targeted by an antibody. And if you can do that then why go through mirror life anyway?
A reasonable argument is that mirror proteins will evade the usual degradation+antigen presentation pipeline and this will make efficient adaptive response more difficult, or that the innate immune reaction will not be enough to recruit adaptive response. But surely it's not impossible. And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
> I find it really hard to believe that you can make a whole organism that doesn't have any molecules that can be targeted by an antibody.
We just don't know yet, but I want to believe because I think it's exciting. Protease failure, transport machinery failure, MHC binding failure, they are all stereospecific after all... So it's possible.
> And if you can do that then why go through mirror life anyway?
Because our body can produce antibodies against all "classical" forms of life. It's probably impossible to produce classical pathogens that are fully invisible to the immune system. That's the whole point and danger of mirror life in the context of pathogen creation. Plenty of classical pathogens were our antibodies (usually) don't help already exist though: HIV for example, where only very few people are lucky enough to be elite neutralizers. If we wanted to do biological warfare, it would probably easier to enhance those viruses.
> And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
I am not so sure about this, if the bodies molecular machinery is unable to produce antigens for those pathogens, no classical or mrna vaccine is gonna trick the body into producing them, it's just technically impossible. You'd need to "update" the whole immune system to be able to manufacture the mirror antibodies and from that we are an eternity away. The only remotely feasible cure in such a world would be through infecting the body with another mirror-pathogen that produces mirror-antibodies or directly injecting mirror-antibodies...
I got promoted to something like staff engineer and my director keeps pushing me to find new things to work on. It's very stressful and I am kind of not creative at all in regards to features, so I am focusing on saving costs. Caching, batching, rightsizing, bundling, optimizing. At the same time I need to steer him away from putting me in charge of "set up to fail" moonshot projects.
If I regularly reduce costs by 2, 3 times what I cost my company, I will be left alone with the moonshot projects, won't be targeted by RIF and get my above inflation salary increase. Luckily, there are ENDLESS money wasting sins of the past to fix.
That little thing where we send unnecessary SNS messages that was costing 1000$ a year when the company was still young? It's 100.000$ a year now! Nothing that moves the needle in a multi million dollar revenue company, but still a noteworthy personal achievement if fixed on my own volition.
Incredible how the idea of Google being such bad choice has become so entrenched that people prefer the offerings of two companies that might not exist anymore in a few years over Google‘s similar offering.
Nothing nefarious is actually going on here: You have to understand that AI models are like fruit. Fresh fruit can quickly spoil and mold. We all know the meme about strawberries getting moldy before you can even bring them home! This is the reason they regularly bring out new, unspoiled models and also the reason why they will need to keep doing so just to keep model performance at the same level.
reply