John I Glass

The only reason it's partitioned into small plasmids right now is for the ease of working with it, because we were trying to figure out what genes are necessary, and adding and removing genes is much simpler when it's a plasmid that you can normally clone in bacteria.

There is a way to make a megaplasmid, like basically the thing that John Glass does for his mycoplasma-based cells.

And so we already know how to encapsulate the megaplasmid in a liposome.

So once we settled on this is the genome that I want to persist, it's going to be, I cannot say trivial because it's still a technical project to do it, but we know how to do it to put it all on a megaplasmid.

But one thing I'm curious about is I want to go back to 2019.

There was a conference, some kind of workshop event where synthetic biologists got together and you were there.

John Glass was there.

And basically everybody looked around and was like, yeah, we should make mirror life.

He's been really driving the science, but he's also been helping to build this international community.

Kate's mentor, John Glass.

And John was immediately receptive.

They laid the whole thing out and said, "Can you think of a reason not to be worried?" They were talking about the fact that mirror proteins are invisible to the immune system, and I kept coming up with things that I thought that would make it not be a thing, and everything I thought of, they shot it down with actual data.