musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, now is the time that face should form another


Lately, I think I have been too obsessed with reflections; with mirrors; with evidence that proves I am still here. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven I suppose, but mirrors…? My loyal, if not avid, readers will no doubt have noticed my idée fixe of late -actually I wanted to impress you with an apropos Latin quotation but I haven’t studied Latin since first year university when the general public was still whispering it in pubs and heavily-mirrored washrooms.

Anyway, I don’t think I am a particularly vain person; my clothes are all of a different era and those friends who are still around will no doubt attest to that. I have no great need of mirrors, nor do I necessarily enjoy the reality they seek to portray. Perhaps though, I can be excused: a recent illness has drawn me more frequently and critically to the mirror to prove that I -or at least my image- has survived. The reflection no doubt has changed, but so slowly as to be noticeable only to those who see me infrequently, and I doubt that even then they would inspect me very closely.

Still, what is it that makes the reflection of each one of us unique? Or is that just hubris on my part: the hope that after 82 years I am still differentiable from others of a similar age? Of course anybody beyond 50 (as seen by the young) are just, well, old.

My Narcissism would have faded like everything else in an older person, had I not, in my endless curiosity, come across an article on ‘mirror life’.[i] Not mine, you understand, but life as it might live on the other side of the mirror. ‘The building blocks of life, like DNA and proteins, all have a property called chirality. Derived from the Greek word for “handedness,” chirality means that these fundamental biomolecules come in two varieties: with either a right-handed or left-handed orientation. DNA, for instance, is made up of a right-handed double helix of sugars, like a ladder twisted only in a certain direction. Proteins, by contrast, are made up of left-handed amino acids. The opposite hands for both amino acids and sugars exist in the universe, but they just aren’t utilized by any known biological life form.

‘Right and left-handed molecules, however, like the handedness of gloves, are not interchangeable.’ Apart from the mirror-thing, I hope you can see why I find this interesting; scientists can synthesize these molecules in their labs. So what would happen if one of them (the molecule, not the scientist) happened to escape to the outside world? They’d be almost invisible to our regular enzymes hired to break things down. ‘Right-handed amino acids seem quite similar to their left-handed counterparts. But in fact, they’re significantly harder to break down, because the enzymes in Earth’s life are built to degrade proteins with left-handed chirality.’ 

Bad enough for controlling the wrong-handed proteins and amino acids, but what would happen if those rogue proteins were to become, or at least be incorporated into bacteria? Our immune systems, evolved to deal with the regularly-handed proteins, would be affected. Perhaps they might discombobulate our regular-handed infectors, or cancer cells at first, but if there were even a couple of chiral-guys around, we’d probably lose the game.

Remember Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938? Well… if you’re not very very old, have heard about it anyway? The story was that earth had been invaded by Martians (no doubt a reference to other world issues prevalent at the time) and the only thing that was able to defeat them finally, were infections by our run-of-the-mill microbes they had never encountered before on Mars. They were protected at home, I suppose, but once they’d encountered our differently-chiralled guys, the game was over. Uhmm, I rest my rather feeble case of using Orson Welles’ drama if you’re willing to think about it for a moment. We mess with things at our own peril, eh?

And anyway, ‘These synthetic life forms would threaten more than just humans. Other animals and plants would put up similarly weak defenses. Entire ecosystems could be at risk. The impact on the food chain would be devastating.’

I wonder though, how much reality -how much chirality- we should assign to the mirror person in my bathroom mirror. Would its world involve reverse handed DNA? I mean it does seem to point at me with the wrong hand, eh? Is the prison of its glass the only protection for my world? Our world? I wonder if the more imaginative scientists have ever considered what might happen if they ever stepped on a shard of glass from a cracked bathroom mirror when they were coming out of the shower…

I posed this problem of chirality with Peter, the only guy from our usual coffee group who showed up at the food court last Wednesday. He seemed too preoccupied with his doughnut to concentrate on my concerns, however. I suppose he wasn’t really interested in the opposite handedness of a reflection or what might happen if the image in the mirror escaped. Peter’s world just wasn’t concerned with counterfactuals when he was staring at a doughnut.

When I approached the table, “Where is everybody?” was his only response between loud slurps of his coffee and looking up with icing on his face from one of his half-gnawed doughnuts.

I find slurping and failure to wipe off facial icing to be beyond the pale, and so I glared at him for a moment. “At the rate you’re eating, you’ll be finished before anybody arrives.”

He glanced at his watch, and then at me. “Well, I guess you’re right; nobody’s coming today… You want something from the counter? A rescue bagel, or something?” He wet a finger of his left hand and gathered a few crumbs on his paper plate so he could lick them off.

Ever since he’d joined our coffee group, Peter had been rude like that, though. But, before he stood up, he frowned and studied my face for a moment. “What were you saying about handedness, G?” He shook his head slowly. “Were being critical of left-handed people like me? Didn’t you tell us one time that your teacher tried to ‘cure’ you of writing with your left hand when you, too, were one of us?”

I blinked, wondering if he was trying to make a point. “Yes, but the left-handedness wore off over the years. Now I’m kind of a right-handed ambi, eh?”

I don’t think he knew what an ‘ambi’ was. “So then, why were you asking me about the handedness of proteins, and DNA, and stuff? You know I’m still sensitive about everything being designed for right handers…”

To make a point, I suppose, he swished what remained in his cup with his right hand and stood up after some of it splashed onto the table. “Would it be wrong for a protein to do stuff with its other hand…?”

He obviously hadn’t understood anything of my explanation of protein handedness. He shook his head accusingly and walked towards the exit leaving his dirty paper plate and cardboard cup with its spilled coffee on the table for me to clean up. He never returned.

I wasn’t sorry; I’d long considered him a fifth columnist; I think he’d probably already sold out to the chirals anyway…

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-warn-of-an-unprecedented-risk-from-synthetic-mirror-life-built-with-a-reverse-version-of-natural-proteins-and-sugars-180985670

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