Relman was a headliner at the recent Stanford Health Policy Forum: Engineered Threats to Global Health, in conversation with Hank Greely, JD, a law professor who focuses on ethical, legal, and social issues in the biosciences and director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School. The talk was moderated by Paul Costello, an adjunct professor in the Stanford Department of Medicine.

Relman came at the biological conundrum from a scientific perspective, while Greely tackled the legal and ethical implications.

Greely agrees there’s a potential risk to mirror life and that a moratorium on its creation is a good idea, although he’s focused on the uncertainties.

“I’ve been working in bioscience for about 35 years and one thing I’ve learned is that it’s almost always more complicated than we think it’s going to be,” he said. “Life is extraordinarily complex, so I’m not convinced—and I don’t think David is convinced—that this would be the end of all life on Earth. But I am convinced that there is a significant enough risk that we should do something about it.”

Both he and Relman believe an international group, such as the United Nations or other groups of nations, could oversee recommendations and regulations of mirror biology. When human genome editing became a reality, for example, Greely said international and national bodies, such as the WHO, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and UK’s Royal Society, issued a series of guidelines. Their counsel has largely held.

Unfortunately, Greely said, this may not be the moment for regulating mirror life.

“We are in the era of chemtrails,” he said. “We are in the era of Bill Gates microchips in vaccines. We are in the era when any conspiracy theory seems to be enthusiastically adopted by at least a third of the country.”

Greely said binding law on mirror life may be even more complicated than the science itself due to the lack of worldwide cooperation and trust, as well as enforcement mechanisms. International treaties, for example, take years to adopt.

“That side of the problem is even harder than the biology,” Greely said. “I will say though, I don’t think we should panic, in part because it’s at least several years away—and in part because panic is the world’s least useful emotion. We do need to take clear, thoughtful steps, which I think David and his group have been doing.”