India, Oct. 8 -- Last month, in a tiny room in Manchester, UK, a niche group of biology scientists gathered to discuss if they needed to restrict research in an emerging technology that might affect humans and environment within a decade or two in dramatic, unexpected ways.

Mirror life is a kind of a synthetic cell in which scientists flip an organism's DNA using advanced experiments. They turn these cells from homochiral where DNA and RNA are made from right-handed nucleotides (molecules that are the building blocks of genetic matter such as DNA and RNA) to left-handed ones, to create a new synthetic cell that is a mirror clone of the living cell. This flipping of DNA to create a mirror cell could, some scientists believe, could likely ...