There is growing scientific and policy attention being paid to the risks of mirror life, but recognition of the problem has so far outpaced the development of concrete oversight. This paper sets out the authors’ view on how the governance of mirror biology research might begin to be operationalized. The authors’ organizing claim is that the most pressing deficit in the landscape is the gap between the widening recognition of mirror biology as a governance challenge and the absence of any concerted effort to apply operational mechanisms to it. They build from that gap to develop a preliminary framework that calibrates the intensity of oversight to the degree to which a given line of biological research would enable the creation of mirror life, and they set out what different actors could do to close the gap in the near term.
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