Since the mid-1990s, scientists have been obsessed with cloning animals. Dolly the sheep famously became the first mammal to be cloned from a cell taken from an adult mammary gland almost 30 years ago, in 1996.
Transitioning from cloning animal embryos to human ones has proven far more controversial, and not only because of the litany of risks involved. So far, scientists have only gone as far as to generate human embryo models grown stem cells and clone primates from fetal cells — rather than adult cells, like Dolly.
That hasn’t stopped some from exploring the idea as part of a secretive effort to realize an alternative to anti-aging tech that sounds like it was ripped straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel. A billionaire-backed stealth startup, called R3 Bio, recently announced that it was raising money to develop non-sentient monkey “organ sacks,” as Wired reported last week, an eyebrow-raising alternative to animal testing. Such structures would contain all typical organs excluding the brain, ultimately serving as a source for donor organs and tissues.
But according to a sprawling followup investigation by MIT Technology Review, R3 Bio’s founders secretly have a far more ambitious goal in mind: creating entire “brainless clones” of the human body that aging or ill individuals could one day transplant their brain into. One advantage of not developing the brain in the donor bodies, albeit a ghoulish one: such a brain-free clone would neatly circumvent certain moral conundrums over the concept.
Still, to call the idea ethically fraught would be a vast understatement. Despite an insider likening a pitch they heard from R3’s founder, John Schloendorn, to a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove” in an interview with Tech Review, the company has since distanced itself from the idea of brainless human clones.
The company said its founder “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates” in a statement to Tech Review, and insisted that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”
Strikingly, though, cofounder Alice Gilman told the publication that the “team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions” about brainless clones involving humans.
Beyond the ethical implications, experts also threw cold water on the biological feasibility of full body replacement.
“There are so many barriers,” Michigan State University researcher Jose Cibelli, who was among the first to try to clone human embryos by obtaining matched stem cells in the early 2000s, told Tech Review, from illegality and safety issues to the fact that an artificial womb remains science fiction.
“You’d have to convince a woman to carry a fetus that is going to be abnormal,” he said.
The considerable “yuck factor,” per Cibelli, seemingly has R3’s founders undeterred. Schloendorn has been investigating the idea of human replacements for years now, Tech Review reports, regularly giving seminars behind the scenes about the idea and pitching investors on it.
“We will try to do it in a way that produces defined societal benefits early on, and we need to be prepared to take no for an answer, if it turns out that this cannot be done safely,” he wrote in a 2024 LinkedIn message to Tech Review.
He declined an interview with the magazine, arguing that he wanted to show that the benefits are “reasonably grounded in reality” before taking R3 out of stealth mode.
More on cloning: Jeffrey Epstein Had a Bizarre Obsession With “Improving” Human DNA, and He Was Emailing With Top Scientists About It