Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”
But even Schloendorn and his cofounder, Alice Gilman, can’t seem to keep away from the topic. Just last September, the pair presented at Abundance Longevity, a $70,000-per-ticket event in Boston organized by the anti-aging promoter Peter Diamandis. Although the presentation to about 40 people was not recorded and was meant to be confidential, a copy of the agenda for the event shows that Schloendorn was there to outline his “final bid to defeat aging” in a session called “Full Body Replacement.”
According to a person who was there, both animal research and personal clones for spare organs were discussed. During the presentation, Gilman and Schloendorn even stood in front of an image of a cloning needle. Pressed on whether this was a talk about brainless clones, Gilman told us that while R3’s current business is replacing animal models, “the team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions.”
MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains.
A child with hydranencephaly, a rare condition in which most of the brain is missing. Could a human clone also be created without much of a brain as an ethical source of spare organs?
DIMITRI AGAMANOLIS, M.D. VIA WIKIPEDIA
A main purpose of the fundraising, investors say, was to support efforts to try these techniques in monkeys from a base in the Caribbean. That offered a path to a nearer-term business plan for more ethical medical experiments and toxicology testing—if the company could develop what it now calls monkey “organ sacks.” However, this work would clearly inform any possible human version.
Though he holds a PhD, Schloendorn is a biotech outsider who has published little and is best known for having once outfitted a DIY lab in his Bay Area garage. Still, his ties to the experimental fringe of longevity science have earned him a network in Silicon Valley and allies at a risk-taking US health innovation agency, ARPA-H. Together with his success at raising money from investors, this signals that the brainless-clone concept should be taken seriously by a wider community of scientists, doctors, and ethicists, some of whom expressed grave concerns.
“It sounds crazy, in my opinion,” said Jose Cibelli, a researcher at Michigan State University, after MIT Technology Review described R3’s brainless-clone idea to him. “How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an abnormal human?”
Twenty-five years ago, Cibelli was among the first scientists to try to clone human embryos, but he was trying to obtain matched stem cells, not make a baby. “There is no limit to human imagination and ways to make money, but there have to be boundaries,” he says. “And this is the boundary of making a human being who is not a human being.”
