Funded Startup Proposes Brainless Cloned Bodies for Aging People to Use

The company R3 Bio gave its first public interview to Wired on March 23, 2026. The version they told Wired: the company was raising money to build nonsentient monkey “organ sacks” as a replacement for lab animals. Full organ systems, no brain. Cofounder Alice Gilman said R3 eventually aims to scale the technology to humans for organ and tissue supply.

One week later, MIT Technology Review published what the company had actually been pitching behind closed doors. Founder John Schloendorn has been presenting a far more ambitious vision to investors and longevity enthusiasts at closed-door events: genetically engineered brainless clones of the human body that aging clients could one day transplant their brain into.

Someone who sat through one of Schloendorn’s pitches compared the experience to a “close encounter of the third kind” crossed with “Dr. Strangelove.”

R3 denied it. The company said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ that would be carried by surrogates” and that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.” Then Gilman told MIT Technology Review that “the team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions” about brainless clones involving humans.

Schloendorn holds a PhD and once operated a DIY bio lab out of his garage in the Bay Area. He did his doctoral work at the University of Arizona with funding from the SENS Research Foundation, Aubrey de Grey’s organization dedicated to “engineering negligible senescence.” De Grey has called him “one of my proteges.” Peter Thiel put an estimated $1.5 million into ImmunePath, an earlier Schloendorn venture focused on stem cell treatments. The company didn’t survive. Schloendorn founded R3 Bio in 2021.

Gilman’s father had a heart transplant. She says that experience partly drove her into this work. She objects to calling R3’s creations “brainless.” “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she told Wired.

In September 2025, Schloendorn and Gilman gave a presentation at Abundance Longevity in Boston. Tickets cost $70,000. Peter Diamandis organized it. The title of the session: “Full Body Replacement.” About 40 people were in the room. No recording was made. Attendees heard pitches for both the animal testing replacement and the personal human clone concept.

Boyang Wang, who runs the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, confirmed he put $500,000 into R3 in 2024. The company showed him evidence that it had produced mice without complete brains. “There were imperfections, but the resulting mice survived, grew up, and to me, that is a pretty strong experiment,” Wang said.

He has since walked it back, calling whole-body transplant “very infeasible, not even very scientific.” A second company surfaced in the MIT Technology Review investigation. Kind Biotechnology, based in New Hampshire, was founded by Justin Rebo, who has collaborated with Schloendorn. Rebo’s team used CRISPR to delete genes from mouse embryos. The patent filings include images of the results: mice born without a complete brain, without faces, without limbs. MIT Technology Review described one patent illustration as resembling “a fleshy duffel bag connected to life-support tubes.”

George Church, the Harvard genetics professor and advisor to Kind Bio: “There’s almost no scenario where you need a whole body. I just think even if it’s someday acceptable, it’s not a good place to start. Not very useful, in addition to being repulsive.”

Jose Cibelli, a Michigan State researcher who was among the first to clone human embryos 25 years ago: “How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an abnormal human? There is no limit to human imagination and ways to make money, but there have to be boundaries. And this is the boundary of making a human being who is not a human being.”

Schloendorn points to hydranencephaly as proof of concept. Children with this condition are born with almost no cerebral cortex but can still survive on brainstem function alone. He has reportedly shown investors medical scans of these children’s skulls to argue that a body can function without higher brain structures.

Cibelli on the surrogacy problem: “You’d have to convince a woman to carry a fetus that is going to be abnormal.”

The people behind this movement mapped out how to introduce it to the public. Kris Borer, one of the entrepreneurs in this space, laid out the strategy at a longevity conference in France. He warned that exposure would bring “a huge backlash.” His plan: “We are not going to start with Let’s clone you and give you a body. We are going to start with Let’s solve the organ shortage. Eventually people will warm up to it, and then we can go to the more hardcore stuff.”

The Longevity Biotech Fellowship put the cost of a proof-of-concept human clone without a neocortex at $40 million.

Jean Hebert joined ARPA-H as a program manager in 2024 after teaching at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He runs a stem cell brain-repair project there. Before taking the government role, he told MIT Technology Review that he and Schloendorn had a “very collaborative” relationship. The split was clean. Hebert works on repairing brains. Schloendorn works on growing bodies without them. “It’s a perfect match, right? Body, brain,” Hebert said. R3 is listed on the ARPA-H website as a prospective partner for Hebert’s program.

The first successful primate clone happened in 2018 with 2 monkeys in China. The current record for a human surviving with a pig organ is just under 9 months. The closest anyone has come to a head transplant: Russian surgeons removed and reattached a pig’s head last July. The pig could barely breathe and managed to lap water from a syringe. It couldn’t move. The spinal cord had been cut and there’s no proven way to reconnect one. It survived 12 hours before being euthanized.

More than 100,000 Americans are on the transplant waiting list. 13 die every day waiting.

In September 2025, a hot microphone caught Vladimir Putin telling Xi Jinping: “Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and you can even achieve immortality.”

Schloendorn, in a 2024 LinkedIn message to MIT Technology Review: “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.”

Hank Greely, a Stanford bioethicist: “If you make a living entity without a brain at all, I think we’d be pretty comfortable with thinking it can’t feel pain. It’s highly possible that none of this will ever work, but it’s also possible that it could.” He added: “I think the ‘yuck factor’ will be strong.”