Funded Start-up Proposes Innocent Composite Bodies For Seniors To Use
The company R3 Bio is holding its first public interview It has strings on March 23, 2026. The version they say It has strings: the company was raising money to build “body bags” for non-hearing monkeys instead of lab animals. Full organ systems, no brain. Founder Alice Gilman said R3 ultimately aims to scale up the technology for people to receive organs and tissues.
After a week, MIT Technology Review published what the company had been keeping behind closed doors. Founder John Schloendorn has been pitching a groundbreaking idea to investors and longevity enthusiasts at closed-door events: mindless genetically engineered clones of the human body into which elderly clients could one day transplant their brains.
Someone who stayed at one of Schloendorn’s spots compared the experience to a “close encounter of the third kind” crossed with “Dr. Strangelove.”
R3 denied. The company said that Schloendorn “never made any statement about ‘senseless human clones’ to be managed by those acting on behalf of others” and that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or people with brain damage are completely false.” Gilman said MIT Technology Review that “the team reserves the right to hold speculative discussions for the future” about mindless human clones.
Schloendorn has a PhD and once ran a DIY bio lab out of his garage in the Bay Area. He did his doctoral work at the University of Arizona with the support of the SENS Research Foundation, Aubrey de Grey’s organization dedicated to “training for useless engineering.” De Gray called him “one of my patrons.” Peter Thiel has invested about $1.5 million in ImmunePath, Schloendorn’s former venture that focuses on stem cell therapy. The company did not survive. Schloendorn founded R3 Bio in 2021.
Gilman’s father had a heart transplant. He says his experience made him join this project. He refuses to call R3’s creations “absurd.” “Nothing is missing, because we designed it to have only the things we want,” he said It has strings.
In September 2025, Schloendorn and Gilman presented at Abundance Longevity in Boston. Tickets cost $70,000. Peter Diamandis edited it. Session title: “Recovering the Whole Body.” About 40 people were in the house. No recording was made. Attendees heard pitches for both animal testing and the concept of a personal clone.
Boyang Wang, who runs the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, confirmed that he invested $500,000 in R3 in 2024. The company showed him evidence that it had produced mice without a complete brain. “There were imperfections, but the mice survived, they grew, and to me that’s a strong test,” Wang said.
He has since pushed back, calling a full-body transplant “highly improbable, not even very scientific.” A second company appeared in the area MIT Technology Review investigation. Kind Biotechnology, based in New Hampshire, was founded by Justin Rebo, who partnered with Schloendorn. Rebo’s team used CRISPR to delete genes from mouse embryos. The patent filing includes images of the results: mice born without a complete brain, faceless, limbless. MIT Technology Review he described one image of the patent as resembling “a fleshy duffel bag attached to life support tubes.”
George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard and advisor to Kind Bio: “There’s probably no situation where you need the whole body. I just think that even if one day it’s acceptable, it’s not a good place to start. It’s not very helpful, more than disgusting.”
Jose Cibelli, a Michigan State researcher who was among the first to synthesize human embryos 25 years ago: “How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an extraordinary person? There is no limit to human imagination and ways to make money, but there must be limits. And this is the borderline of creating a non-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 brain function alone. He reportedly showed investors medical scans of these children’s skulls to argue that the body can function without higher brain structures.
Cibelli on the problem of giving birth to a child: “You will have to make the woman believe that she is carrying an embryo that will be unusual.”
The people who inspired this organization revealed how they can present it to the public. Kris Borer, one of the entrepreneurs in this space, presented this strategy at a long life conference in France. He warned that disclosure would bring “massive backlash.” His plan: “We’re going to start by putting you together and giving you a body. We’re going to start by solving the organ shortage problem. Eventually people will warm up, and then we’ll get into the more difficult stuff.”
The Longevity Biotech Fellowship puts the cost of a proof-of-concept human clone without the neocortex at $40 million.
Jean Hebert joined ARPA-H as program manager in 2024 after teaching at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He runs a brain stem repair project there. Before taking the role of the government, he told MIT Technology Review that he and Schloendorn had a “very cooperative” relationship. The breakup was clean. Hebert works on brain repair. Schloendorn works on growing bodies without them. “It’s a perfect fit, right? Body, brain,” Hebert said. R3 is listed on the ARPA-H website as a potential partner for Hebert’s program.
The first successful primate clone happened in 2018 with 2 monkeys in China. The current record for human survival with a pig organ is less than 9 months. A person close to him came to the head transplant: Russian surgeons removed and attached a pig’s head last July. The pig could not breathe and was able to draw water by injection. It could not move. The spinal cord was severed and there is no guaranteed way to reconnect one. It survived 12 hours before it was killed.
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 developing continuously. 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 will produce the public benefits defined in advance, and we need to be ready to reject the answer, if it turns out that this cannot be done safely.”
Hank Greely, a biologist at Stanford: “If you make a living organism that has no brain at all, I think we can safely assume that it can’t feel pain. It’s very likely 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.”
