A Startup Has Been Quietly Pitching 'Brainless Human Clones' as Backup Bodies

The Public Story

R3 Bio, based in Richmond, California, came out of stealth mode on March 24, 2026, in an interview with Wired. The company announced it had raised funding to create nonsentient monkey "organ sacks" — biological models intended as alternatives to traditional animal testing. The company disclosed three investors: billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, and LongGame Ventures, a firm focused on life-extension investments. R3 Bio did not publicly disclose the amount of funding raised.

The company's public pitch was positioned at the intersection of bioethics and practicality: growing animal tissue models without sentience that could replace lab animals in pharmaceutical testing. On its face, the idea was provocative but arguably defensible within existing bioethics frameworks.

The Private Vision

But according to MIT Technology Review's investigation, published March 30, 2026, the company's founder, John Schloendorn, has been privately pitching a far more radical long-term plan: creating "brainless clones" of human beings.

As described in MIT Technology Review's reporting, the concept involves growing a biological duplicate of a person's body with only enough brain structure to sustain basic biological functions — alive, but not conscious. The clone would serve as a source of replacement organs, or, in the most extreme version of the pitch, as a body into which an aging or ill person's brain could theoretically be transplanted — a procedure Schloendorn has referred to as "full body replacement."

According to MIT Technology Review, a key scientific inspiration cited by Schloendorn is a rare birth defect — anencephaly or severe hydranencephaly — in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres. Schloendorn reportedly showed people medical scans of these children's skulls as evidence that a human body can survive without a developed brain.

One person who attended an R3 Bio presentation told MIT Technology Review, speaking on condition of anonymity, that the briefing was like a "close encounter of the third kind" with "Dr. Strangelove." That person described being left "reeling" by the implications and by Schloendorn's enthusiasm.

The Surrogacy Problem

MIT Technology Review reported one of the most ethically charged elements of R3 Bio's plan: since artificial wombs do not currently exist, the first brainless human clones would have to be carried to term by women paid to serve as surrogates. According to the reporting, Schloendorn discussed a future in which, once a brainless clone existed, it could give birth to additional clones — effectively creating a self-perpetuating supply chain of bodies without involving additional human surrogates.

MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 Bio has successfully cloned any animal larger than a rodent. The publication did, however, obtain documents including a 2023 letter to supporters in which R3 described a technical road map for "body replacement cloning," as well as meeting agendas outlining the concept.

R3 Bio's Response

On March 24 — the same day it publicly announced itself via Wired — R3 Bio sent MIT Technology Review a statement that described allegations of human cloning intent as "categorically false." The company stated that Schloendorn "never made any statement regarding hypothetical 'non-sentient human clones' [that] would be carried by surrogates."

However, MIT Technology Review noted a contradiction. In September 2025, Schloendorn and his co-founder, Alice Gilman, presented at Abundance Longevity, a $70,000-per-ticket event in Boston organized by anti-aging promoter Peter Diamandis. The session was listed on the event agenda — a copy of which MIT Technology Review obtained — as "Full Body Replacement." According to an attendee who spoke to the publication, both animal research and personal clones for spare organs were discussed during the presentation. Gilman and Schloendorn stood in front of an image of a cloning needle during the talk, the attendee said.

When pressed, Gilman told MIT Technology Review that while R3's current business focuses on replacing animal models, "the team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions."

The Legal and Ethical Landscape

Human reproductive cloning is illegal in many countries. The United States has no federal law explicitly banning human cloning, though multiple bills have been introduced over the years and several states have enacted their own bans. The United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration in 2005 calling on member states to prohibit all forms of human cloning "inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity."

Even the intermediate step — growing a human body with a deliberately damaged or absent brain for the purpose of organ harvesting — raises legal questions that have no established precedent. The concept of a "nonsentient" human body blurs the line between a living person and a biological artifact in ways that existing medical ethics frameworks were not designed to address.

Brain transplants or "body transplants" remain entirely theoretical. No such procedure has ever been performed or seriously attempted in humans. The complexity of reconnecting a brain's spinal cord, blood supply, and nervous system to a new body is considered by mainstream neuroscience to be far beyond current or near-term surgical capability.

The Longevity Movement Connection

R3 Bio's vision exists within a broader ecosystem of well-funded life-extension research. The company's investors — Draper, Immortal Dragons, and LongGame Ventures — are all active in the longevity space. The $70,000-per-ticket Abundance Longevity conference where Schloendorn and Gilman presented is organized by Diamandis, a prominent figure in the anti-aging and transhumanist communities who also co-founded Singularity University and the XPRIZE Foundation.

MIT Technology Review reported that R3 Bio's plans had been kept secret within a circle of "extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash." The publication of MIT Technology Review's investigation, followed by widespread coverage from Futurism and Slashdot, appears to have forced exactly the kind of public reckoning those proponents sought to avoid.