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Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio’s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms — from which, in theory, they can grow and harvest organs for implantation into human bodies, or to test future drugs and other treatments without the need for live animal testing.
“It’s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,” Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. “But it’s not technically alive because it’s exclusively the organs. And they’re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.”
Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits — which will ideally be born without brains — as “organ sacks.” Needless to say, it’s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions — a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.
“I try to not be scary to an average person,” Gilman told Hattikudur.
Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It’s not exactly clear.
About a week before the podcast episode was set to air, producers for the Skyline Drive reached out to Gilman to fact-check the conversation. To their surprise, Gilman requested that the episode be postponed. Despite describing imagined “organ sacks” in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept “for now, period,” and declined to say what it was working on instead.
Gilman didn’t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a “federal asset,” seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, “federal asset” usually implies some kind of ownership or domain over something held by the federal government. Which would imply that the federal government is investing in a company that’s claimed to have worked on “organ sacks.” She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.
R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create “organ sacks.” Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” and that “if we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
But R3 Bio’s ambitions seemingly go far beyond “organ sacks.” A few days after Wired’s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published a deep dive about R3 Bio’s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn — a self-described “biological designer” who has given confidential talks about “full body replacement” and “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” Generally speaking, replacement bodies refer to physical clones that will allow for humans to transplant their heads onto a whole new human body, a still-theoretical idea that’s attracted the fascination of several scientists. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a “sweeping disavowal” of its findings, and said that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.”)
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