Why this startup wants to make brainless human clones
In another example of a tech startup’s founders ignoring the ethical lessons of sci-fi movies and books and instead falling in love with the society-destroying technologies the stories are about, The cable recently reported that a startup called R3 Bio is testing the idea of cloning brainless human bodies for organ transplants.
Yes, you read that right.
Publicly, the company pitches the concept with a truly horrifying set of words that sound like street slang from a cyberpunk novel but are now used as official corporate parlance: organ bags, or what are essentially lab-grown bodies without brains, designed explicitly to produce organs for transplant or serve as more ethical alternatives to animal testing.
A startup wants to grow human bodies without brains. All it needs is yours.
These sacks of human flesh and parts would contain functioning organ systems, but lack any ability to think or pain, as if that makes it any better. The idea here is that in a world where hundreds of thousands of Americans are waiting for transplants every day, why not just grow replacement organs instead of waiting for donors?
R3 Bio has announced that it is raising money to develop monkey-derived organ sacs. Private according to The cablebut the company reportedly doesn’t want to stop there. It’s worth noting that R3 Bio disputes the report, according to another deep dive into the company’s disturbing alleged ambitions published in MIT Technology Review.
As for how realistic any of this is, after reading what scientists interviewed of both The cable and MIT Technology Review gotta say, there seems to be a gigantic gap between concept and execution. It turns out that growing full human bodies without brains and then keeping them “alive” long enough for their insides to remain viable for transplant is a prospect so fraught with ethical, legal and technological problems that it’s hard to see any of this making the leap from the pages of science fiction and into the real world anytime soon.
