A California-based company called R3 Bio says, on its web site:
Recent Media Coverage
We noted recent sensational media coverage. Such attention is not encouraged by us. R3 Bio works with microscopic structures in cell culture. We do not produce the types of large scale structures envisioned in the media. We do not work with live primates.
Note that the statement does not say anything about whether that media coverage is accurate. Note that the statement does not say anything about whether that media coverage is accurate. Note that the statement does not say anything about whether that media coverage is accurate. Have you noted that the statement does not say anything about whether that media coverage is accurate?
That media coverage includes a March 30, 2026 report in the magazine MIT Technology Review. That news article says:
Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones
The ultimate plan to live forever is a brand new body.
By Antonio Regalado
fter operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week—saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey “organ sacks” as an alternative to animal testing.
In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, and life-extension investors LongGame Ventures.
But there is more to the story. And R3 doesn’t want that story told.
MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he’s called “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies….
BONUS READING: About the novel Never Let Me Go
You might enjoy reading a paper called “On not wanting to know: Some thoughts on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go“, by Christian Wieland, published in 2024 in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. Wieland writes:
Kazuo Ishiguro‘s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go takes place, as the author tells us in ‘England, the late 1990s’ and follows the lives of a group of clones who had been created with the sole purpose of harvesting their organs for transplant. The novel is steeped in an atmosphere of illusion and self-deception while remaining deeply rooted in human emotions…. [This] paper concentrates on one aspect of this multilayered novel—the misrepresentation of reality and the human wish not to know about painful truths
