In another example of a tech startup’s founders ignoring the ethical lessons of sci-fi movies and books and instead becoming enamored of the society-ruining technologies the stories are about, Wired 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 is pitching the concept with a truly horrifying set of words that sound like the street slang from a cyberpunk novel but is now being used as official corporate lingo: organ sacks, 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 meat and parts would contain functioning organ systems but lack any capacity for thought 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’s raising funds to develop monkey-derived organ sacs. Privately, according to Wired, the company allegedly doesn’t want to stop there, though. It’s worth noting that R3 Bio disputes the report, according to a second deep dive into the company’s unsettling alleged ambitions published in MIT Technology Review.
As for how realistic any of this is, after reading what scientists interviewed by both Wired and MIT Technology Review had to say, it seems like there’s a gigantic gap between concept and execution. Turns out, growing full human bodies without brains and then keeping them “alive” long enough to have their innards remain viable for transplantation is a prospect so filled 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.
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