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Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio<\/a>, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive<\/a>. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio\u2019s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms \u2014\u00a0from 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,\u201d Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. \u201cBut it\u2019s not technically alive because it\u2019s exclusively the organs. And they\u2019re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits \u2014 which will ideally be born without brains \u2014 as \u201corgan sacks.\u201d Needless to say, it\u2019s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions \u2014\u00a0a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.<\/p>\n \u201cI try to not be scary to an average person,\u201d Gilman told Hattikudur.<\/p>\n Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It\u2019s not exactly clear.<\/p>\n About a week before the podcast episode\u00a0was 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 \u201corgan sacks\u201d in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept \u201cfor now, period,\u201d and declined to say what it was working on instead.<\/p>\n Gilman didn\u2019t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a \u201cfederal asset,\u201d seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, \u201cfederal asset\u201d 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\u2019s claimed to have worked on \u201corgan sacks.\u201d She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.<\/p>\n R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article<\/a>, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create \u201corgan sacks.\u201d Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that \u201creplacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,\u201d and that \u201cif we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.\u201d<\/p>\n But R3 Bio\u2019s ambitions seemingly go far beyond \u201corgan sacks.\u201d A few days after Wired\u2019s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published<\/a> a deep dive about R3 Bio\u2019s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn \u2014 a self-described \u201cbiological designer\u201d who has given confidential talks about \u201cfull body replacement\u201d and \u201crecent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.\u201d 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\u2019s attracted the fascination of several scientists<\/a>. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a \u201csweeping disavowal\u201d of its findings, and said that \u201cany allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.\u201d)<\/p>\n In her interview with Skyline Drive, which took place before Wired or MIT Tech published their respective pieces, Gilman says that the company has \u201ca few milestones that we\u2019re hoping to achieve. The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal testing by using skin stem cells.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s mostly a stealth project, but the essence of the surface level of what we do is we take skin cells from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanaka miracles,\u201d she said, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning<\/a> scientist Shinya Yamanaka\u2019s transformational stem cell research, \u201cthat result in fully grown organ systems.\u201d<\/p>\n In its March reporting, Wired found that the company had put out a job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico who could \u201cimplant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births\u201d in nonhuman primates. On its website<\/a>, however, R3 Bio states that it does \u201cnot work with live primates.\u201d<\/p>\n Gilman gave the Skyline Drive interview from an island in Puerto Rico. R3 Bio wanted \u201cmonkey access,\u201d Gilman told Hattikudur, but didn\u2019t want to put monkeys in cages, a practice that the cofounder believes is unethical; after all, one goal of her company is to eliminate the need for animal testing.<\/p>\n So instead, they picked an island with a lot of monkeys.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a big animal rights advocate\u2026 I don\u2019t want to keep monkeys in cages,\u201d she told Hattikudur. \u201cAnd there\u2019s an option to have them run around the island with bracelets on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted monkey access and there\u2019s a lot of monkeys here,\u201d she added. \u201cAfter negotiating with local companies that are supervising them, we can walk up to them, get some of their skin cells.\u201d<\/p>\n During the conversation with Skyline Drive, Gilman also discussed one very big scientific problem the company is facing: that the less sentient an \u201corgan sack\u201d is, the less likely it is to function effectively.<\/p>\n \u201cSo do these organ sacks have the stem of a brain?\u201d Hattikudur asked.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the mice models can exist with a very limited set of nervous systems\u2026 but then there are other constraints on the ability of the organs to preserve themselves,\u201d Gilman responded. \u201cSo there\u2019s a way in which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less nervous system, and then when you scoot towards social acceptance, it looks better, but it\u2019s less scientifically feasible.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo we are still making observations about how that would work,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n How far along R3 Bio is right now is murky at best. Gilman cryptically noted that she lives in a \u201ccontextual world,\u201d and in that world, \u201cjust because we don\u2019t talk about a lot of things, that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n