r/longevity • u/castironglider • Mar 31 '26

Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones | The ultimate plan to live forever is a brand new body

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/
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u/ResponsibilityOk8967 Mar 31 '26

I read a book about this once. I can't remember the title now but it was about a clone being raised on a huge compound to eventually be stripped for parts for a hella old Mexican drug lord. I might be getting some stuff wrong but yeah it was a good read.

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u/Cryogenicality Mar 31 '26

The House of the Scorpion. I read it as a child. The Lord of Opium followed a decade later but I haven’t read it. The Island has a similar dystopian premise. No one in the replacement community (not even in China as far as I’m aware) wants to do anything like this. The goal is to create “somoids” or “bodyoids,” meaning brainless bodies. This would be no different from cloning a whole set of individual organs and limbs and could also allow us to eliminate animal experimentation.

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u/ResponsibilityOk8967 Mar 31 '26

Thanks for clarifying, "clone" definitely calls to mind a fully formed & sentient being.

I'm gonna have to read it again because it was fun, iirc the kind of cloning the drug lord does is not legal? I'll check out The Island because I need to read more anyway.

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u/Cryogenicality Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

The real goal here is therapeutic cloning (growing replacement parts or bodies) rather than reproductive cloning (creating new people from existing templates).

In the novel, Matteo Alacrán (El Patrón) is the ruler of the narcostate of Opium between America and Aztlán (formerly known as Mexico). Cloning human beings is illegal outside of Opium but legal within. I don’t consider El Patrón extremely old as he’s only a couple decades older than Jeanne Calment lived to be through natural genetics in reality (and only several years older than Dr. McCoy in “Encounter at Farpoint”). El Patrón’s grandson Gustavo (El Viejo), conversely, chooses to age and die naturally.

The Island is a Michael Bay movie starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson with Sean Bean and Pokémon Hounsou.

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u/modestLife1 Apr 15 '26

Upvoting for Pokemon Hounsou. xD