After 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.
Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver. Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.
The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash. And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.” A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.  And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another. Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.” But even Schloendorn and his cofounder, Alice Gilman, can’t seem to keep away from the topic. Just last September, the pair presented at Abundance Longevity, a $70,000-per-ticket event in Boston organized by the anti-aging promoter Peter Diamandis. Although the presentation to about 40 people was not recorded and was meant to be confidential, a copy of the agenda for the event shows that Schloendorn was there to outline his “final bid to defeat aging” in a session called “Full Body Replacement.” According to a person who was there, both animal research and personal clones for spare organs were discussed. During the presentation, Gilman and Schloendorn even stood in front of an image of a cloning needle. Pressed on whether this was a talk about brainless clones, Gilman told us that while R3’s current business is replacing animal models, “the team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions.” MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains. 

A child with hydranencephaly, a rare condition in which most of the brain is missing. Could a human clone also be created without much of a brain as an ethical source of spare organs?DIMITRI AGAMANOLIS, M.D. VIA WIKIPEDIA A main purpose of the fundraising, investors say, was to support efforts to try these techniques in monkeys from a base in the Caribbean. That offered a path to a nearer-term business plan for more ethical medical experiments and toxicology testing—if the company could develop what it now calls monkey “organ sacks.” However, this work would clearly inform any possible human version.  Though he holds a PhD, Schloendorn is a biotech outsider who has published little and is best known for having once outfitted a DIY lab in his Bay Area garage. Still, his ties to the experimental fringe of longevity science have earned him a network in Silicon Valley and allies at a risk-taking US health innovation agency, ARPA-H. Together with his success at raising money from investors, this signals that the brainless-clone concept should be taken seriously by a wider community of scientists, doctors, and ethicists, some of whom expressed grave concerns.  “It sounds crazy, in my opinion,” said Jose Cibelli, a researcher at Michigan State University, after MIT Technology Review described R3’s brainless-clone idea to him. “How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an abnormal human?” Twenty-five years ago, Cibelli was among the first scientists to try to clone human embryos, but he was trying to obtain matched stem cells, not make a baby. “There is no limit to human imagination and ways to make money, but there have to be boundaries,” he says. “And this is the boundary of making a human being who is not a human being.”  “Feasibility research” Since Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, researchers have cloned dogs, cats, camels, horses, cattle, ferrets, and other species of mammal. Injecting a cell from an existing animal into an egg creates a carbon-copy embryo that can develop, although not always without problems. Defects, deformities, and stillbirths remain common.  Those grave risks are why we’ve never heard of a human clone, even though it’s theoretically possible to create one.  But brainless clones flip the script. That’s because the ultimate aim is to create not a healthy person but an unconscious body that would probably need life support, like a feeding tube, to stay alive. Because this body would share the DNA of the person being copied, its organs would be a near-perfect immunological match.  Backers of this broad concept argue that a nonsentient body would be ethically acceptable to harvest organs from. Some also believe that swapping in fresh, young body parts—known as “replacement”—is the likeliest path to life extension, since so far no drug can reverse aging. 
And then there’s the idea of a complete body transplant. “Certainly, for the cryonics patients, that sounds like something really promising,” says Anders Sandberg, a prominent Swedish transhumanist and expert in the ethics of future technologies. He notes that many people who opt to be stored in cryonic chambers after death choose the less expensive “head only” option, so “there might be a market for having an extra cloned body.” MIT Technology Review first approached Schloendorn two years ago after learning he’d led a confidential online seminar called the Body Replacement Mini Conference, in which he presented “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” 
According to a copy of the agenda, that 2023 session also included a presentation by a cloning expert, Young Gie Chung. And there was another from Jean Hébert, who was then a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is now a program manager at ARPA-H, where he oversees a project to use stem cells to restore damaged brain tissue. Hébert popularized the so-called replacement solution to avoiding death in a 2020 book called Replacing Aging.  In an interview prior to joining the government in 2024, Hébert described an informal but “very collaborative” relationship with Schloendorn. The overall idea was that to stop aging, one of them would determine how to repair a brain, while the other would figure out how to create a body without one. “It’s a perfect match, right? Body, brain,” Hébert told MIT Technology Review at the time.  Schloendorn, by working outside the mainstream, had the huge advantage of “not being bound by getting the next paper out, or the next grant,” Hébert said, adding, “It’s such a wonderful way of doing research. It’s just clean and pure.” R3 now appears on the ARPA-H website on a list of prospective partners for Hébert’s program. In a LinkedIn message exchanged with Schloendorn that same year, he described his work as “feasibility research in body replacement.” “We will try to do it in a way that produces defined societal benefits early on, and we need to be prepared to take no for an answer, if it turns out that this cannot be done safely,” Schloendorn wrote at the time. He declined an interview then, saying that before exiting stealth mode, he wants to be sure the benefits are “reasonably grounded in reality.” That could prove challenging. While body-part replacement sounds logical, like swapping the timing belt on an old car, in reality there’s scant evidence that receiving organs from a younger twin would make you live any longer. 
A complete body transplant, meanwhile, would probably be fatal, at least with current techniques. In the latest test of the concept, published last July, Russian surgeons removed a pig’s head and then sewed it back on. The animal did live—breathing weakly and lapping water from a syringe. But because its spinal cord had been cut, it was otherwise totally paralyzed. (As yet, there’s no proven method to rejoin a severed spinal cord.) In an act of mercy, the doctors ended the pig’s life after about 12 hours.  Even some of R3’s investors say the endeavor is a risky, low-odds project, on par with colonizing Mars. Boyang Wang, head of Immortal Dragons, has spoken at longevity conferences about body-swapping technology, referring to the chance that “when the time comes, you can transplant your brain into a new body.” Wang confirmed in a January Zoom call that he’d been referring to R3 and that he invested $500,000 in the company during a 2024 fundraising round. But since making his investment, Wang says, he’s become less bullish. He now views whole-body transplant as “very infeasible, not even very scientific” and “far away from hope for any realistic application.”  Still, he says, the investment in R3 fits with his philosophy of making unorthodox bets that could be breakthroughs against aging. “What can really move the needle?” he asks. “Because time is running out.”
Stealth mode Clonal bodies sit at the extreme frontier of an advancing cluster of technologies all aimed at growing spare parts. Researchers are exploring stem cells, synthetic embryos, and blob-like organoids, and some companies are cloning genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys and hearts have already been transplanted into a few patients. Each of these methods seeks to harness development—the process by which animal bodies naturally form in the womb—to grow fully functional organs.  There’s even a growing cadre of mainstream scientists who say nonsentient bodies could solve the organ shortage, if they could be grown through artificial means. Two Stanford University professors, calling these structures “bodyoids,” published an editorial in favor of manufacturing spare human bodies in MIT Technology Review last year. While that editorial left many details to the imagination, they called the idea “at least plausible—and possibly revolutionary.”  “There are a lot of variations on this where they’re trying to find a socially acceptable form,” says George Church, a Harvard University professor who advises startups in the field. But Church says gestating an entire body is probably taking things too far, especially since nearly all patients on transplant lists are waiting for just a single organ, like a heart or kidney.  “There’s almost no scenario where you need a whole body,” he says. “I just think even if it’s someday acceptable, it’s not a good place to start.” For the moment, Church says, brainless human bodies are “not very useful, in addition to being repulsive.” That’s arguably why body replacement technology still feels risky to talk about, even among life-extension enthusiasts who are otherwise ready to inject Chinese peptides or have their bodies cryogenically frozen. “I think it’s exciting or interesting from a scientific perspective, but I think the world is not fully ready for it yet,” says Emil Kendziorra, CEO of Tomorrow Bio, a company in Berlin that stores bodies at -196 °C in the hope they can be restored to life in the future.  “Everybody’s like, yeah, you know, cryopreservation makes total sense,” he says. “And then you talk about total body replacement. And then everybody’s like, Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Even so, “replacement” technology has found a fervent base of support among a group of self-described “hardcore” longevity adherents who follow a philosophy called Vitalism, which holds that society should redirect resources toward achieving unlimited lifespans. The growing influence of this movement, achieved through lobbying, investment, recruiting, and public messaging, was detailed earlier this year in MIT Technology Review. Last spring, during a meetup for this community, Kendziorra was among the attendees at an invite-only “Replacement Day” gathering that took place off the public schedule. It was where more radical ideas could be discussed freely, since to some in the Vitalist circle, replacing body parts has emerged as the most plausible, least expensive way to beat death.  At least that was the conclusion of a road map for anti-aging technology produced by one Vitalist group, the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which reckoned that a proof-of-concept human clone lacking a neocortex would cost $40 million to create—a tiny amount, relatively speaking.  Its report cited the existence of two stealth companies working on cloning whole nonsentient bodies, although it took care not to name them. If these companies’ activities become public, “there will be a huge backlash—people will hate it,” the entrepreneur Kris Borer said while presenting the road map at a French resort last August.  “There are a ton of dystopian movies and novels about this kind of stuff. That is why I didn’t talk about any of the companies working on it. They are trying to hide from public attention,” he said. “We have to have the angel investors and other people invest kind of in secret until things are ready.”  Borer did say what he sees as the best way to go public: first, to slowly ease body replacement into society’s awareness by disclosing more limited aims, which will be palatable. “We are not going to start with Let’s clone you and give you a body. We are going to start with Let’s solve the organ shortage,” he said. “Eventually people will warm up to it, and then we can go to the more hardcore stuff.” In an interview earlier this month, Borer declined to name the companies involved in his immortality road map, or to say if R3 is one of them. But we did identify one additional stealthy startup, this one focused on replacing a person’s internal organs, not the whole body. Called Kind Biotechnology, it is a New Hampshire–based company headed by the anti-aging researcher Justin Rebo, a sometime collaborator of Schloendorn’s. A patent image from Kind Biotechnology shows a mouse pup engineered to lack anatomical features (left) next to a normal animal. The company’s goal is to grow organ “sacks” with a “complete lack of ability to feel, think, or sense.” WO2025260099 VIA WIPO According to patent applications filed by the company, Rebo’s team is working to create animals with a “complete lack of ability to feel, think, or sense the environment.” Images included in the patents show mice the company produced that lack a complete brain, and others that don’t have faces or limbs. They did that by deleting genes in embryos using the gene-editing technology CRISPR with the goal of creating a “sack of organs that grows mostly on its own,” with only a minimal nervous system. A cartoon rendering submitted to the patent office shows what looks like a fleshy duffel bag connected to life support tubes.  In an email, Rebo said his company is working on an “ethical and scalable” way to create animal organs for experimental transplant to humans. He notes that “thousands die while waiting” for an organ.  Some of Kind’s patent applications do cover the possibility of producing these organ sacks from human cells. Rebo says that’s more of a speculative possibility. But he does see his work as part of the “replacement” approach to longevity. Firstly, that’s because a “scalable production of young, high-quality organs” would let surgeons try transplants in more types of patients, including many with heart disease in old age who aren’t candidates for a transplant now.  “With abundant high-quality organs, replacement could become a direct form of rejuvenation by replacement of failing parts,” he says.  And Rebo imagines that simultaneously replacing multiple internal organs (grown together in the sack) could have even broader rejuvenating effects. “Ultimately, replacing failing parts is a direct path to extending healthy human lifespan,” he says.  Church, who agreed earlier this year to advise Kind Bio, sees this work as part of an effort to “nudge” these technologies “toward something that is more useful and more acceptable from the get-go,” he says. “And then let’s see how society responds to that—rather than jumping to the most repulsive and most useless form, which some of them seem to be aiming for.”  “There’s one way to find out” People who know Schloendorn describe a dynamo-like presence who is “100% dedicated” to the goal of extreme life extension. In 2006, he penned a paper in a bioethics journal outlining why the “desire to live forever” is rational, and his doctoral research at the University of Arizona was sponsored by a longevity research organization called the SENS Foundation.   He’s also well connected. In an interview, Aubrey de Grey, the influential and controversial fundraiser and prognosticator who cofounded SENS, called Schloendorn “one of my protégés.” And around 2010, Peter Thiel reportedly invested $1.5 million in ImmunePath, a company started by Schloendorn to develop stem-cell treatments, though it soon failed. (A representative for Thiel did not respond to a request to confirm the figure.) By 2021, Schloendorn had moved on, founding R3 Biotechnologies. He began to circulate the body replacement idea and discuss a step-by-step scheme to get there: assess techniques in the lab first, then in monkeys, and maybe eventually in humans.  A 2023 “letter to stakeholders” signed by Schloendorn begins by saying that “body replacement cloning will require multicomponent genetic engineering on a scale that has never been attempted in primates.” Fortunately, it adds, molecular techniques for “brain knockout” are well known in mice and should also be expected to function in “birthing whole primates,” a class that includes both monkeys and humans.  Would it work? “There’s one way to find out,” the letter says.  Wang, the investor at Immortal Dragons, says he put money into R3 after it showed him it is possible to create mice without complete brains. “There were imperfections, but the resulting mice survived, grew up, and to me, that is a pretty strong experiment,” he says; it was evidence enough for him to fund R3’s attempt to “replicate the result in primates.”  (In its emailed statement, R3 said the company and its founders “never produced any degree of brain alterations in any species, did not attempt to do so, did not hire another party to do so, and have no specific plans to do so in the future.” It added: “We do not work with live non-human primates.”)  The bigger technical obstacle, though, remains the cloning. Out of 100 attempts to clone an animal, only a few typically succeed. That fact alone makes cloning a human—or a monkey—almost infeasible. But R3 does seem to have made an effort to tackle the efficiency problem. In one document reviewed by MIT Technology Review, it claims to have implemented improvements to the basic procedure in rodents, referencing a protein, called a histone demethylase, that helps erase a cell’s genetic memory. Adding it can greatly increase the chance that the cell will form a cloned embryo after being injected into an egg in the lab. Those molecules were used in the first successful cloning of a monkey, which occurred in 2018 in China. But it still wasn’t easy—in fact, it was a huge and costly effort to handle a crowd of monkeys in estrus and perform IVF on them. According to Michigan State’s Cibelli, monkey cloning remains nearly impossible, at least on US territory, just because it’s “unaffordable.” Nevertheless, success in monkeys did help prove, at least biologically, that human reproductive cloning could be possible.  The company may also have tried to tackle a second long-standing obstacle to cloning: defects in how the placenta works. Because of such problems, some cloned animals die quickly after birth. The R3 document refers to a “birthing fix” it developed to further improve the cloning success rate. While MIT Technology Review didn’t learn what R3’s process entails, we found a reference to it on the LinkedIn page of Maitriyee Mahanta, a scientist who cosigned the 2023 letter to R3 stakeholders and is a former research assistant to Hébert. (We were unable to reach Mahanta for comment.) Her page described her current role as “molecular lead” studying cloning, “birth rate fixing,” and cortical development using cells from nonhuman primates. Her job affiliation is given as the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, a nonprofit where de Grey is the president and chief science officer. But de Grey says his foundation only arranged a work visa for Mahanta as part of a partnership “with the company she actually spends her time at.” Like several other people interviewed for this article, de Grey made a resourceful effort to avoid directly confirming the existence of R3 when we spoke, while at the same time freely discussing theoretical aspects of body cloning technology. For instance, he talked about ways to shorten the wait for your double to grow up to a size suitable for organ harvesting; a further genetic mutation could be added to cause “central precocious puberty” in the clone, he said. This condition causes a growth spurt, even pubic hair, in a toddler.  Cloning dictators Who would clone a body and pay to keep it alive for years, until it’s needed? The first customers for this costly technology (if it ever proves feasible) would likely be the ultra-rich or the ultra-powerful.  Indeed, somehow the world’s top dictators seem to have gotten the memo about replacement parts. In September, a hot mic picked up a conversation between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping as they walked through Beijing with North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un; in the exchange, the Russian speculated on life extension.   “Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality,” Putin said through an interpreter. “Some predict that in this century, humans will live to 150 years old,” Xi responded agreeably. How the leaders learned of these possibilities is unknown. But scenarios involving dictators are a constant topic among body replacement enthusiasts.  “There are companies working on this. They are in stealth—we can’t reveal too much about them—but the general concept on this is if you didn’t have any ethical qualms, you could do most of it today,” Will Harborne, the chief investment officer of LongGame Advisors, said last year, during an interview with the podcaster Julian Issa. “If you were the dictator of some country and wanted a clone of yourself, you can already go grow one. You can create a cloned embryo of yourself, you can get a surrogate to carry it to term, and you can grow [a] body until age 18 with a brain, and eventually, if you were a dictator, you could kill them and try to transplant your head on their body.” “And now no one is suggesting you do that—it’s very unethical—but most of the technology is there,” he said. He noted that the reason for removing the cortex of a clone created for such a purpose is that “we don’t want to kill other people to live forever.”  Harborne subsequently confirmed to MIT Technology Review that the fund invested $1 million in R3 about a year and a half ago. In order to make the body replacement process ethical, the clone’s brain needs to be stunted so it lacks consciousness. That is where the interest in birth defects comes in. Remarkable medical scans of kids with a rare condition, hydranencephaly, show a total absence of the cerebral hemispheres. Yet if they are cared for, they may be able to live into their 20s, even though they cannot speak or engage in purposeful movement.  The technical question, then, is how to intentionally produce such a condition in a clone. Sandberg, the futurist, says he’s visited R3’s lab, talked to Gilman, and sat through a presentation about how genetic engineering can be used to shape brain growth. Previous work has shown that by adding a toxic gene, it is possible to kill specific cell types in a growing embryo but spare others, leading to a mouse without a neocortex. While Sandberg isn’t an expert in biotechnology, he says R3’s theory looked sensible to him. “I think it’s possible to actually prevent the development of the brain well enough that you can say ‘Yeah, there is almost certainly no consciousness here,’” Sandberg says. “Hence, there can’t be any suffering, or any individual, in a practical sense.” “I think the overall aim—actually, it looks ethically pretty good,” he says.  Monkeys were successfully cloned in China for the first time in 2018. Although it was was a costly and difficult undertaking, the feat suggested human cloning is biologically possible. QIANG SUN AND MU-MING POO/CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES VIA AP Yet it could be difficult to really determine where consciousness starts and ends. Under current medical standards, taking the organs of people with hydranencephaly isn’t allowed because they don’t meet the standard of brain death: They have a functioning brain stem. An even more serious problem is evidence that the brain stem alone produces a basic form of consciousness. If that is so, says Bjorn Merker, a neuroscientist who surveyed caretakers of more than a hundred children with hydranencephaly, a plan “to harvest organs from organisms modeled on this condition would be unethical.” Of course, the most extreme version of the replacement dream isn’t just to take organs. It’s to take over the body entirely. Sergio Canavero, a controversial Italian surgeon who has proposed head and brain transplants, says he was approached for advice by Schloendorn and others a few years ago. “They told me they were looking at a head transplant on a two- or three-year-old,” he says. “I stopped short. How could you even conceive of that? The biomechanical compatibility is not there. You have to wait until at least 14. And I would say 16. It was very clear to me these guys are not surgeons—they are biologists.”  Canavero says he’s not opposed to cloning bodies for transplant—he thinks it could work. “But if you want to use a clone,” he says, “it must be a nonsentient clone. Otherwise it’s murder, a homicide.”     MIT Technology Review has not found any evidence that R3 has yet created an “organ sack,” much less a brainless human clone. And there are many reasons to believe their hypothetical future of “full body replacement” will never come to pass—that it is just a live-forever fantasy. “There are so many barriers,” says Cibelli. It’s a long list: Human cloning is illegal in many countries, it’s unsafe, and few competent experts would want, or dare, to participate. And then there’s the inconvenient fact that for now, there’s no way to grow a brainless clone to birth, except in a woman’s body. Think about it, Cibelli says: “You’d have to convince a woman to carry a fetus that is going to be abnormal.” Sandberg agrees that is where things could start to get tricky. “The problem here, of course,” he says, “is that the yuck factor is magnificent.”

Today in Bangkok, we’re bringing together 50 disaster management leaders from across Southeast and South Asia for our inaugural AI Jam for Disaster Management professionals, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (APDC), and DataKind. The question guiding this initiative is simple, but urgent: How can AI help governments and nonprofits respond faster and more effectively when it matters most? Participants come from 13 countries—Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor Leste, Vietnam—representing government agencies, multilateral organizations and non-profits. Many are directly involved in disaster response on the ground, coordinating information, supporting affected communities, and making time-critical decisions.Responding to growing disaster risks in Asia Disaster response teams often operate in resource-constrained environments, working with fragmented data, manual processes and limited infrastructure. These constraints can slow coordination and delay critical decisions, especially in fast-moving situations where timely information is essential. Many teams are now exploring how AI can better support these workflows.That urgency is only growing. In the second half of last year, a series of typhoons and severe storms across South and Southeast Asia disrupted communities and stretched disaster response systems to their limits. Asia remains the world’s most disaster-prone region, accounting for an estimated 75% of people affected by disasters globally. The World Bank estimates disasters have cost ASEAN countries more than $11 billion in previous years. In these moments, we’re also seeing a shift in how people seek support. During Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka, internal data showed a 17× increase in cyclone-related messages on ChatGPT, highlighting how AI is already being used to access information and guidance during crises. During Cyclone Senyar in November 2025, Thailand saw similar AI usage surges, with message volume jumping 3.2× compared to the months prior. This points to a clear opportunity to integrate AI more directly into how response teams gather information, make decisions, and communicate during emergencies.Building practical AI solutionsThis is what our Jam focused on. In today’s session, participants worked side by side with OpenAI mentors to find practical ways AI can support their daily work.Rather than starting from scratch, they explored building custom GPTs and reusable workflows they can apply in different situations—from situation reporting to needs assessment and public communication. The sessions also emphasized the importance of responsible use and building institutional trust in adopting AI technologies.Professor Dr Yodchanan Wongsawat, a Member of the House of Representatives in Thailand, opened the session by highlighting the importance of public-private collaboration in strengthening disaster preparedness and response across the region.“In the future, the most powerful AI won’t just be the smartest, it will be the most accessible. Technology only matters if it reaches the people who need it most. The capabilities to solve real-world challenges already exist today, and collaborations like this between OpenAI, ADPC, and the Gates Foundation show how bringing together expertise across sectors can turn that potential into scalable, real-world solutions.” —Professor Dr Yodchanan Wongsawat, member of the house of representatives in Thailand“This session is aimed at closing the gap between what AI can do and how it’s actually used in the field. Across Asia, there’s strong momentum and interest in AI, but the real opportunity is turning that into practical capability. By working directly with disaster-response professionals, we can ensure these tools are useful, accessible, and grounded in real-world needs.”—Sandy Kunvatanagarn, Head of Public Policy at OpenAI“Equipping the people closest to communities with the knowledge and skills to harness the power of digital tools and emerging technologies like AI is one of the most powerful investments we can make in disaster preparedness and response. We’re proud to bring together partners across the region and to see it translate into tools that can be put to work right away.”—Dr. Valerie Nkamgang Bemo, Deputy Director, Emergency Response at the Gates Foundation“AI is opening new possibilities for how we understand and respond to disasters. ADPC integrates AI into geospatial tools and risk analytics to transform satellite and earth observation data into actionable insights. AI Skills Jam could improve AI literacy and empower people to find solutions to disaster challenges. We can combine AI tools with regional expertise and partnerships to strengthen early warning systems, improve risk mapping, and support faster, more informed decision-making for communities and governments across the region.”—Mr. Aslam Perwaiz, ADPC Executive DirectorTogether with our partners, we’re exploring a second phase in the coming months, focused on pilot deployments and deeper technical collaboration with participating organizations across the region. We look forward to continuing this work, building practical tools that help communities prepare for and respond to disasters more effectively. 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY “Think of this as a human body,” says Javier González. In front of me is essentially a metal box on wheels. Standing at around a meter in height, it reminds me of a stainless-steel counter in a restaurant kitchen. It is covered in flexible plastic tubing—which act as veins and arteries—connecting a series of transparent containers, the organs of this machine. What makes it extra special is the role of the cream-colored tub that sits on its surface. Ten months ago, González, a biomedical scientist who developed the device with his colleagues at the Carlos Simon Foundation, carefully placed a freshly donated human uterus in the tub. The team connected it to the device’s tubes and pumped in modified human blood. The device kept the uterus alive for a day—a new feat that could represent the first step to the long-term maintenance of uteruses outside the human body. The work has not yet been published. 
The team members want to keep donated human uteruses alive long enough to see a full menstrual cycle. They hope this will help them study diseases of the uterus and learn more about how embryos burrow their way into the organ’s lining at the start of a pregnancy. They also hope that future iterations of their device might one day sustain the full gestation of a human fetus. The machine is technically called PUPER, which stands for “preservation of the uterus in perfusion.” But González’s colleague Xavier Santamaria says the team has adopted a nickname for it: “We call it ‘Mother.’”
The organ in the machine González and Santamaria, medical vice president of the Carlos Simon Foundation, demonstrated how the device might work when I visited the foundation in Valencia, Spain, earlier this month (although it held no organs on that day).  Both are interested in learning more about implantation, the moment at which an embryo attaches itself to the lining of a uterus—essentially, the very first moment of pregnancy. The foundation’s founder and director, Carlos Simon, believes it’s a sticking point in IVF: Scientists have made many improvements to the technology over the years, but the failure of embryos to implant underlies plenty of unsuccessful IVF cycles, he says. Being able to carefully study how the process works in a real, living organ might give the team a better idea of how to prevent those failures. JESS HAMZELOU JAVIER GONZALES/CARLOS SIMON FOUNDATION Javier González demonstrates the perfusion machine. A previous iteration of the device kept a sheep’s uterus (right) alive for a day. The team took inspiration from advances in technologies designed to maintain donated organs for transplantation. In recent years, researchers around the world have created devices that deliver nutrients and filter waste so that organs can survive longer after being removed from donors’ bodies. The main goal here is to buy time. A human organ might last only a matter of hours outside the body, so a transplant may require frantic preparation for the recipient, sometimes in the middle of the night. With a little more time, doctors could find better donor-patient matches and potentially test the quality of donated organs. This approach is called normothermic or machine perfusion, and it is already being used clinically for some liver, kidney, and heart transplants. The team at the Carlos Simon Foundation built a similar machine for uteruses. A blood bag hangs on one side. From there, blood is ferried via plastic tubing to a pump, which functions as the heart. The pump shunts the blood through an oxygenator, which adds oxygen and removes carbon dioxide as the lungs would in a human body. The blood is warmed and passed through sensors that monitor the levels of glucose and oxygen, along with other factors. It passes through a “kidney” to remove waste. And finally the blood reaches the uterus, hooked up to its own plastic “arteries” and “veins.” The organ itself sits at a tilt, just as in the body, and is kept in a humid environment to stay moist.

Mother’s first uterus The team first began testing an early prototype of the device with sheep uteruses around four years ago. That meant carting the machine to an animal research center in Zaragoza, around 200 miles away. Over the course of the preliminary study, veterinary surgeons removed the uteruses of six sheep and hooked them up to the machine. They kept each uterus alive for a day, using blood from the same animals. After the sheep experiments, the researchers carted their machine back to Valencia and modified it to achieve its current incarnation, “Mother.” They started working with a local hospital that performed hysterectomies. And in May last year, they were offered their first human uterus. The team needed to be quick. “You need to put [the uterus in the machine] within a couple of hours, maximum, of the extraction,” says Santamaria. He and his colleagues also needed to connect the uterus’s blood vessels to the tubing delicately, taking care to avoid any blockages (clotting is a major challenge in organ perfusion). The organ was hooked up to human blood obtained from a blood bank. It seemed to work—at least temporarily. “We kept it alive for one day,” says Santamaria. “As a proof of concept, it is impressive,” says Keren Ladin, a bioethicist who has focused on organ transplantation and perfusion at Tufts University. “These are early days.” It might not sound like much, but 24 hours is a long time for an organ to be out of the body. Maintaining a donated uterus for that long could expand the options for uterus transplant, a fairly new procedure offered to some people who want to be pregnant but don’t have a functional uterus, says Gerald Brandacher, professor of experimental and translational transplant surgery at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria. “It is better than what we currently have, because we have only a couple of hours,” he says. So far, most uterus transplants have been planned operations involving organs from living donors. A technology like this could allow for the use of more organs from deceased donors, he says. That work is “not in the immediate pipeline” for the team in Spain, says Santamaria. “We are working on other problems.”
Pregnancy in the lab? Santamaria, González, and their colleagues are more interested in using sustained human uteruses for research.  They’ve mounted a camera to a wall in the corner of the room, pointed at their machine. It allows the team to monitor “Mother” remotely, and to check if any valves disconnect. (That happened once before—a spike in pressure caused the blood bag to come loose, spilling a liter of blood on the floor, Santamaria says.)
They’d like to be able to keep their uteruses alive for around 28 days to study the menstrual cycle and disorders that affect the uterus, like endometriosis and fibroids. It won’t be easy to maintain a uterus for that long, cautions Brandacher. As far as he knows, no one has been able to maintain a liver for more than seven days. “No studies out there … have shown 30-day survival in a machine perfusion circuit,” he says. But it’s worth the effort. The team’s main interest is learning more about how embryos implant in the uterine lining at the start of a pregnancy. They hope to be able to test the process in their outside-the-body uteruses. They won’t be allowed to use human embryos for this, says González—that would cross an ethical boundary. Instead, they plan to use embryo-like structures made from stem cells. The structures closely resemble human embryos but are created in a lab without sperm or eggs. Simon himself has grander ambitions. He sees a future in which a machine like “Mother” will be able to fully gestate a human, all the way from embryo to newborn. It could offer a new path to parenthood for people who don’t have a uterus, for example, or who are not able to get pregnant for other reasons. He appreciates that it sounds futuristic, to say the least. “I don’t know if we will end up having pregnancies inside of the uterus outside of the body, but at least we are ready to understand all the steps to do that,” he says. “You have to start somewhere.”

From industrial legacy to digital leverageSTADLER is a family-owned company with more than 230 years of history, specializing in automated waste sorting plants for the global recycling industry. With over 650 employees operating worldwide, the company plays a critical role in helping countries advance their sustainability and circular economy goals.Under the leadership of Co-CEO Julia Stadler, the company has taken a forward-looking approach to modernization—embedding AI into everyday work as a core productivity layer. Since 2023, STADLER has pursued a clear principle: every employee working on a computer should use AI to improve speed, quality, and collaboration.“In many teams, people were spending too much time turning raw knowledge into usable output—summarizing, translating, drafting. We knew there had to be a better way.”—Julia Stadler, Co-CEOTurning AI into a company-wide productivity layerSTADLER adopted OpenAI’s ChatGPT to remove this friction, selecting it for its output quality, speed, and immediate usability.After evaluating alternatives, ChatGPT consistently delivered more structured, context-aware, and practically useful results. Just as importantly, it enabled immediate value—teams could start generating usable outputs from day one.The rollout combined bottom-up experimentation with top-down support. Employees were encouraged to explore use cases, while leadership provided company-wide access, training, and clear guardrails.Today, ChatGPT is embedded across nearly every function:Engineering & data teams use it for analysis, code support, and performance evaluationProject and management teams use custom GPTs to structure processes and improve documentationMarketing teams translate complex technical knowledge into clear global communicationAll teams use it for drafting, summarizing, research, and structured thinkingSTADLER has created more than 125 custom GPTs, with particularly strong adoption in translation and email workflows.”We moved from needing half a day to get a decent first version to having a solid draft in 20 minutes—and then improving it,” says Julia Stadler.“ChatGPT isn’t just a writing tool—it’s a thinking partner that helps structure ideas and accelerate how we work.”—Dr. Bastian Küppers, Head of Process EngineeringFrom blank page to business impactThe impact has been immediate and measurable. Tasks that once took hours—drafting documents, summarizing information, preparing communication—are now completed in minutes.Instead of starting from scratch, employees begin with structured outputs and focus on refinement, decision-making, and higher-value work.Key outcomes include:30-40% time savings on common knowledge tasks such as summarizing and documentation2.5x faster time to first draft on average, with up to 6x acceleration in high-volume use cases like social media >85% daily active usage, with employees engaging multiple times per dayFaster decision-making, driven by quicker access to structured insightsHigher-quality outputs, with improved clarity, consistency, and structureReduced friction, making complex tasks easier to start and complete“The most meaningful signal is how often people come back to it. When employees use it multiple times a day without being asked, you know it’s delivering real value.”—Raphael Fricker, Head of ITBeyond efficiency gains, STADLER has seen a broader shift in how teams work. Employees increasingly use ChatGPT to clarify thinking, explore ideas, and structure complex problems. What started as a productivity tool became a cognitive one.What comes next: from assistant to execution layerSTADLER now sees AI evolving beyond assistance into execution.The next phase is integrating AI agents into core workflows—systems that can gather information, generate outputs, validate against standards, and route work for approval.For a company with more than two centuries of history, the transformation is already clear. By embedding AI into everyday work, STADLER is operating with greater speed, agility, and intelligence—unlocking a new level of productivity across its global organization.Join the new era of workMore than 1 million businesses around the world are achieving meaningful results with OpenAI.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How a couple of ski bums built the internet’s best weather app  The best snow-forecasting app for skiers isn’t a federally-funded service or a big-name brand. It’s OpenSnow, a startup that uses government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to deliver the best predictions out there.  The app has proved especially vital this winter, one of the weirdest on record. It’s even made microcelebrities of its forecasters, who sift through reams of data to write “Daily Snow” reports for locations around the world.   We headed to the Tahoe mountains to hear how two broke ski bums became modern-day snow gods. Read the full story. 
—Rachel Levin  Here’s why some people choose cryonics to store their bodies and brains after death  —Jessica Hamzelou 
This week I reported on unusual research focused on the frozen brain of L. Stephen Coles.  Coles, a researcher who studied aging, was interested in cryonics—the long-term storage of human bodies and brains in the hope that they might one day be brought back to life. It’s a hope shared by many.  Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to people who run cryonics facilities, study cryopreservation, or just want to be cryogenically stored. All of them acknowledge that there’s a vanishingly small chance of being brought back to life. So why do they do it?  Read the full story to find out.  This article is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.  What’s next for space exploration?   Whether it’s the race to find life on Mars, the campaign to outsmart killer asteroids, or the quest to make the moon a permanent home to astronauts, scientists’ efforts in space can tell us more about where humanity is headed. To learn more about the progress and possibilities ahead, our features editor Amanda Silverman sat down with Robin George Andrews, an award-winning science journalist and author, on Wednesday. If you missed their conversation, fear not—you can catch up and watch the video here. You’ll need to be a subscriber to access it, but the good news is subscriptions are discounted right now. Bag yours if you haven’t already!  The must-reads 

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.  1 The Pentagon’s ban on Anthropic has been halted A judge has paused its designation as a supply chain risk. (CBS News)  + She said the government was trying to “chill public debate.” (BBC) + Sam Altman claimed he tried to “save” Anthropic in the clash. (Axios)  2 Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against an ad boycott on X A judge admonished the “fishing expedition.” (Ars Technica) + Ad revenue fell by more than half as advertisers fled X after Musk took over. (BBC)  3 OpenAI has put plans for an erotic chatbot on hold “indefinitely” Staff and investors had raised concerns. (The Information $) + The company is making a sharp strategic pivot. (FT $) + AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction. (MIT Technology Review)  4 A helium shortage has started impacting tech supply chains The problem stems from the Middle East conflict. (Reuters) + The era of cheap helium is over. (MIT Technology Review)  5 Trump’s new science advisers: 12 tech chiefs and just one academic They include at least nine billionaires. (Nature) + David Sacks is stepping down as Trump’s crypto and AI czar. (TechCrunch)  6 Anthropic is mulling an IPO as soon as October It’s racing OpenAI to hold an initial public offering. (Bloomberg $)  7 Wikipedia has banned all AI-generated content  LLM-related issues had overwhelmed editors. (404 Media) + Here’s what we’re getting wrong about AI’s truth crisis. (MIT Technology Review) 
8 OpenAI’s ad pilot generated $100 million in under 2 months More than 600 advertisers are working on the trial. (CNBC) + Ads will arrive on ChatGPT free ‌and Go in the coming weeks. (Reuters)   9 An Irish village is giving kids a phone-free upbringing The ban works because almost everyone’s bought in. (NYT $)  10 Chatting with sycophantic AI makes you less kind New research found it encourages “uncouth behavior.” (Nature) 
Quote of the day  “I don’t know if it’s ‘murder,’ but it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic.”  —Judge Rita Lin rules against the Pentagon’s ban on Anthropic, The Verge reports.  One More Thing  AURELIA INSTITUTE This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit   More and more people are traveling beyond Earth, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 of them at a time.   Aurelia Institute, an architecture R&D lab based in Cambridge, MA, is building a solution: a habitat that launches in compact stacks of flat tiles—and self-assembles in orbit.   The concept may sound far-fetched, but it’s already won support from NASA. Read the full story. 
—Sarah Ward  We can still have nice things  A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)  + These optical illusions are absolute brain-melters. + The web design museum lovingly visualizes the evolution of the internet. + Zara Picken’s modernist illustrations are a new window into the mid-20th century. + Explore our planet’s connections through the digital Knowledge Garden. 

This week I reported on some rather unusual research that focuses on the brain of L. Stephen Coles. Coles was a gerontologist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2014. He had spent the latter part of his career specializing in human longevity. And before he died, he decided to have his brain preserved by a cryonics facility. Today, it’s being stored at −146 °C at a center in Arizona, where it sits covered in a thin layer of frost. Coles also tasked his longtime friend Greg Fahy with studying pieces of his brain to see how they had fared (partly because he was worried his brain might crack). Fahy, a renowned cryobiologist, has found that the brain is “astonishingly well preserved.” But that doesn’t mean Coles could be reanimated. Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to people who run cryonics facilities, study cryopreservation, or just want to be cryogenically stored. All those I’ve spoken to acknowledge that the chance they’ll one day be brought back to life is vanishingly small. So why do they do it?
The first person to be cryonically preserved was James Hiram Bedford, a retired psychology professor who died of kidney cancer in 1967. Affiliates of the Cryonics Society of California, an organization headed by a charming TV repairman with no scientific or medical training, perfused his body with cryoproctective chemicals to protect against harmful ice formation and “quick-froze” him. Today, Bedford’s body is still in storage at Alcor, a cryonics facility based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s one of a handful of organizations that offer to collect, preserve, and store a person’s whole body or just their brain—pretty much indefinitely. It’s where Coles’s brain is stored.
Both men died from cancer. Medicine could not cure them. But in the future, who knows? One of the premises of cryonics is that modern medicine will continue to advance over time. Cancer death rates have declined significantly in the US since the early 1990s. I don’t know what exactly drove Coles and Bedford to their decisions, but they might have hoped to be reanimated at some point in the future when their cancers became curable. Others simply don’t want to die, period. Last year, I attended Vitalist Bay, a gathering for people who believe that life is good and that death is “humanity’s core problem.” Emil Kendziorra, CEO of the cryonics organization Tomorrow.Bio, spoke at the event, and a healthy interest in cryonics was obvious among the attendees. Many of them believe that science will find a way to “obviate” aging. And some were keen on the idea of being preserved until that happens. Think of it as a way to cheat not only death but aging itself. This sentiment might have support beyond the realms of Vitalist Bay, according to research by Kendziorra and his colleagues. In 2021, they surveyed 1,478 US-based internet users who were recruited via Craigslist. They found that men were more aware of cryonics than women, and more optimistic about its outcomes. Just over a third of the men who completed the survey expressed interest “a desire to live indefinitely.” Still, cryonics is a niche field. Worldwide, only around 5,000 or 6,000 people have signed up for cryopreservation when they die, Kendziorra told me when we chatted at Vitalist Bay. He also told me that his company gets between 20 and 50 new signups every month. And there are plenty of reasons why people don’t do it. A small fraction of the people who responded to Kendziorra’s survey said that they thought the idea of cryonics was dystopian, and some even said it should be illegal. Then there’s the cost. Alcor charges $80,000 to store a person’s brain, and around $220,000 to store a whole body. Tomorrow.Bio’s charges are slightly higher. Many people, including Kendziorra himself, opt to cover this cost via a life insurance policy. Perhaps the main reason people don’t opt for cryonic preservation is that we don’t have any way to bring people back. Bedford has been in storage for more than 50 years, Coles for more than a decade. All the scientists I’ve spoken to say the likelihood of reanimating remains like theirs is vanishingly small.

The fact that the possibility—however tiny—is above zero is enough for some, including Nick Llewellyn, the director of research and development at Alcor. As a scientist, he says, he acknowledges that the chances reanimation will actually work are “pretty low.” Still, he’s interested in seeing what the future will look like, so he has signed himself up for the cryonic preservation of his brain. But Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells me that she wouldn’t sign up for cryonic preservation even if it worked. “It turns into a philosophical question,” she says. “Do I want to be revived hundreds of years later when my family is gone and life is different?” she asks. “There are so many complicated philosophical, societal, [and] legal complications that need to be thought through.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.