Bryan Johnson has 'cloned' himself as a baby to grow spare organs
Bryan Johnson says there's a newborn version of him sitting in a petri dish right now. The biohacker and tech entrepreneur announced it on X this week. "I just cloned myself...as a newborn," he wrote. He calls it baby-Bryan.
What he actually did, according to his own account, is have blood drawn and cells extracted, then treated with what are known as Yamanaka factors to reset their epigenetic age. The cells get pushed back into an embryonic-like state.
Scientists call this induced pluripotent stem cell technology, or iPSC. It's not new, Shinya Yamanaka pioneered it in the 2000s and won a Nobel Prize for it in 2012.
Johnson, 48, has spent years running extreme anti-aging experiments on himself under a project he calls Blueprint.
He says the lab-grown cells could eventually let him test new treatments, grow replacement organs, or supply young cells for transfusions. He described it as becoming his "own blood boy."
Medical experts aren't convinced this amounts to cloning in any meaningful sense.
Dr. Marc Siegel, a medical analyst, pointed out that true human cloning remains out of reach because of how complicated epigenetics turns out to be in practice, pointing to the well-documented problems researchers ran into with Dolly the sheep and with cloning attempts in primates.
