I don’t remember much about Peppy, my first and only pet cat. I can conjure the sensation of stroking her while she purred, recall how she used to get stuck in trees (just like in cartoons!), and chuckle about the time she pooed in my baby sister’s cot. That’s about it.

What I do vividly remember, though, is the day she went missing. I was 10 years old, and I searched everywhere for her, scouting nearby fields and woods until sunset. I made posters. We never found her. I was devastated.

There was no way to get more time with Peppy, but almost 30 years later, pet owners are being offered an ever-expanding set of options to potentially prolong their years with their furry companions. The possibilities include drugs, cloning, and even cryonics. But is that a good thing?

There’s certainly a market for pet preservation. And a growing number of biotech companies have their sights set on pet longevity. Loyal, a company that is currently working on three potential longevity drugs for dogs, is trialing one designed to improve metabolic health in around 1,300 pet dogs across the US. Others are testing dog drugs that aim to combat both age-related diseases, including conditions like obesity and osteoarthritis, and aging itself. There’s even a company focused on longevity medicines for domesticated cats.

I don’t know how or when Peppy died. But if there had been a drug that might have protected her from diabetes or arthritis, there’s no doubt I would have tried to get my hands on it.

That’s about where my enthusiasm for pet life extension ends, though.

I’m far less interested in cloning, a relatively new option for people mourning a pet and seeking a replacement. In most cases, this technology involves taking the DNA of a pet, putting it into an egg cell from another animal of the same species, and growing the resulting embryo in a surrogate animal. It worked for Dolly the sheep, who was born the year before Peppy went missing. It has since worked for other mammals, including cattle, horses, and ferrets—and cats and dogs. In the US, a company called Viagen Pets offers to clone cats and dogs for $50,000 a go. This doesn’t result in an exact replica of the animal but a genetic twin.

Still, there are lots of reasons why a person might want to clone a pet. On its website, Viagen explicitly offers customers “a way to hold on.” Lori Kogan, a professor of clinical sciences at Colorado State University who has studied human-animal relationships for decades, doesn’t have a problem with the practice. She points out that while we have well-established rituals for coping with the loss of a person—such as funeral services, time off work, and memorial gifts—we don’t really have the same for pets. As a result, pet owners can experience what is sometimes called “disenfranchised grief,” she says. Having their feelings go unrecognized can feel isolating. If cloning a pet brings a person peace, she says, “who are we to judge?”

Fair enough. But I can’t help thinking that pet loss in childhood might be different. It’s often the first time a child confronts death. Losing Peppy was a formative experience, and distressing though it was, I like to think it helped prepare me for losses I experienced in adulthood. I wouldn’t want my own children to think that death is not final, and that individuals can be replicated or replaced.

Or, for that matter, revived, which is the promise behind pet cryonics. For a fee, a handful of companies offer to cool dead pets to extremely low temperatures and store them for long periods of time—even indefinitely. The idea is that at some point in the future, we’ll have invented incredible technologies that will not only bring your pet back to life but also cure whatever it died of. Alcor, a cryonics facility in Arizona, is currently storing the remains of hundreds of pets as well as people. It even recently announced it had cooled a small marsupial—its first pet sugar glider.

With cryonics, the chances of being reunited with your pet are bordering on zero. Even those who work in the field acknowledge that the stored people and animals are unlikely to be reanimated. As things stand, there is no way to really and truly bring any animal “back.”

I miss Peppy. But given the chance, would I stick her in a vat of liquid nitrogen? Or get another cat to give birth to a genetically identical animal? No, I would not.

RIP to the one and only Peppy.

This week my colleague Antonio Regalado had an interesting update on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. According to research presented at an aging meeting in Boston, these drugs seem to affect at least some measures of biological age.

Overweight and diabetic people who take GLP-1s have a biological age around two to three years younger than similar individuals who take a placebo, according to findings from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, two pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs.

I’ve heard people in the aging field describe GLP-1s as longevity drugs for a while now (even if they only benefit people who are overweight or diabetic in the first place). This latest announcement comes after we’ve seen a raft of other benefits associated with taking these drugs. But there are also some weird side effects.

So far, GLP-1 agonist drugs—which repress hunger—have been approved for treating diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and obesity, and they can also be prescribed for some people who are overweight or at risk of certain cardiovascular diseases. But there is research to suggest they might also help people with substance-use disorders, and they’ve been investigated for potential benefits in neurodegenerative disease and cancer.

And a lot of people are taking them. According to a recent Gallup poll, 11% of Americans are taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss, up from 3% in 2024. And 15% of Americans say they’ve used one for weight loss at some point.

They can be incredibly effective. But, like any drug, they can come with side effects. And we’re still figuring out exactly what those might be, and how widespread they are.

The most common side effects are gastrointestinal—nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and constipation. The drugs have also been linked to pancreatitis and gallstone disease. 

Some claim that, in rare cases, the drugs might cause damage to nerves behind the eye. Dozens of people are suing Novo and Eli Lilly after developing a condition that can lead to sudden vision loss. They’re claiming that their symptoms were brought on by the GLP-1 drugs that these companies manufacture. Both companies dispute the claims. Research into the link is mixed.

We’re still getting to grips with the effects of weight-loss drugs on hair and nails, too. When Savanna Vidal at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, DC, and colleagues assessed electronic health data from 67 US health-care organizations, they found that GLP-1 use was associated with an increased risk of hair loss. It’s still not thought to be common, however.

And at a conference in Austria last week, another group presented the results of a smaller study suggesting that 66% of GLP-1 users reported at least one nail disorder—in some cases involving nail detachment. Nail conditions were also fairly common among people who didn’t take the drugs, though. The authors don’t claim that the drugs are causing nails to fall out (as I’m sure 11% of the American population will be relieved to hear).

The side effects might look different in children, but there’s not much data on those at the moment. Still, pediatric side effects will be something to watch given that, between 2019 and 2026, there was a 310-fold increase in GLP-1 prescriptions for eight- to 11-year-old children with obesity in the US. Child prescriptions are still rare, but they’ve been rising.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization released its first guidelines on managing obesity in children and adolescents. Despite the scale of the issue—the WHO estimates that 70 million children aged five to nine were living with obesity in 2024—the organization explicitly says it does not recommend pharmacological treatment for kids under 10.

“This recommendation accounts for the lack of evidence on both benefits and the potential adverse events and consequences of the different medications and/or their active ingredients on normal growth, development, physiological parameters, and mental health,” the guidelines state.

I get press releases about GLP-1s on an almost daily basis. There’s been a ton of research into these drugs, and there are probably hundreds of other studies underway. There will likely be plenty more on this from The Checkup as the evidence evolves.

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.

This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger.

I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies.

Over a six-month period, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age as measured in a bunch of different ways. There’s even a leaderboard! The winners will include the person who shows the greatest difference between their chronological and biological age, as well as the person who manages to reverse their biological age the most.

The competition is the brainchild of the neuroscientist and physician Christin Glorioso, who is also founder and CEO of NeuroAge Therapeutics. The company offers tools to track brain health and aging and is running a trial to find out if biological brain age can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Glorioso says she has several goals for the Younger contest. The first, she tells me, is to “explain to the world what aging clocks are.” Regular Checkup readers will be familiar with these tools, but for the uninitiated, they are basically designed to measure biological age.

Many measure chemical signatures that form a layer on top of our DNA and seem to change with age. But others might involve looking at proteins or lipids in blood. Some are designed to measure functional health, while others predict when a person will die. There are more than a hundred clocks out there, and they probably each capture a specific aspect of the biological process of aging.

These clocks are proving very useful for scientists, who use them to study aging and development in humans and many other species. But using them to estimate the biological age of an individual person is more controversial. They’re just not good enough for that yet.

Part of the problem is that we don’t really understand what each clock is capturing. Glorioso hopes that data collected through the Younger contest might help answer that question. She’s hoping to generate “the world’s most comprehensive clock dataset.”

Some longevity clinics try to get around the limits of biological age testing by using multiple clocks. That’s this competition’s approach too. As a standard competitor, I’ll be sending a blood spot sample to TruDiagnostic, a company that measures epigenetic chemical groups on DNA and offers to reveal an overall biological age as well as a person’s pace of aging and the biological ages of each of 11 organ systems, including the heart and brain.

I’ll get a brain age score from NeuroAge once I complete the cognitive tasks on offer. I’ll also submit some physical measures like grip strength. And I’ll upload a series of selfies to an app developed by a team at Harvard that promises to tell me my face age. That’s exactly what it sounds like—an estimate of how old my face looks.

I’m intrigued to see my scores, even though I know I shouldn’t put too much stock in them. The first time I took a test, four years ago, the company I used gave me a biological age that matched my chronological age, which was a little disappointing and, if I’m honest, a bit underwhelming. A year later, the same company told me I had a young heart but a relatively old brain, liver, and hormonal system. My lifestyle hasn’t changed much since then. Will the years have made much difference?

(Ultra competitors—who pay $4,499 rather than the $999 cost of regular entry—are also offered a range of other blood tests and clocks, as well as MRI and DEXA scans. I’ve got complimentary press access to the standard package.)

Glorioso is also hoping to gather information about the effects of some purported longevity approaches. During the competition, some participants will be offered red-light masks, access to a sauna, or other low-risk offerings that partner companies who are sponsoring the event to varying degrees might want to collect data on. “A lot of these companies just can’t afford to run [clinical] trials,” says Glorioso.

She also sees the event as a public health initiative. A couple of years ago, David Sinclair, who studies aging at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues estimated that if we could slow down aging in the general population and increase life expectancy by one year, it would save the US economy $38 trillion.

The event officially kicks off in January, but around 120 people have already signed up, says Glorioso. Ultimately, she expects 500 participants. Each person’s six-month run starts as soon as they take their baseline measurements, whenever that may be. A handful of people have already started. “I think the majority of people are going to want to sign up after the holidays,” says Glorioso. “They’re not going to want to be trying to win an aging contest over Christmas and Hanukkah.”

Glorioso took her own baseline measurements back in August. Those initial tests suggested that her biological age was around 10 years below her chronological age. That sounded pretty impressive to me until I looked at the leaderboard and saw that competitor @Fred had a biological age 28.8 years below his chronological age.

The leaderboard is pretty sparse at the moment, as only seven people have logged their baseline measurements so far. Six of them have biological ages tracking low, but one 47-year-old has been given a biological age of 68.1. She’s competing publicly, so I can see the breakdown of her scores. The worst is for the speed at which she can stand from sitting in a chair—by that measure, she’s been given a biological age of 100.

Hillary Lin, a longevity-focused physician in New York, has just started logging her baseline measurements for the competition. She tells me she’s taken biological age tests in the past and that they’ve tended to give scores below her chronological age, which is currently 37. Last year, the TruDiagnostic test put her pace of aging at 0.75—suggesting she’s only doing nine months’ worth of aging in a typical year. “That’s supposed to be quite good,” she says.

If it had been up to her, Lin says, she would have incorporated more blood tests into the competition, to build a fuller picture of a person’s health. And she’s worried that a six-month period might not be long enough to see changes in biological measures of aging. Still, she’s excited, and is already making plans to improve her sleep, diet, and exercise.

But she already follows a high-protein, low-carb diet and works out at the gym every day. She also visits a sauna every few days (sauna use has been linked to improved heart health). Glorioso’s efforts are impressive too. She tells me she’s started drinking a smoothie made from a pond plant that has been linked to health improvements, and that she’s cut added sugar and deep-fried foods from her diet. She’s also bought “a bunch of fancy Korean sunscreens” in an attempt to lower her face age.

I haven’t received my kit or logged my baseline measurements yet, and I’ll wait until then to start setting health goals. I don’t fancy my chances against these two competitors. But at the very least, I hope I can stand up faster than a 100-year-old.

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.

Around this time last year I was attending an aging conference in Manchester, listening to a talk about fly aging, when my phone started pinging. News outlets were reporting that a hot mic had caught Russia’s and China’s leaders discussing the possibility of living forever.

“With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin reportedly told China’s Xi Jinping.

He seems to have been referring to the “replacement” theory of longevity, which has been supported by multiple experiments that involved physically stitching young mice to old ones. Something about the young blood rejuvenated the old mice. Perhaps young organs could rejuvenate world leaders in their 70s, too.

Unfortunately for Putin, new research pours a little cold water on this idea. Studies on transplanted hearts in both mice and humans suggest that new hearts soon adopt the biological age of the recipient, no matter how young they were to begin with. The finding could be important for transplantation, but it also highlights just how complex aging—and rejuvenation—are.

Jesse Poganik at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is one of the many scientists trying to understand exactly what it is about the bodies of young mice that rejuvenates old ones. Plenty of research has focused on seeking the secrets of youth in young blood. But what if it’s something about young organs instead?

To find out, he and his colleagues performed a set of heart transplants in mice. In humans, heart transplants typically involve removing a damaged or injured heart and replacing it with another from a donor who is usually much younger than the recipient. (When Poganik assessed hospital records, he found that most recipients were about 20 years older than their donors.)

The mouse transplants were different: Mice received a second heart, implanted in the neck—a procedure that’s slightly simpler and allows scientists to compare the new hearts with the existing ones. In some cases, young adult mice were given a heart from a middle-aged donor. In others, middle-aged mice got young hearts.

The team used a trio of “aging clocks”—molecular tools used to estimate the biological ages of tissues and whole organisms—to assess whether the additional hearts affected the mice in any way. These clocks were good at predicting the chronological age of mice that didn’t get new hearts.

Poganik says he was expecting to see a reciprocal effect, and that young hearts might benefit older animals, for example. In previous work by other members of his team, young mice that got old hearts experienced a buildup of senescent cells in their other organs. These cells are thought to contribute to the aging process, suggesting that receiving an old organ might prematurely age an animal.

But that’s not what he found. When he and his colleagues analyzed the transplanted hearts between four and six months after surgery, they found that the hearts seemed to have adopted the biological age of the recipients. Young hearts got older, and old hearts got younger. “The environment of the transplanted organ really dictates how it seems to behave biologically,” he says. The findings were published online at bioRxiv last week.

The team also looked at each mouse’s blood and other organs—including its original heart—and were surprised to find that they seemed to be unaffected by the presence of the new heart, despite the age of its donor.

The finding was backed up by data from human heart transplants. People who receive a donor heart must typically undergo a series of heart biopsies after surgery. The tiny pieces of heart tissue collected from people who had heart transplants at Brigham and Women’s have been stored for decades. And when Poganik and his colleagues tested their biological ages with the aging clocks, they found a similar pattern: No matter the age of the donor, a new heart quickly adopts the biological age of the person who received it.

It’s not clear why this is, but João Pedro de Magalhães, who studies aging at the University of Birmingham in the UK and was not involved in the study, thinks it might have something to do with the recipient’s immune system. Perhaps immune cells circulating in the blood might affect markers of aging in the new organ, he says.

Perhaps the potential rejuvenating effects of a young heart end up being diluted by all the other aged components of an older body, Poganik suggests. Or maybe a single organ just isn’t enough to see an effect.

Poganik hopes his finding will encourage surgeons to consider using hearts from older donors, many of which are discarded on the assumption they won’t function as well. (Machines used to preserve organs before transplantation are changing that already—and Poganik has worked on another study showing that these devices seem to rejuvenate donor livers to some extent.)

But the study also highlights just how complicated aging is. If organs seem to be getting older by one measure but not by another, how can we get a full picture of the biological age of an organ, or a person?

This complexity means that scientists are not likely to discover a true way to completely reverse aging, says Poganik. “That would mean that every aspect of aging has to go back in time,” he says. Reversing DNA damage, structural damage, and all the other degradations that are part of the aging package, across all our various cells and tissues, presents an enormous challenge.

“There are aspects of biological age that are probably reversible, and there are aspects that are probably not,” he says. Sorry, Putin.

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.

In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI carries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.”

Those posts came a few days after the AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was leaving a role at Anthropic, charging that neither it nor OpenAI (where he had also worked) was acting responsibly. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he posted on X. Another Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he responded on X. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

One of the ways they fear AI might end us all is by somehow aiding the design, creation, and release of some kind of bioweapon. Let’s take a closer look at why.

A bioweapon might be a highly lethal virus that targets people according to their genes. It could be a fungus that wipes out a crop and causes food insecurity. Perhaps it would be a tasteless, odorless toxin that could be slipped into a region’s water supply, undetected.

The concern is that AI tools can be used to help generate agents like these. In 2022, researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals found that it was remarkably easy to do so using an AI “molecule generator” they’d developed to find potential drugs for human disease. In less than six hours, the model generated 40,000 molecules with the potential to serve as chemical warfare agents. Some of them were designed to be even more toxic than known nerve agents. “Without being overly alarmist, this should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community,” the authors wrote at the time.

It was a wake-up call for David Magnus, a professor of medicine and biomedical ethics at Stanford University, even though he had been assessing the risks associated with the misuse of medical science and biotechnology since the late 1990s. “That was very scary to me,” he says. “Of course, everything since then has just sort of blown up.”

Today, AI bots can answer questions on topics spanning all realms of science. Anyone can use large language models trained on the knowledge and experience of “almost every scientist who ever lived on this planet,” says Dunja Sabra, a biosecurity researcher at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Those models can provide instructions and video training on how to conduct experiments.

Combine that with advances in biotech that have made gene editing and synthetic biology tools much more accessible (the “DIY biology” movement has already enabled many people to set up labs at home), and you’ve got a potentially very dangerous situation. “The chances are that someone determined would succeed eventually,” Sabra says.

There are safeguards in place. People who want to build new genomes must typically order the pieces of DNA from companies that screen for suspicious requests. Responsible researchers put potentially risky research through rounds of analysis called “red-teaming,” in which independent scientists look for ways the work might be misused, and “blue-teaming,” where others come up with potential mitigations. And AI companies have tweaked their tools in attempts to prevent them from offering up scientific information that could be misused. But none of these protections are ironclad.

In a report published last week, Anthropic acknowledged that people had attempted to use its models to explore ways to make the chikungunya virus more transmissible, create a form of bird flu that is more dangerous to humans, and build an “atlas of venom toxin peptides,” among other things.

“We’ve got a constant back and forth,” says Magnus. “We have to build better surveillance and screening tools, [but] AI is really good at figuring out ways around them.” We’ll probably need to use AI to find ways to restrict the use of AI, he says.

I should add here that not all scientists agree on the level of risk. At a recent media briefing, some biologists at Imperial College London argued that AI tools just aren’t good enough to fully develop bioweapons, and that testing new pathogens requires difficult, time-consuming, human work. Some think the guardrails we have in place are sufficient.

And Wendy Barclay, a professor of infectious disease at Imperial, pointed out that, as things stand, the greatest risk of a pandemic isn’t from a bioweapon, but from pathogens that are already circulating. Take H5N1, the bird flu virus that has already killed millions of birds and spread widely through US dairy cattle; last month it was also detected in captive mink at a farm in Utah.

Sabra, on the other hand, likes to think five to 10 years ahead. Countries should be strengthening their health-care systems, preparing antidotes to known toxins, and stockpiling medicines, she says: “We need to be prepared.”

Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist who invented both technology to fast-track the propagation of a genetic feature through an entire population and ways to limit that technology, echoed these concerns in an X post on Wednesday, stating that a large language model had “disclosed a novel form of bioweapon that I hadn’t realized was possible.”

He added, “Please, for the love of God, children, the future of humanity, or whatever you consider holy, let’s err on the side of caution here.”

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.

Every year, MIT Technology Review puts together a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. Our 35 Innovators Under 35 are the ones to watch—people whose research and technical work stands to shape the future of their fields.

This year, the list includes nine people who are transforming biotech. And this week, I’m going to give you a taste of some of the very cool stuff five of them are working on, which includes lifesaving innovations and groundbreaking “age reversal” tech.  

1. Preventing maternal deaths

Let’s start with Paschal Kija, a 28-year-old who has developed a device to treat postpartum hemorrhage—a dangerous birth complication that contributes to around 29% of maternal deaths in his home country, Tanzania. The Mkanda Salama (“Safe Wrap” in Swahili) is easy to use and costs just $70. A study found that it stopped postpartum bleeding in 73% of women within 20 minutes.

2. Making brain electrodes inspired by Japanese art

For decades, scientists have been developing, testing, and implanting brain electrodes. These devices are literally inserted into people’s brains, so while they can help us understand brain activity and treat various neurological disorders, it’s not totally surprising that they can also cause a bit of damage. Xiao Yang, 34, is working on ultra-small electrodes, which she hopes will have less of an impact on surrounding brain tissue. Her electrodes are flexible, too—in fact, they look a lot like actual neurons.

Yang is also creating sheets of electrodes to study brain cells in the lab. Inspired by kirigami—the traditional Japanese art of cutting paper to form three-dimensional shapes—she’s created a sheet of electrodes with a honeycombed structure shaped like a spiral basket. And she’s already using it to study brain cells.

3. Developing an all-new treatment for baby KJ

In 2024, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr. was born with a rare and potentially fatal genetic disorder. Sarah Grandinette was a member of a team that developed an entirely new, personalized treatment for him—a gene-editing therapy essentially designed to correct a genetic misspelling.

Grandinette, who is now 26, created cells with KJ’s genetic variant and used them to screen gene-editing approaches; then she tested potential medicines in mice and monkeys. KJ ultimately got his first dose of the resulting treatment when he was about seven months old. He responded well and was eventually discharged from hospital. He’s “doing pretty great,” she says.

4. Reversing the aging process to treat eye disease

The buzziest tech in longevity right now centers on reprogramming—attempts to rewind the age of cells by resetting them to a more embryonic-like state. In a study published in 2020, Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu (now 34) and his colleagues showed that a reprogramming therapy reversed vision loss in aged, blind mice. Now an almost identical version of that therapy is being tested in people with eye disease. Life Biosciences, the company developing the drug, dosed its first volunteer in June.

5. Using AI to design new viruses

Last year, Samuel King used a generative AI model to come up with new genetic blueprints for bacteriophages—teeny viruses that can infect bacteria. Once he had those blueprints, he printed them out as strands of DNA. In experiments, he found that those AI-designed viruses could create new copies of themselves, burst out of bacterial cells, and infect other nearby bacteria. Viruses aren’t alive, but King, 27, hopes that AI-designed life forms might one day be used to make drugs or soak up pollution.

You can read more about these innovators, and the others on the biotech list, here.

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.

When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been “discovered by” its generative AI platform.

Insilico leads a pack of companies using AI to rapidly come up with drug ideas humans might never think of, potentially speeding the race to new cures. AI models are now able to generate atomic designs for drugs almost as easily as ChatGPT can write a thank-you note.

However, when it came time to file for an all-important patent to protect that new chemical structure, the company made no mention of AI. Instead the patent names five humans, including CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, as the drug’s “inventors.”

The discrepancy points to a fascinating wrinkle in intellectual-property law. No matter how fundamental an AI is to a discovery, when it comes to winning rights to an invention, it’s humans—and only humans—who can take the credit.

US courts reached that conclusion after Ryan Abbott, a partner at the LA law firm Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, brought a pro bono test case naming an AI called DABUS as an inventor of a better food container, whose intricate geometric surface lets it transfer heat well and stack easily. Because no human contributed to the design, Abbott argued that the AI should be named the inventor.

The case might have raised philosophical questions, like whether AIs deserve legal rights or what the true nature is of that eureka moment that leads to a better mousetrap. But in 2022, an appeals court in Washington, DC, said these “metaphysical matters” were beside the point. Instead, it noted that US statutes describe an inventor as an “individual,” the plain meaning of which is a human being.

Since machines aren’t people, they can’t be inventors. Case closed.

“There needs to be a human inventor or there’s no invention and no patent,” says Sarah Korman, a patent attorney who is now chief business officer and legal officer of Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet spinout with big ambitions for AI cures. Korman, who made her remarks at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech event last year, added that there is “no doubt” our laws will need to evolve to keep pace with AI.

That’s partly because no one is denying that AIs can invent things. In the future, they may do so with less and less human intervention. As the US Patent and Trademark Office has itself acknowledged, “an AI system—like other tools—may perform acts that, if performed by a human, could constitute inventorship under our laws.”

Instead, the key question going forward may actually be whether or not any human contributed enough to be named as an inventor. Abbott believes there could be legal challenges to AI-generated drugs, since one way to invalidate a patent is to show it has the wrong inventors listed.

Abbott’s worry is that if US policy excludes AI-generated outputs from protection, that could put a damper on future drug development. Already, the US Copyright Office is refusing to grant copyrights to images and text generated by AI, raising concerns from organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, whose members are using those tools. 

The point of our intellectual-property laws is to encourage innovation, Abbott says. It’s right there in Article 1 of the US Constitution, which says inventors and authors need to be given exclusive rights to their ideas, for a limited time, in order “to promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts.”

Currently, the US patent office seems to be taking a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to the use of AI. Under the Biden administration, the agency published guidance to help applicants determine whether and when humans would truly qualify as co-inventors of an AI discovery. But after Trump arrived in office, it reversed course. Now the patent office says AI is merely a tool, like a calculator. No need to even mention it.

You can bet that pioneering AI drug companies are keeping humans in the loop, at least for now, and documenting everything carefully. At Insilico, Zhavoronkov says, human chemists still have to synthesize the drugs, create variants, and test them on animals. “That’s the person who is going to be named on the patent,” he says. “And even if you decided to completely roboticize this process, including the experiments, someone will still push the button and give the budget.”

Should pushing a button count as being an inventor? Abbott says that’s a question for future legal cases. “What if I asked Claude to cure cancer, and it did?” he says. “I think it would be inappropriate to claim that I invented that.” 

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.

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.

That’s right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome. Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi who co-led the work, told me it felt a bit like sci-fi.

Ishiuchi and his colleague Shogo Matoba of the Riken BioResource Research Center hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from the cool to the outright creepy.

We can’t talk about cloning without mentioning Dolly, the celebrity sheep born in 1996 and the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell. In that case, scientists took the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult mammary cell from one sheep and transferred it into an egg cell that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting embryo was transferred to a surrogate sheep, which gave birth to Dolly—an animal genetically identical to the DNA donor.

The scientists behind that work were interested in genetically modifying livestock. Farmers have essentially been doing this for thousands of years through selective breeding, but cloning allows scientists to create genetic replicas of animals with desirable traits.

Cloning is also being used to replicate deceased pets, including, famously, those of Barbra Streisand and Tom Brady, among others. For a price somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, a company can take cells from your pet and turn them into a living, breathing clone.

Considering that cloning also requires egg cells from another animal, and a surrogate animal to carry the pregnancy, not everyone is on board with this, especially since there is no medical or environmental need for the procedures. One bioethicist, Jessica Pierce, has described this aspect of dog cloning as “the exploitation of the canine underclass.”

The case for cloning is stronger when it comes to conservation—where some argue there is environmental value.

Scientists have been preserving animal tissues for years. Some of these tissues are cryopreserved at low temperatures in “frozen zoos.” The facility at the San Diego Zoo, for example, currently has cells from over 1,300 species. Some of these samples were taken decades ago.

Preserved tissues like these have enabled scientists to create clones of animals considered close to extinction, including black-footed ferrets and Przewalski’s horse. But they might also help us bring back extinct animals.

In 2009, researchers in Spain described how they’d cloned an extinct wild goat, the Pyrenean ibex, using skin cells that had been cryopreserved a decade earlier. In that research, the team used egg cells from domestic goats to create a total of 439 embryos. Ultimately, only one goat—a female—was born. She died minutes later because of a defect in her lungs.

Poor Pyrenean ibex. It’s the only animal we know of that has gone extinct twice.

The biotech company Colossal Biosciences is hoping to use old—and potentially ancient—genetic material to bring back long-extinct species like the thylacine and woolly mammoth. So far, the company’s efforts have largely involved modifying the genomes of modern-day animals.

Technically, it’s also possible to clone humans. As far as we know, no one has done it. But some have played with the idea. One biotech startup founder has pitched an idea for “brainless clones”—human clones that lack a brain but contain all the organs people might need to replace their own in future. My colleague Antonio Regalado described that pitch in March. (I had to pause eating my lunch while rereading it.)

Scientists have done a hell of a lot with cloning over the last few decades. I’m excited—but also slightly nervous—about what the coming decades will bring.

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.

Kris DeVault is desperate.

His son, Brody, was born in March 2023. It wasn’t long before he started to show signs of developmental delay, says DeVault. As time went on, Brody started missing key milestones in speech, movement, and coordination, he says.

When Brody was around two and a half years old, a genetic test revealed creatine transporter deficiency—a rare condition in which the brain and muscles lack the energy they need to develop.

There are no cures for Brody’s condition. But DeVault has learned of a company developing a drug that might help. That drug is still in the early stages of development and has only been tested in animals and a small number of healthy adults. Doctors can’t prescribe it.

DeVault knows the drug might not work. But he’s doing all he can to access it regardless. And a new law in Montana could make it easier for people in his position to get access to treatments—at least in theory.

Today, Brody is three years old. His dad describes him as a happy, curious, and loving little boy who wants to learn. But Brody struggles to communicate. “He’s got no words, really,” says DeVault. “He wants to communicate more than he’s able to … which then turns into frustration.”

It’s difficult for Brody to tell his parents whether he’s hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable, or even in pain, says DeVault. He recently found Brody standing on an anthill in the backyard, being bitten by red ants. “These fire ants were just going to town on his feet … and he was just looking,” he says.

Brody has muscle weakness too. “He can’t move very fast, he doesn’t have a ton of strength … and it takes a lot of energy for him to walk balanced,” says DeVault. “His arms are skinnier than [those of] his nine-month-old sister.”

It’s concerning, but DeVault is most worried about Brody’s neurological development. Toddlers’ brains are exceptionally “plastic”—the first years of a child’s life are thought to be crucial for long-term brain development.

A biotechnology company in France is working on a drug to help people like Brody. Creatine usually provides brain cells with energy. People with creatine transporter deficiency (CTD) can’t get creatine into the brain.

The team at Ceres Brain Therapeutics is developing a treatment designed to bypass this issue and effectively deliver creatine directly to the brain. So far, the team has seen promising results in mice, says Ceres CEO Thomas Joudinaud.

The company also recently completed a phase I clinical trial that involved testing various doses of the drug, which is delivered as a nasal spray, in 48 healthy adult volunteers. That trial has not yet been published, says Joudinaud. The drug has not been tested in people with CTD, or in children.

“I look at this, and I’m like, that is my one shot for Brody,” says DeVault.

Joudinaud is planning a phase II trial in people with CTD, as well as others with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But that trial will take place in France, and it’s unlikely that Brody will be able to take part, says DeVault.

Ceres can’t make the drug available to Brody under an expanded access scheme run by the US Food and Drug Administration either, because the drug has not been registered with the FDA, and because it is currently manufactured in a way that does not comply with FDA regulations, says Joudinaud.

Even if that phase II trial is successful, and if the drug is ultimately approved, it is unlikely to reach the US market for at least a few years. DeVault is worried that will be too late for Brody—he’ll be “past his plasticity window” by then, he says.

Now, with the adoption of a new law in Montana, he theoretically has another option. Montana has had a “right to try” law—which allows terminally ill people to apply for access to unapproved drugs—in place since 2015. In 2023, a new law technically expanded this option to people who were not terminally ill, providing the drugs have been through preliminary phase I clinical trials. A second law aimed to clarify how clinics could sell and administer those treatments to patients. And last weekend, the state’s department of Health and Human Services finalized a set of rules for those clinics.

An experimental treatment review board (ETRB) has been established to review applications for access to experimental, unproven, and unapproved drugs. And it is set to review its first two applications in the coming weeks.

Ceres could also apply to Montana’s ETRB to sell its experimental treatment to Brody’s parents via a clinic in the state. But Joudinaud is reluctant, at least for the time being. While he thinks that Montana’s setup is “very interesting and very pragmatic” and “suitable for our drug,” he’s worried about getting on the wrong side of the FDA.

DeVault has been pleading with FDA staffers for a written statement essentially promising that biotech companies participating in Montana’s program won’t be penalized later on, especially when they eventually try to get their drugs approved in the US. But he hasn’t made any progress.

Now he’s looking beyond Montana. He’s considering accessing treatment in Próspera, a private city and “special economic zone” in Roatán, Honduras, where a clinic sells unproven stem-cell and gene therapies, among others.

Many scientists have cautioned against the use of such “offshore” clinics. Even when it comes to Montana, scientists, bioethicists, and health law experts will caution that phase I clinical trials don’t prove a drug is safe. And they certainly don’t prove a drug’s efficacy, either.

When I spoke to Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School with expertise in health policy and drug regulation, about the Montana law earlier this week, he made his concerns clear. “Patients who want these kinds of treatments deserve them to be rigorously assessed so that [they] can better understand what they’re getting themselves into, and what they’re paying their hard-earned money for.”

But DeVault pushes back on these arguments. “I’m a full-grown human being,” he says. “I’m capable of going to Vegas right now … blowing it all on the poker table, [or] I can go to the gun shop and buy a silenced [semi-automatic rifle] … how come I can’t make a decision to purchase a potential treatment that might change the entire trajectory of my son’s life?”

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.