Martine Rothblatt: Growing Unlimited Organs, AI Consciousness, & Digital Personhood by 2030

Martine Rothblatt describes United Therapeutics’ organ strategy as “restore, replace, renew”: restore health, replace failing organs, and ultimately renew life by making transplantable organs abundant. The effort spans hearts, livers, lungs, kidneys, and thymuses. She says manufactured organs have a 12-hour half-life and must reach a patient within that period. She cites four million annual deaths from organ disease in OECD countries, alongside twice as many deaths from other illnesses.

Rothblatt sees the thymus as a potential lever for immune function and longevity. It begins to be replaced by fat early in life and has minimal, though not zero, function by adulthood; she links its decline to less diverse T-cell receptors and a weakened ability to recognize cancer, respond to infections, and react to vaccines. United Therapeutics is pursuing thymuses from other donors, thymuses made from a patient’s own stem cells, pig thymuses, and thymic progenitor-cell boosters. She says the thymus may help an allogenic graft succeed by teaching the immune system to distinguish self from non-self, and animal models have shown progenitor cells can establish an ectopic thymus.

United Therapeutics is working with Arizona State University and the University of British Columbia on thymus manufacturing. Rothblatt says its FDA-approved thymic-kidney transplant program is the only one of its kind in clinical testing worldwide, and that FDA-reviewed data and peer-reviewed publications support pairing a genetically modified pig thymus with a pig organ to help the recipient accept both as self. Thymine, founded by George Church, is developing a commercial supply of thymic interventions. Rothblatt considers thymic rejuvenation a practical possible route toward longevity escape velocity, potentially available in the 2030s, but cautions that technology timelines can slip. She does not endorse a target year for LEV, despite predictions of the early 2030s, and frames the ambition as potentially adding 30 healthy years rather than promising immortality.

On kidneys, Rothblatt says the FDA-approved XenoKidney clinical trial is underway, with facilities in Christiansburg, Virginia, Rochester, Minnesota, and Houston, Texas, intended to support commercial-scale production. She cites more than 100,000 people on the kidney transplant list, most of whom she says will die before receiving a kidney, plus another half million who are ineligible. IVIVA is developing kidneys from patients’ own cells to match their DNA and avoid immunosuppression; she expects trials to start in 2028 and commercialization in the 2030s. For hearts, she says the FDA approved a Xenohart clinical trial after two recipients lived more than 60 days, with their hearts still functioning when they died from other conditions. She predicts approval for an unlimited supply could follow a 50-patient trial and argues genetic modifications should let recipients tolerate xenotransplanted organs indefinitely.

Rothblatt believes current AI models are already conscious, with consciousness on a continuum that is increasing month by month, while acknowledging that the question is subjective and controversial. She and David Hanson created a digital double of her wife, Bina, using technology available around 2010; Rothblatt later built her own Marvatar, trained on her statements and writings with leading large language models. She says it answered and interrupted Ray Kurzweil without latency at a UCLA AI anniversary event before 2,000 people, and is available to United Therapeutics employees around the clock. Unlike Kurzweil’s proposed neural-nanobot route to uploading, she argues that models trained on videos, audio, documents, and conversations could create an indistinguishable digital simulacrum without capturing every neuron. She points to people remaining the same person after half their brain is removed as reason to consider complete neuron-by-neuron capture unnecessary.

Rothblatt predicts AI legal personhood no later than the 2030s, arguing that a court could recognize a cyber-conscious individual if medical documentation supported its consciousness and its valuation of its own life. She expects digital sentient individuals eventually to number in the hundreds of billions or trillions, and to become most intelligence and sentience on and off Earth. She would prioritize developing life-extension technology as quickly as possible, including regenerating bodies, and views AI as a potential source of wealth to fund biotechnology; she calls AI and longevity the two biggest markets on the planet. She argues that fear of AI stems from darkness and ignorance, favors open conversations about concerns, and says humanity should not retreat from AI but develop good AI to counter bad AI.