Interesting, but not for the reasons you’d think:
The blood of the young and healthy could one day serve as the ‘biological fountain of youth’ for those hoping to challenge the inevitability of death.
It may sound like vampirisim, but the bizarre practice known as ‘parabiosis’ has caught the attention of many life-extension enthusiasts – including billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
Early studies have shown that the procedure, which involves the transfusion of blood plasma from a young donor, can have age-reversing effects on the body, and it’s recently begun clinical trials on humans…
In an interview last year with Jeff Bercovici, Peter Thiel explained his interest in life-extension medicine.
Moving on from a discussion on caloric restriction, human growth hormone, and diabetes drug metformin, the investor said he isn’t yet convinced that scientists have found the cure-all technique.
But, he’s turned his sights to some ‘strangely underexplored’ fields.
I forget when I first read the mouse study, but it must have been in the nineties. As time went on I wondered, what are the chances somebody finds a technique which measurably rejuvenates muscle and liver tissue, if I recall correctly, and then nobody ever tries it in humans? The procedure is already commonly performed in hospitals every day, and it would cost almost nothing to try, and nobody tried it?
I came to a couple of conclusions. I assume it was tried, because it was incomprehensible to me that nobody would try it. I mean a cure for aging?
I also assumed it would have problems, because there seems to be some tendency for those who get transfusions to have auto-immune and inflammatory problems later on. Regan’s Alzheimers is not uncommon in those who get large transfusions. Whether plasma is the same as whole blood, I don’t know, but it will have antibodies in it, as well as other proteins from the donor. How your immune system may take to it all is probably not a given.
The question was, if it failed, why not make it known?
In the back of my mind has been the possibility that they figured out what was producing the effect, and a way to utilize it without any risks. I believe there are about 1800 compounds in human blood. The answer is among them.
Which would mean that the real power brokers might remain anonymous because they don’t want you to know their age, or see what they look like. I suppose if a guy like Soros were to grow famous, he would be out, because all you need is one plebe suddenly spotting a twenty-five year old Soros partying in Ibiza, and word would be out.
After all, you wouldn’t want that getting out, lest it end up mass-marketed, and suddenly you have too many plebes and not enough food. There is little that will turn humans into a violent species like a cure for aging.
And yet, at some point, a substantial advance is coming.
I like to think of it as a preemptive cure for post-scarcity.
[…] Peter Thiel Pursuing Parabiosis Blood Transfusions As Fountain Of Youth […]
People who think there’s a simple cure for aging have obviously never attempted to fix anything. I mean, what do you do if your car’s alternator breaks? Replace it. What if the body rusts? Patch it up with epoxy. What if deep rust fissures open up all over the undercarriage? Get some sheet metal, a hammer, a blowtorch, and build a new body.
Everything is either a shoddy band-aid solution or a total replacement of the affected parts. Most people give up at some point and replace the whole car. Genetic engineering might soon give us pigs with human-transplantable organs, but there’s no replacing the organ between your ears. Look at the lucky people who don’t get cancer or organ failure — around age 90-100 their minds just slowly fade away.
I agree to a point.
But that said, the tissues did revert to a more youthful appearance and the mice’s energy picked back up. In a way, just one year of flawless health is a shocking accomplishment, but we get forty or fifty off our DNA, and then we pass it to another generation which does the same. When you are older, the DNA instructions are the same in each cell as when young. Telomeres and epigenes, and cellular constituents, and so on are changed, but the mouse study implied there is something which reversed all of that, and the same cells with the same instructions acted the way they did when younger.
It is not impossible that at some point they will figure out how to get the genes to behave the same when young. It won’t last forever, but it could buy a lot of time spent young and happy.
You might be right that people are keeping it secret. But Thiel is among the rich and powerful by any definition and is talking about it openly, even funding a company called Ambrosia that’s working on this, I believe. So that would undercut your point.
Thiel is recognized. Say his name and we know who he is. I’m talking about people who won’t let their worth be known, whose names nobody has heard of, and whose every penny is hidden behind trusts and corporations based out of exotic locals like the City of London, which don’t require actual names attached to anything. As an example, the Rothschild family has more money than the first 1600 people on the Forbes richest list according to one estimate. But none of them appear on any list, we don’t know who the vast majority of them are, and even their actual worth is just speculation.
If you are smart, you stay below the radar. I’m betting there are more than a few out there who have done just that, and the amount of power your family can amass with just a few generations of wealth and secrecy would be impressive.
On the other hand, many smart people consider Putin to be the richest person on Earth.
I’m not sure I buy into this conspiracy theory sort of line of reasoning. I think a lot of the stuff you’re referring to has to do with the peculiarities of the traditional aristocracy in Britain, and I don’t think families could keep power like that in the modern world because newer members want to break out and make a name for themselves.
Don’t make the mistake of projecting your own psychology or neurotypical psychology onto people capable of amassing enormous quantities of wealth over a great number of generations.
Regards.
Maybe Elizabeth Bathory was on to something. Then again, maybe she was just a nut.
I can see a brisk underground business rising up in places like China using the blood of young, kidnapped “volunteers”.
Yeah, there is a scary Science Fiction side to a culture where the old and established can extend their lives by buying the youth of the young and unestablished.
Beware of messing with telomeres. Cells in old people don’t have the same DNA as the zygote they came from — they have accumulated many mutations, but short telomeres limit their potential for malignancy. Lab mice have longer telomeres than wild mice, but this makes them more likely to develop cancer. This effect would be even more pronounced in humans because we have more cells and we live longer.
And yet, we don’t see the mutations build up significantly in gametes over thousands of generations.
I’m not sold that mutations are all that common, or have that much effect. It could be, but my suspicion is we have 200-300 years in our raw DNA sequence. I will bet we will find that something else is at play, and think the blood thing may work because it temporarily fixes another factor.
Au contraire. We see it build up significantly even in a few generations. It remains unnoticed because the vast majority of mutations affect only IQ and social behavior with no serious medical defects.
http://www.genetics.org/content/202/3/869
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coming-soon-giga-death-world-of-mutants.html
“And yet, we don’t see the mutations build up significantly in gametes over thousands of generations.”
That’s because unless a mutation happens in your testes to one of the cells that eventually produces a sperm cell that fathers one of your children, it has no effect on future generations. Even then, mutations are quickly flushed out if they prevent the zygote from growing into a healthy, fertile adult.
Mutations are not that common, but you have trillions of cells in your body, and only one needs to go malignant to kill you. Telomeres that shorten with each cell division are a safety mechanism. Only a tiny minority known as “stem cells” have non-reducing telomeres. Endlessly dividing to produce red blood cells, skin, and the lining of your digestive tract, stem cells also produce the deadliest cancers.
Yeah, but my main point was though, suppose the gamete DNA has been copied X number of times along the path from fertilized egg, to adult gamete, to unfertilized egg or sperm, to fertilized egg.
Meanwhile a finger’s epithelial cell’s DNA has been copied, say 1000X times as it proliferated, differentiated, and reached maturity. Look at that alone, and the mutation/risk argument is plausible.
But when you look at the bigger timeline, that gamete DNA strand has been copied X number of times, over how many generations, going back? 80-90 thousand times, going from gamete to descendant’s gamete, and on again, just for our species. And the DNA is relatively undamaged statistically, because look how rare a real, damaging spontaneous mutation is. Maybe mistakes are rare, maybe a lot fo the DNA can be damaged without significant effect, but the result is, you can get a lot of mileage out of the structure statistically speaking.
I’m not saying those divisions are meaningless and anyone will live forever, but I think we could get a lot more divisions out of our stem cell’s DNA than we presently do, without significant mutational cost in many cases, if we could simply figure out how to trigger cellular proliferation of a sufficient rate to replenish tissues the way they are replenished in our youth.
I’m betting we will see 150 years in our lifetime, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that got us to the point of one day seeing 250-300 years, with some getting longer, and some not. I also suspect the immune system of a rejuvenated individual may pick up on many cancers more effectively.
It would be a funny thing, as if we lived 300 years, there would probably have to be some limit on childbirth. If that were the case, it is possible that such a world would see that a majority would have lived through the SJW collapse several times, at any one point. It would be as if the hipsters today were a small minority, and the majority were old-timers who had seen WWII, the Depression, WWI, and the Spanish American War, and recognized Chamberlain’s treason in today’s SJW.
It would be a world of reality-hardened amygdalae, that would recoil at leftism because it would have seen two or three cycles of wealth-SJWism-collapse. I could see such a world being very inhospitable to the left. Of course the ease those people would create might produce another r-generation, just much later on.
Who says that all mutations happen during copying? DNA can be damaged when it’s sitting around doing nothing.
Cells die all the time. Even if you convince their neighbors to multiply just enough to replace them, there’s still the problem of keeping all these cells organized into functional structures. There is no global coordinate system telling cells where to stand; they arrived at their current arrangement by growing from a single parent cell and dividing or dying according to their genes and signals from nearby cells. Every organ has some ability to repair itself, but given enough time, it deteriorates into a useless lump of scar tissue.
If it were possible to drag this process out over two or three centuries, we’d see at least a few lucky people living that long today.
One, there may be some mechanism keeping cells differentiated properly in the correct positions, probably using concentration gradients of various signals at different positions. Some think they can take stem cells, and actually exploit that in humans one day so an amputated limb would grow back, mimicing how a salamander grows a leg that is ripped off. I admit it seems unlikely, but I also think there is a reason it is unusual when a liver cell drifts off and survives to proliferate in a lung.
I don’t think we would see a 200 year old person today, if there is a central mechanism, or couple of mechanisms bogging the whole thing down, which could be lifted (which I think there is). Anyway, all I am saying is I think we have 200-300 years of usable DNA in us on average, if we could get cells to read it as they did when we were 20 or 30, and that is the limitation. I think now when we die, the DNA could have absorbed mutations for much longer before giving out. But that 200-300 years is more a feel than something I can scientifically justify.
I do think we will see a major advance someday. I hope to see it. I would love to see anti-gravity and space travel. The frontier is what I feel like I was born for.