
Blood from young animals can revitalise old ones - JumpCrisscross
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724967-might-be-true-people-too
======
dynofuz
This was shown to be an inaccurate conclusion from the study. Since the
animals were sewn together, more than just blood was shared. Organs, motility,
behavior, etc. [http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/22/young-blood-does-not-
rev...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/22/young-blood-does-not-reverse-
aging-in-old-mice-uc-berkeley-study-finds/)

a new study must be done where only blood is transmitted periodically without
those other factors in the picture.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha, based on all the complaints above about selling blood, people are
unlikely to accept sewing humans together.

~~~
pmoriarty
Is it really so different than blood transfusions, which are not even blinked
at by most people anymore?

Some might be squeamish about it at first, but they'd probably get used to if
they saw a pressing medical need for the procedure, just like they got used to
so many other medical procedures that were controversial when they were first
introduced.

~~~
Houshalter
Probably it's not necessary. Just exchange blood through tubes, and if you
ever need to leave you can just disconnect it. Sewing people together seems a
bit extreme.

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etatoby
I think older civilizations may have discovered something like this and put it
into practice, giving rise to the myth of Vampires.

The Vampires of lore are described as very old people who suck the blood of
youngsters to stay alive. The parts about them fearing sunlight, or garlic, or
whatever, might just be based on side-effects of this cure for ageing. The
inaccuracy of "sucking" instead of transfusion, might be because nobody
survived to recount the exact way in which vampires took their blood and what
they did with it. All they knew was that bodies of young people would
sometimes be found, drained of blood and with tiny syringe-like marks on their
necks.

In fact, they might still be among us, ruling our world from the shadows :-)

~~~
jbmorgado
Hum, no. If you you drink someone's blood it goes trough your digestive system
and it's processed that way, it doesn't become your blood, just provides you
some nutrients.

Besides you do that almost everyday, i.e. eat animals younger than you and in
certain cuisines part of their blood.

This here is something very different, allowing the blood to be used _as is_
from an young individual in an older one.

~~~
etatoby
I did mention that the part about drinking the blood might be an inaccuracy of
the Vampire legend. It's obvious you can't just drink it.

------
sigjuice
Yup. This was the subject of a recent episode of the documentary Silicon
Valley on HBO :p

~~~
kcanini
> documentary

I see what you did there :)

------
mmjaa
This is not going to end well. Human trafficking is already a seriously bad
condition in most societies - with this kind of science, I doubt that the
black/grey markets are going to ignore the fact that there are very, very
wealthy people out there, willing to pay for a little youth or two.

This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The
world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life
sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience
exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix,
I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world,
though.

~~~
mrfusion
Come on. Let's start with a positive comment.

(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article
about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)

~~~
thinkfurther
What technological stagnation?

> _Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a
> neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make
> of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we
> will all perish together as fools._

\-- Martin Luther King

Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress,
there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology,
they're just for things like a decent world to live in, _too_.

But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s)
That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse,
Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to
ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this
slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient
than the stairs.

Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at
some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot
about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people
who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that
are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of
life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR
of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true.
We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging
the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the
broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.

If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead
gladly.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die
at some point?"_

This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann,
one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed)
people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]

Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways
to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good
night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that
it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to
be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do
so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of
saintliness.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death)

[2] - [https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-
ni...](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night#poem-
content)

~~~
thinkfurther
Was Marcus Aurelius a saint? Was Einstein?

> _Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body,
> although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous
> egotisms._

Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands
of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will
go on without me. I got over it.

In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If
your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you
learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made
piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would
merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere
minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to _all_ of life, it's a pixel
in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?

------
RachelF
There were lots of headlines about this last year, most involving Peter
Thiel[1]. It sounds a bit like a tabloid vampire headline.

"The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death"
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel-
young-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel-young-blood-
anti-aging-research)

~~~
will_pseudonym
"The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death" \- Not with
that attitude!

------
robobro
I'm excited to see capitalists and oligarchs become literal blood suckers.
Reminds me of the blood boy sketch in Silicon Valley.

~~~
had2makeanacct
That was based on real events though, aren't Silicon Valley people also using
Ketamine to cure depression?

~~~
cgb223
There's all sorts of lore about constructive drug use in Silicon Valley start
up culture but it's not as prevalent as people say it is

I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell,
most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.

It's just that weird drug use makes headlines and headlines makes money

~~~
tazjin
> I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell,
> most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.

Or maybe they don't tell you.

~~~
mmjaa
Or maybe he just doesn't have much exposure to the drug-using classes in this
world, because anecdotally over 30 years of involvement in the computer world,
I've met far, far more people who think they are enhancing their performance
through drug use than those who don't.

Its extremely common in the hackrrspace scene to encounter developers who are
using 'smart drugs' to stay up for 3 or 4 days at a time, or who think that a
bump of speed at the right moment can make all the difference in the world to
the codebase. Of course, I'm yet to see a case where this so-called boost in
productivity is actively achieved, but it seems this isn't as important a fact
to the guys in the lab coats ..

~~~
Retric
Exactly.

A friend in collage used say a little alcohol would help him calm down and
code. A few decades later he accepted that he was just an alcoholic. Another
friend refers to nicotine as his work drug...

20 years ago I met a guy who said he was using LSD to avoid wasting time
sleeping and to boost his creativity. IMO, it's the same deal where people
self justify whatever drug they want to use.

------
nikbackm
So Elizabeth Báthory was just a little before her time it seems.

------
duncan_bayne
This isn't a new issue, ethically speaking.

[http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-
selling-h...](http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-selling-
human-org)

------
msie
I don't see why they can't go forward with blood scrubbing in a few years. Oh
wait, isn't this dialysis? There must have been some study of dialysis
patients.

------
zitterbewegung
This submarine story has been in the news for awhile. From what I can gather
this transfusion has only worked in animals. Also, there is a company that is
performing these transfusions for a fee. This article and other is designed to
make you feel the narrative "rich people are like vampires ". When you think
about what you are reading it really "rich people are having transfusions that
may have no medical benefit. Also, none of these articles state that blood has
a shelf life. If it isn't used then it is thrown away. For example there is
usually a large amount of blood donations that occur when there is a terrorist
attack . Most of the blood is discarded because they don't have enough time to
distribute it correctly. In effect they are buying garbage.

------
rl3
> _... older animals may also benefit from having their blood scrubbed by
> young kidneys and livers, which mere blood transfusion would not offer._

What of transplant patients that receive a kidney or liver transplant from a
younger donor?

~~~
adrianN
I'd guess that side effects from the immunosuppressants that they have to take
cancel out any positive effect. Also, typically you don't give organs to
geriatric patients, they're too valuable, so any age difference won't be very
large.

------
amai
Young blood treatment:
[https://www.ambrosiaplasma.com/](https://www.ambrosiaplasma.com/)

------
banku_brougham
Noone has mentioned the movie 'The Island', which hit this topic in a broader
sense. Clones used as replacement parts.

I guess its different only in that as a group 'the young' are distinct from
'the clones'

I'm also reminded of a legend from southern africa that HIV could be cured via
sex with a young virgin.

------
tjarratt
This reminds me a lot of Jenn Schiffer's talk at XOXO last year.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewAC5X_CZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewAC5X_CZ8)

------
zbruhnke
Saw this headline and immediately thought to myself "Gavin Belson was right?!"
Haha

------
BooglyWoo
I think Bart's blood revitalised Mr Burns once.

------
MentallyRetired
Soooo you're saying I should get a blood boy?

~~~
mgarfias
Blood bag, please. Let's use gender neutral descriptions

~~~
richmarr
(In the UK at least) "bag" is a derogatory term used for older women. Just
sayin.

~~~
jessaustin
In the movie, the blood bags seemed to be mostly young men?

~~~
mgarfias
Thank god someone got the reference

------
epx
One thousand terror movies that involved blood transfusion could not be wrong
after all

------
djvdorp
The title gives me quite the Orphan Black feeling here. Very interesting.

~~~
bschwindHN
I was reminded of The House of the Scorpion, which seems to have similar
themes to Orphan Black.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion)

------
nthcolumn
I love spoiling the plot of Dorian Gray for people. Never gets old.

------
Vektorweg
This sounds like a cyberpunk story.

------
honestoHeminway
We are going to be written into the history books as the decadent vampires who
ran earth into the ground.

~~~
krapp
Meh. Elizabeth Bathory used to bathe in the blood of her servant girls, and
Vlad Tepes impaled his enemies and used their viscera as a dipping sauce. Now
_that_ is decadence.

------
not_that_noob
Perhaps UberEats can pivot to UberBlood? Fresh young blood of the right type
on demand via app. Blood boys can be regular Uber drivers when blood demand is
low. You're welcome Uber.

~~~
raverbashing
But for UberBlood it will be $3/h instead of $2/h?

~~~
rubatuga
Depends on surge pricing

------
transparentlabs
Two Words: Blood Boy

------
AJRF
I need a blood boy.

------
jerry40
So blood of young people will be a real currency of future? Bloodcoin?

PS OMG, I googled and discovered that bloodcoin already exists.

------
sundvor
Side note: Speaking as a male blood donor, donating blood has benefits for the
donor as well. Particularly because we're not regularly performing blood
regeneration, there's a number of benefits related to it. And that pint is
fresh, new stuff. :)

~~~
option_greek
Is there any research that confirms this. I ask because I hear it everywhere.
But it feels too convineant an excuse to make people give blood :)
(voluntarity in most cases)

~~~
flukus
I've always wondered if it's a viable wight loss technique. There must be a
certain amount of energy that goes into blood production. And losing wight by
sitting still for a while is the holy grail.

Market it right and the billionaires might even be able to charge us to give
them blood.

~~~
Eerie
>wight loss technique

wight

~~~
flukus
Don't assume English is everyone's first language. It happens to be mine, but
don't assume everyone is sober either!

~~~
Eerie
I just thought it was funnily relevant. You know, drink enough blood and you
just might turn into wight...

