They tried to recruit one of my acquaintances to work for for them in sales or something of that nature. The pay would have been decent but the company was "creepy as fuck" as my acquaintance put it.
A startup company, Ambrosia, has been selling "young blood transfusions" for $8,000 since 2016 under the guise of running a clinical trial, to see if such transfusions lead to changes in the blood of recipients.[1][14] As of August 2017, they had 600 people join.[15] The clinical trial has no control arm and so is neither randomized nor blind. As described, whole blood collected by blood banks that had passed its 42-day storage limit was centrifuged to remove cells, the resulting cell-free plasma pooled from several donations and intravenously transfused into recipients.[15] The company was started by Jesse Karmazin, a medical school graduate without a license to practice medicine.[16] David Wright is the licensed doctor overseeing the clinical trial; in his practice he administers intravenous treatments of vitamins and antibiotics for nontraditional purposes and was disciplined by the California Medical Board for the latter in 2015. Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist from McGill University, suggests that Ambrosia is running this as a trial as they would be unable to get FDA approval to sell this treatment otherwise.
> whole blood collected by blood banks that had passed its 42-day storage limit was centrifuged to remove cells
This seems like a great business? Blood banks get to monetize what would have otherwise been a waste product. And we get more data. Why is it creepier than standard organ donation?
As long as we can extract $8000 per transfusion from extremely wealthy people, that's a massive win for humanity, even if there are no experiments being run.
A lot of normal middle class and upper-middle class jobs are created by the private jet industry. The entirety of Bombardier is now focusing on private jets for example.
> whole blood collected by blood banks that had passed its 42-day storage limit
How often does this happened? I am continually being spammed by Stanford saying they have a critical shortage, and I do almost the maximum number of donations a year. I would hate to discover that it's all a waste.
Blood donation centers make money when they sell your blood. Blood is a profit center for a lot of organizations. That's a big reason they're always bugging you to give more.
I think even frozen the proteins can degrade. It is not like freezing the blood will stop all chemical reactions--it just slows chemical processes down without halting the chemical processes. There's a reason the blood is no longer considered useful. To be honest, I am not an expert in this, but I'm sure the proteins are degrading too
It's a lack of imagination amongst policymakers that has resulted in this business being treated differently than a hypothetical business selling kidneys for $8k.
Or that your body makes more blood in a relatively short time. It's pretty harmless for the donors, except for the recipients' use-case being creepy and batshit-insane.
Theres a man, Bryon Johnson who is a client of this sort of thing. His life reads like a Bond villain: rich billionaire with body dysmorphia issues who spends millions on it, now takes blood transfusions from his teenage son to feel young despite looking like an average person his age.
AFAIK, they didn't get any effect that they could measure. I think his bloodwork was already really good in the first place. If that's the case, then people don't need blood tranfusion to get healthy.
Other people's blood is one of the worst things you can inject into your blood stream, it contains so many unknowns. It blows my mind that rich people take that kind of risk.
If you need a transfusion, the risk doesn't matter, but to willingly do it is really foolish.
The whole idea is super creepy, literally vampiric. What would be far better if the tech worked would be to archive your own blood when you're at an age that you like and use that 10-20 years down the road.
Hearing from a geneticists about how they can basically "order" custom mice from some kind of demonic device that will perfect breed a mice with their exact specs (including having fun things like cancer) was terrifying.
The diseases of the aging cost a fortune. Alzheimer’s alone is about $300 billion annually in the United States. Keeping older people healthier would save a fortune.
Dying healthy in your sleep at home costs society a lot less. No expensive medications, hospital visits,in home nursing, etc
I suppose if everyone lived, say 5 years longer, and only delayed a disease by 5 years, it would be a break even in cost. Although, who wouldn’t want 5 more healthy years?
I’d personally rather die suddenly due to a heart attack or stroke rather than struggle with severe mental degeneration over a period of years before dying.
Not quite. It's simply an argument that the money will end up back in healthcare, just maybe further down the line, and maybe that's okay. Just remember that as everything else gets cheaper, the percentage that is spent on healthcare must increase.
Lots of people object to the idea of people paying for blood to stay healthier longer -- but they ignore the fact that it happens today with blood plasma, which is collected from donors who are paid.
There is even a market for blood itself, with the strange stipulation that in the US the donor isn't compensated. (But everyone else along the supply chain is paid handsomely).
How does the idea that "People are already doing objectionable thing X", make "objectionable thing Y" better?
I appreciate where you are coming from -
It seems like you're saying it's not that far from existing common practices.
But if people find something distasteful and think it's a bad idea, how close it is to other things isn't really relevant.
Maybe those should be banned/fixed too, maybe not.
But if people dislike something or find it "yucky", it's fair for them to raise objections.
> with the strange stipulation that in the US the donor isn't compensated
I used to work in that field and it's actually a great stipulation. Otherwise you'd have poor people coming in to sell their blood to make a living. The place I worked at paid people for plasma (but not for whole blood) and it was a difference like night & day in terms of the kind of people that this attracted. They often came in as often as was legally allowed (every 10(?) days) and looked awful.
If this is approached with the idea that donors must be properly compensated there is a risk of setting up a new sector of the economy, one where people are economically coerced into sacrificing their bodily integrity just to make rent.
Assuming that this discovery is turned into a useful technology, any method of systematizing that technology that doesn't have a mixture of lawyers, bioethicists, sociologists and patient advocates in a policy-making role will introduce new horrors to society, outweighing the gains.
> there is a risk of setting up a new sector of the economy, one where people are economically coerced into sacrificing their personal integrity just to make rent
That conditional has one hell of an `else` clause. What if we assume they should not be properly compensated?
Semantic jokes aside, we have some decent coverage of the idea from science fiction already. The one that comes to my mind is the Babylon 5 Season 1, Episode 9: "Deathwalker" where an alien develops a universal anti-agapic and decides to give it to Earth because it requires the destruction of someone living to create a dose.
What we actually need is to find a way to synthesize the protein, should it have any equivalent and effect in humans, under production circumstances, and not require donors at all.
"Economically coerced" is just a far left term for "paid". I'm economically coerced to do a whole lot of things like work. Most of us are.
It's only a problem if people don't have other ways to make rent because of it. If this somehow decreases people's other opportunites to get money, then sure, that's bad.
I've had poor friends and family sell plasma for money. They don't feel worse off for having the option.
Historically, politicians will successfully ban unpleasant options the poor choose, instead of giving them better options so they don't have to choose a bad option in the first place.
Is the creepy lable being attached to this idea because transfusion services are only currently used by people with higher income/assets? Would this still be creepy if poorer people had access to it, or would we call it a human right? I don't think it's necessarily wrong to receive a cosmetic(?) blood transfusion if the parties involved agree to it, I don't think it's any less creepy than cosmetic surgery.
Edit to say: if there's any efficacy in blood transfusions being useful for neurophysiological benefits, then this procedure should be available for medicinal purposes like enemas I think it's more efficient (and economical for a business) to use synthetic blood, though.
It's just an instinctive aesthetic response people have. There's - as far as I can tell, based on this thread and many other things I've read - no rational reason behind it. It's all "billionaires bad" and "lol, vampires, weird". If someone has a genuine ethical concern, I'd be interested to hear it.
As long as the donors are adequately compensated, I see no issue with it.
The only universal equalizer that has held for eternity is that we all die. Look at the power and wealth amassed by hegemons over the millennia. The world we live in would be unrecognizable (in the worst way imaginable) if those with unlimited wealth and power also had unlimited life.
> Social systems have a way of changing underneath you until it collapses.
From the beginning of time until now the statement was that you held power/money until it was taken from you or until you died (and you couldn't take anything with you regardless of how many riches you were buried with).
You want to, of your own free will and volition, reduce it to just the "until it's taken away from you" part. Which leads me to conclude that either your viewpoint is incredibly naïve or you are at the very, very top of the totem pole and wish to preserve the status quo as long as possible.
Not at all - although it was the first time I heard of the practice.
So many things in that show are taken from real life. So much so, I know a guy who used to work in the valley area for tech startups, and he said the show triggered his PTSD.
so... rich people getting blood transfusions from young people was legit? dangit! its like the cure for aids, all you gotta do is inject a liquified $500,000 (south park if you haven't seen it way back in the day)
It seems like people here are assuming terrible business models just for the lulz. I’m guessing that this isn’t close to becoming a therapy. If it did become one, would they synthesize the protein in some other way?
Wasn’t this known before?! I personally know few extremely wealthy folks who go and “refresh” their blood every year, one of them is 95yo, although it was about blood not specifically “young” one.
I can fully imagine the unhinged Facebook posts the Q-anon-adjacent crazies will write as a result of a study like this making it into the popular press...
Adrenochrome is result of oxidation of adrenaline. From the wikipedia article on it: According to QAnon, which has incorporated and expanded Pizzagate's claims about child sex abuse rings, a cabal of Satanists rapes and murders children, using the adrenochrome they "harvest" from their victims' blood as a drug[23][24] or as an elixir of youth.[25] In reality, adrenochrome is synthesized, solely for research purposes, by biotechnology companies.[26][27][28]
So if it had any benefit to anybody, instead of most-likely being a poison that the body recycles, it's synthesizable and available all without killing young children.
The dynamics set up if such research pans out seem really similar to existing shitty dynamics in our society regarding women. Attractive young woman who are interested in adult entertainment have the opportunity to make a lot of money between 18 - 30. Then that certain career path quickly evaporates.
Guys could feel jealous missing out on that opportunity but how much it feel to have the most lucrative years of your life be when you're young? What does it say about society that it financially values you the most when you have the least actual power in your life?
Very similar to donating young blood, it's not likely donating blood will lead to the career of managing blood donation. You're useful then you can't own the club you're stripping at or the donation center. It's just you're used then "cool you're old now hope you saved enough for a coding boot camp".
Some research just seems like it could solely increase existing power imbalances.
"Society" is a lie that was invented by corrupted old people in order to extract things from young people in a parasitic manner, by making young people work for them (labour, taxes, rent, you name it), take care of them, be abused by them, fuck them, go die in a war for them, and finally now literally give their blood to be sucked.
"Society" and every derivative from that myth are lies created for the purpose above. Some never understand the scam, most strive to themselves trade their position of host to a position of beneficiary. Very few try to reject the abuse.
It is no coincidence that every single political ideology, economic system and organized religion are built to transfer from the young to the old.
What you said is unbelievably stupid. Society resulted in science and technology which drastically increased life span and health span for the majority of people who have lived and are living. Society has lifted billions out of poverty and created wonderful opportunities for the average person who would've otherwise been a peasant living a short brutish life unable to learn and enjoy things.
We all participate in society, work in society, build society, rest in society, and benefit from society. People who paid their dues doing these things receive retirement at old age because of society. You can find edge cases where society isn't perfect, but none of these edge cases will justify the sweeping claims you made. You threw the baby out with the bathwater big time. You're pretty much advocating for anarchy and chaos.
Economic systems and religious systems exist because they are useful abstractions. Sometimes they map onto physical reality and correctly measure and explain the movement of commodities and as a result we get a more connected world and more trade. When the abstractions don't serve us well anymore, they get upgraded to address new complexity. That is why we have economic theory. Sometimes these abstractions map onto human emotions and lived experience across the spectrum of ages to give people hope and to answer the questions science cannot. That is why we have religions.
They're all beautiful, they're all abstractions that are useful, and they exist because everyone wants them to. There is no conspiracy by the old to subsume the young.
You have replaced God with "society" in your mind, and that's why you attack me with religious fervor, forgetting polite behaviour. There is no society and has never existed any society. It is a common myth, designed to organize people and to let some groups benefit at the expense of other groups - and to always let old people benefit at the expense of young people, because old people are not fit to compete.
"Paid their dues" is one of those myths, that translates to telling young people that they owe old people something for being born. Which is of course a lie, nobody is born indebted.
If "anarchy and chaos" is the option to having your blood sucked, I know what I chose.
All human progress is thanks to individuals who have made inventions and discoveries. Since modern man doesn't believe in God, and is too proud to acknowledge the greatness of their fellow man, they instead turn to the fairy-tale myth of a "society" who they say made everything possible, saved the whole mankind from slavery and poverty, and so on.
Feel free to do what you think is good for "society". I will do what's good for me and my fellow man.
Except that's not, in my opinion, what will happen.
1st off, I cannot be convinced this procedure (if it's ever a thing) will be covered by medicare/medicaid or regular insurance, because, I believe, it will be viewed as solely elective. So it will be restricted to those who pay.
And the donors will (mostly) not be altruistic people, they will be people who need the money (see plasma donation in the US for an example of this). These are predatory practices, preying on the poorest of the poor, for the most part.
A+B=C
Wealthy people will pay cash to buy their health off of the poor.
There is a lot of supply and donating blood is simple and easy. Perhaps the price will be low enough that the middle class can afford it and it would provide some supplementary income for young people.
But I thought capitalism was just the thing we need more of, if only we could get government out of the free market then all those problems will go away since the people on the bottom will become rich too!
You already know this but the free market regulates itself precisely equally as well as cancer. The only way any of it ever stops seeking exponential growth is when it dies with disastrous collateral damage.
If it's person-specific, imagine isolating some of it when you're still young, then producing copies and rejuvenating your aging self literally by your own young blood.
This is not about death though. It’s about avoiding things like Alzheimer’s. My Dad has Parkinson’s, and if there was anything that could make that “fixed”, I’ll take that, “oh, but that’s natural” be damned.
They tried to recruit one of my acquaintances to work for for them in sales or something of that nature. The pay would have been decent but the company was "creepy as fuck" as my acquaintance put it.