Peter Thiel Pursuing Parabiosis Blood Transfusions As Fountain Of Youth

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.

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8 years ago

[…] Peter Thiel Pursuing Parabiosis Blood Transfusions As Fountain Of Youth […]

Dave
Dave
8 years ago

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.

Wesley
Wesley
8 years ago

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.

Wesley
Wesley
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
8 years ago

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.

Rime
Rime
Reply to  Wesley
8 years ago

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.

Zanjero
Zanjero
8 years ago

Maybe Elizabeth Bathory was on to something. Then again, maybe she was just a nut.

Robert What?
Robert What?
8 years ago

I can see a brisk underground business rising up in places like China using the blood of young, kidnapped “volunteers”.

Dave
Dave
8 years ago

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.

Rime
Rime
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
8 years ago

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

Dave
Dave
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
8 years ago

“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.

Dave
Dave
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
8 years ago

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.