Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-works-for-vampires dept.

Apparently, Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood

According to the article, ...

More than anything, Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter, wants to find a way to escape death. ... if there's one thing that really excites Thiel, it's the prospect of having younger people's blood transfused into his own veins. ... according to Thiel, it's a potential biological Fountain of Youth - the closest thing science has discovered to an anti-ageing panacea.

[...] After decades languishing on the fringes, it's recently started getting attention from mainstream researchers, with multiple clinical trials underway in humans in the U.S. and even more advanced studies in China and Korea.

[...] In Monterey, California, about 120 miles from San Francisco, a company called Ambrosia recently commenced one of the trials. Titled "Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers," it has a simple protocol: Healthy participants aged 35 and older get a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for molecular indicators of health and ageing. The study is patient-funded; participants, who range in age from late 30s through 80s, must pay $8,000 to take part, and live in or travel to Monterey for treatments and follow-up assessments.

I thought I would bring this development to the attention of the Soylent News community. I also have a question. The article claims that the practice is known as parabiosis. But Wikipedia says "parabiosis is a class of techniques in which two living organisms are joined together surgically and develop single, shared physiological systems, such as a shared circulatory system." This definition seems to include the relevant 1950s rat experiments. But I believe it does not cover the Monterey experiment, nor the kinds of human treatment that Thiel and others are seeking. Am I right about this? And if so, is there better word to use?

Also, feel free to comment any fictional examples you know of. Did Montgomery Burns ever partake, for example?


[Continues...]

Want to stay/get younger? Inject plasma from a younger person...

Now a startup has launched a "clinical trial" to test the antiaging benefits of such treatment...but it's pay-per-view. Writing in Science today, Jocelyn Kaiser reports on the ethical, and other, aspects of this project. From her article, "Young blood antiaging trial raises questions":

[...] The company, Ambrosia in Monterey, California, plans to charge participants $8000 for lab tests and a one-time treatment with young plasma. The volunteers don't have to be sick or even particularly aged--the trial is open to anyone 35 and older. Karmazin notes that the study passed ethical review and argues that it's not that unusual to charge people to participate in clinical trials.

To some ethicists and researchers, however, the trial raises red flags, both for its cost to participants and for a design that they say is unlikely to deliver much science. "There's just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you're basically abusing people's trust and the public excitement around this," says neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who led the 2014 young plasma study in mice. [In which injecting old mice with the plasma portion of blood from young mice seemed to improve the elderly rodents' memory and ability to learn.]

[...]

To bioethicist Leigh Turner at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, the study brings to mind a growing number of scientifically dubious trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov by private, for-profit stem cell clinics. The presence of such trials in the database confers "undeserved legitimacy," he says.

The scientific design of the trial is drawing concerns as well. "I don't see how it will be in any way informative or convincing," says aging biologist Matt Kaeberlein of the University of Washington, Seattle. The participants won't necessarily be elderly, making it hard to see any effects, and there are no well-accepted biomarkers of aging in blood, he says. "If you're interested in science," Wyss-Coray adds, why doesn't such a large trial include a placebo arm? Karmazin says he can't expect people to pay knowing they may get a placebo. With physiological measurements taken before and after treatment, each person will serve as their own control, he explains.


[Ed Note: The second sub was added about 15 minutes after the first story went live on the main page.]

Original Submission

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:31AM (#383059)

    [...]Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter, wants to find a way to escape death. ... if there's one thing that really excites Thiel, it's the prospect of having younger people's blood transfused into his own veins.

    Back in my day, this type of people at least attempted to hide the fact that they were leeches, these days, they come right out and say it...

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Funny=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:35AM (#383060)

    I wonder what the next step will be? These fuckers will destroy their own organs by abusing them with hookers, blow and booze just because they have enough money to pay for a transplant 'of their choice'.
    "Hey you, over there with the 'Please give, anything helps - disabled vet' sign on the corner, wanna make 100 bucks? What if I give you 90 bucks and you give me your liver? Deal? Good, for 80 bucks I get your liver, yeah? Here's 70 bucks... as a single 50 bucks bill."

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:53AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:53AM (#383069) Journal

      These fuckers are also investing in technologies such as organ printing that will benefit everybody on the transplant list.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:02PM (#383075)

        except for amputees, because they don't have an arm or a leg anymore, which is what this will cost!

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:06PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:06PM (#383078) Journal

          Only certain double, triple and quadruple amputees.

          Early adopters will get access to functional organs and anti-aging therapies. More people will be able to afford access to more effective organs and therapies later on. That's the way it has always been.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:16PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:16PM (#383086)

            More people will be able to afford...

            Aannnnd you lost me... Are you Canadian? Or do you live in some other civilized country where health care is not equivalent to price gouging? Because based on how it's going here in the US of A, the only thing we're number one in, is the high cost of health care...

            You'll get brought into the ER while unconscious and with some organ failure, they'll keep you alive for long enough (beds gotta be filled to make money), reprint a new organ for you (we gotta use this technology once we have it, it'd be a shame if it stood there unused) and implant it (otherwise that poor OR is just standing there, empty, gotta maximize occupancy, you see). And then for the remainder of your life, you'll be in debt to either the health insurance who ponied up the cost up-front but wants its money back or the hospital because your health insurance doesn't cover custom-printed organs but they gave you one anyway. And there's no way for you to escape, because the newly printed organ's got a remote kill switch in it requiring you to present yourself with your 'payment facilitation officer' every week like you're a felon on parole! Welcome to serf-dom!

            Now if only you were a {b|m}illionaire, you'd be able to afford this easily...

            • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:27PM

              by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:27PM (#383094) Journal

              Anti-aging is preventative health care. It will reduce other health care costs.

              Alzheimer's is a good example. It falls under the AmyloSENS category of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence [wikipedia.org]:

              http://www.alzheimers.net/resources/alzheimers-statistics/ [alzheimers.net]

              The Cost of Alzheimer's Care. The cost of caring for Alzheimer's patients in the U.S. is estimated to be $236 billion in 2016. The global cost of Alzheimer's and dementia is estimated to be $605 billion, which is equivalent to 1% of the entire world's gross domestic product.

              If you implement anti-aging therapies in the population, you eliminate many years of lost productivity, remove the need for costly assisted living, and eliminate the huge expense of end-of-life health care.

              --
              [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
              • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:09PM

                by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:09PM (#383109) Journal

                Look, you're a reasonable person. Since when has health “insurance” been about reducing healthcare costs? The more expensive healthcare is, and the more healthcare people need, the more they can skim off the top.

                • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:49PM

                  by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:49PM (#383127) Journal

                  Are there anti-competitive forces in health care that don't want to see anti-aging succeed? Sure. Will they manage to stop this? Not necessarily. Thiel and other Silicon Valley transhumanist types we love to bash will fund and sell anti-aging therapies if other industries refuse to. They also have the lobbyists necessary to reduce industry-supported FDA barriers. If it can't get done in the U.S., they will just move the research and drug production overseas, and you will see a new form of medical tourism.

                  The ability of citizens to manipulate DNA and synthesize drugs and chemicals in small labs is also getting better.

                  http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/08/01/488255920/fda-approved-knock-offs-of-biotech-drugs-could-safely-save-big-bucks [npr.org]

                  Look, something that goes against the trend of expensive health care. DIDN'T EXPECT THAT DIDYA

                  --
                  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
                  • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:55PM

                    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:55PM (#383155) Journal

                    Fair enough, I didn't expect that! Color me double surprised to see that it was a provision of Obamacare to boot!

                • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:55PM

                  by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:55PM (#383199)

                  The AC up-thread hinted at the answer.

                  In a system of universal health-care, you prioritize based on need, not cost. (Though cost consideration does come into it eventually).

                  They will always be sick people. No need to engineer problems

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:21PM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:21PM (#383241) Journal
                    Sure. If it costs too much, then you don't need it.
                    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:10PM

                      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:10PM (#383297)

                      No, more like you get priority access to the expensive machine if your life is on the line. But there are only so many expensive machines to go around.

                      In a universal health-care system it is understood that some people will cost more money than others. However, nobody chooses to have an expensive life-threatening illness.

                      Mandatory insurance coverage is one thing that Obamacare got right. From my limited understanding, the whole system seem like an awkward compromise though.

                      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:57PM

                        by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:57PM (#383391) Journal

                        Mandatory insurance coverage is one thing that Obamacare got right.

                        I was cautiously optimistic that this was a good idea. I had thought (and still do…) that the free market and the infusion of healthy young people would have driven down costs.

                        Holy shit was I wrong. Everybody believes the “basic care is too expensive!” meme blindly, so insurance companies are getting away with a hell of a racket. I've never had my premiums go up so fast. I used to have a plan that was one grade under a Cadillac plan! I absolutely don't buy it for one damned second that getting tons of healthy young people insurance somehow necessitates raising premiums and deductibles. It's a total scam, and I imagine there's gobs and gobs of Hollywood-style accounting enabling it.

                        The employer mandate was another screw up. What that changed is that instead of merely avoiding having hourly employees go over $limit_x (40 hours), employers have had to create a new class of part time worker who is absolutely forbidden from going over $new_limit (29.5 hours). Before “part time” meant that there was no guarantee you'd get hours, but if you were a good employee you'd probably work between 38 to 42-ish hours per week.

                        I think we need single payer if the alternative is an increasingly broken fucking mess that screws over the middle class, but I'm sure that somehow not even that could fix the spiraling costs.

                        The art of self-fulfilling prophecy at its finest!

                        • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52AM

                          by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52AM (#383428)

                          A single-payer system still has mandatory coverage. I just did not feel awake enough to explain the nuances.

                          Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] summarizes the Canadian system as:

                          a publicly funded healthcare system, which is mostly free at the point of use and has most services provided by private entities. It is guided by the provisions of the Canada Health Act of 1984

                          Generally, doctors are paid a set fee-for-service.

                          What you describe does sound like a scam. Young people tend to not need expensive healthcare except for trauma injuries. Premiums should go down if young people are required to sign up. Although, with universal health-care, they are no longer allowed to exclude you for pre-existing conditions. So it may balance out somewhat.

                          • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:16AM

                            by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:16AM (#383459) Journal

                            No explanation necessary. Sleep well! The only thing I haven't looked into in detail are the differences between Canadian vs. UK vs. German, etc. I guess what I'm hoping for with single payer is some reigning in of costs and the elimination of middlemen.

                            Pre-existing conditions one would think would be their chosen excuse, but it's not. It is literally that paying for everybody to visit their doctor once per year is breaking the bank.

                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 03 2016, @01:22AM

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 03 2016, @01:22AM (#383445) Journal

                          I was cautiously optimistic that this was a good idea. I had thought (and still do…) that the free market and the infusion of healthy young people would have driven down costs.

                          And the US didn't get enough young people to infuse because they aren't stupid. Forcing a bunch of healthy people to pay for known sick people via insurance is great for the sick people, not so great for the healthy people.

                          I think we need single payer if the alternative is an increasingly broken fucking mess that screws over the middle class, but I'm sure that somehow not even that could fix the spiraling costs.

                          I'd take this supposed choice more seriously, if the latest group to break the current US health care system weren't those advocates [cnn.com] for single payer.

                          A third video emerged Wednesday of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, insulting voters and suggesting their ignorance was exploited by those pushing passage of the health care law.

                          and

                          That video, from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 (which you can see here) featured Gruber saying, "If you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in -- if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, OK? Just like how people -- transparent -- lack of transparency is a huge advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

                          Elsewhere he brags [cnn.com] that the Cadillac tax is actually a stealth means to eliminate the employer tax break on health care plans.

                          In one of the videos that surfaced in recent days in which the man described by the Obama campaign as having helped to write Obamacare describes the many ways voters he calls stupid were easily misled about the bill by those pushing it, Gruber says the Cadillac tax will do exactly what the president pledged it would not -- dissuade employers in general from providing insurance for its employees. "Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer provider health insurance," Gruber said at the Pioneer Institute for public policy research in Boston in 2011. The subsidy is "terrible policy," Gruber said.

                          Here, we have a key architect of this key health care bill admitting that he knew ahead of time that of various problems and hid those things from the public for their own good, supposedly. It doesn't strain credulity in my opinion that the creators of this bill attempted to break US health care enough to make single payer appealing to the US voter. For our own good, of course.

                          • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:08AM

                            by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:08AM (#383456) Journal

                            Wow. That's pretty hilarious actually. I wouldn't doubt that some perverse single-payer system where Americans pay trillions and accept a standard of care that's worse than any other developed nation is what the lizard people are going for.

                            I mean, don't get me wrong. I think all that needed to happen was for employers to stop subsidizing health insurance. A big part of my current difficulty with “religious/feminist objection!” are that people think they're suddenly paying more because I'm getting crap for free since, well obviously, omg free Obamacare sex changes! I don't think we had “religious objection!” before Obamacare.

                            I don't want anybody paying for my meds. I have a job and can buy them myself. They're routine, generics are available, and it's not life-threatening. I just want people to shut up and take my money.

                            My resignation is that I have no idea how on earth to salvage the insurance model of healthcare delivery at this point. I know you hate socialism more than I do, but I just get so sick of all the ineptly designed social programs we do have. Something about people learning that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.

                • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:40PM

                  by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:40PM (#383278) Journal

                  The longer people live, the longer you can get money from them. The whole point of this treatment is to make you live longer.

                  --
                  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
              • (Score: 1) by OrugTor on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:42PM

                by OrugTor (5147) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:42PM (#383192)
                Anti-aging therapies will defer old age, not replace it. At least, the first generation of treatments will only postpone. The consequences can be generally foreseen: a longer lifespan before old age is an invitation to various pathologies that develop with something like a Poisson distribution. I'm thinking of cancer primarily which at this point is a natural consequence of the sheer complexity of the organism. Other pathologies that presently are rare or even unknown may become common in those with extended lifespans. I don't see reduced healthcare costs from old age avoidance. The real benefit to the recipient is the extended period of productivity based on accumulated experience and of course, just living more life. This particular approach looks more like mysticism than science. Has Thiel considered drinking the blood of the warriors he has vanquished to absorb their powers?
                • (Score: 1) by OrugTor on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:46PM

                  by OrugTor (5147) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:46PM (#383195)

                  duh

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:22PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:22PM (#383211)
                  </i>
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:18PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:18PM (#383209)

              I thought Canadians are only billed when they go to a private doctor.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:44PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:44PM (#383221) Journal

              You'll get brought... [hysterical sci fi dystopia deleted]

              Well, you just made a straw man, so making straw organs ought to be pretty cheap.

          • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:15PM

            by sjames (2882) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:15PM (#383180) Journal

            Affordability is going the wrong way in the U.S. lately. Costs of common treatments have been tripling or *hrm, we don't have a word for costing 80 times what it used to...)

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday August 03 2016, @10:14AM

      by driverless (4770) on Wednesday August 03 2016, @10:14AM (#383554)

      Heck Erzsébet Báthory was doing this back in the 16th century. They walled her up in a tower for it after she'd gone through several hundred young people.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:44AM (#383063)

    This is the guy who destroyed gawker for reporting on his business failures (6 billion dollars he lost trying to manage a hedge fund). He wants to be a leech, he just doesn't want anyone calling him out on it in public. Also, he founded palantir [wikipedia.org] to secretly track people for the CIA. He's about as destructive and toxic as a man can get.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:26PM (#383093)

      Not that I'm a big fan of Thiel, but you don't think he might hate Gawker because they outed him as a gay man??

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:54PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:54PM (#383103)

        I do not. Because they did not. He outed himself in a 2003 profile in the new yorker.
        He was also openly gay in his daily life, it was only a "secret" to people who didn't know him personally, just like anyone's sexual orientation is a secret to people who do not know them. His supposed outrage over being incidentally mentioned in a positive light as part of a larger story about silicon valley's positive attitude towards gay people is misdirection.

        But even if he had been outed, killing the entire company is completely disproportionate. The damage he suffered as a result was negligible.

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:56PM

          by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:56PM (#383229) Journal

          He outed himself in a 2003 profile in the new yorker.

          The founder of Gawker said that. [adweek.com]

          I looked for the New Yorker article but didn't find it, nor any reference to it, on the Web. I found a New Yorker piece from 2011 that says:

          [...] Thiel didn’t come out to his friends until 2003, when he was in his mid-thirties. “Do you know how many people in the financial world are openly gay?” he asked one friend, explaining that he didn’t want his sexual orientation to get in the way of his work.

          --http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes [newyorker.com]

          The author of the 2007 Valleywag article “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People” said [nytimes.com]

          I did discuss his sexuality, but it was known to a wide circle who felt that it was not fit for discussion beyond that circle.

        • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:31PM

          by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:31PM (#383242) Journal

          He outed himself in a 2003 profile in the new yorker.

          I just got access to The New Yorker's full archives, but it seems like they only have content from after ~2006 indexed for internal searching. At least, that's the earliest piece it's giving me about Thiel. Do you have a specific citation so that I can see what this article actually said without combing through a whole year of The New Yorker? If you do, I'll share the relevant quote (if any) here.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:08PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:08PM (#383263)

            Their search is fucked up. Search for Thiel in the default sort by relevance mode and you'll see some hits going back into the 80s at least (not that thiel though).
            Switch to sort by date and the hits stop in 2006.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:38PM (#383099)

    I thought you were gonna say that the media back in your day was subtler about the phrasing it chooses, but oh well..