SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.]
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:53AM
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
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
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
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
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]
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
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
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
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
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
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:10PM
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
(Score: 1) by OrugTor on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:46PM
duh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:22PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:18PM
I thought Canadians are only billed when they go to a private doctor.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:44PM
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
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: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:21PM
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]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:45PM
If they get approved and not blocked in courts, they save gowawful amounts of money. But currently there's all the foot dragging the law allows. Meanwhile, the FDA granted an exclisive on a 19th century generic medication [nejm.org] (available as herbal medicine for over 1000 years) and general healthcare costs have outpaced inflation for over a decade..
Perhaps if we chop up the FDA for firewood and put a new administration in it's place.