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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: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:21PM
Birth rates are continuing to drop across the planet, and the planet can support much more humans than it does now.
Anti-aging will increase the amount of time people can do productive work, possibly indefinitely, while minimizing the need for expensive medical care and assisted living.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:24PM
I would think this could also be direct treatment for torn ligaments or broken bones, preventative maintenance--like in people genetically likely to develop various diseases or arthritis.
Even if it did not 'extend lifespan', it could help repair damage accumulated over the years that the host body is already too old to properly heal -- who knows, the stem cell treatment may even result in new younger cells sticking around and replacing, as opposed to just appending, cells in the body. It wouldn't be a perfect cure, but I'd take a marginal improvement in anything and call it a win, even if it doesn't marginally improve actual life span.
People groan and moan about too many people and not enough resources and I do not argue with that. I do argue with the context of we can have no nice things because someone else is breeding too much. At least let me get treatments to improve the quality of life as it diminishes with age... and if you have to, make it so I can't have kids anymore, and it may be a worthy trade, even if I do not live significantly longer. I'd rather have mobility and less pain/freedom of movement and have the opportunity to more easily enjoy life, than possibly be bed ridden but my life saved due to miracle invasive surgery that unfortunately requires around-the-clock care at great expense. (probably... we'll see a future with the potential for both... kept alive beyond natural means and bed ridden)
They say youth is wasted on the young, and that you can't take 'it' with you. I wouldn't mind spending some of my 'it' to keep me feeling younger, even if I am not actually made 'younger' overall. I'd even donate blood or plasma or whatever; I imagine that the blood from yourself 20 years prior kept frozen (or breeding in a bottle without the negative effects of 20 years of daily abuses) would be even better for oneself than someone else's -- it's just a matter of appropriate storage.
Even if this manages to prevent diseases of the elderly, someone in charge will fight over the fact it requires costs to invest in such a return. It'll take some champions of accounting to describe the benefits of spending now for the future shareholders to see a benefit. Considering the need for next quarters results, society would probably prefer to just exploit young people directly because that is always cheapest to do (besides ripping off the elderly, of course.)
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:04PM
Birth rates are continuing to drop across the planet, and the planet can support much more humans than it does now.
Only if your view of an optimum life is living in a factory producing more and more humans. In my opinion we have passed the point where further increases in population means a lowering of the quality of life of everyone.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:33PM
Great, so you don't think that global population will plateau (without life extension, it may even peak and decline), and you think that life extension is unsustainable (people will still die of non-aging causes, and others will refuse life extension or kill themselves).
What are you going to do if these therapies pan out and enable indefinite, youthful, healthy lives at a low cost? Are you going to ban them? Good luck with that. You want to start a war or two and trim the population a bit? Better not involve the nuclear powers.
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(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:44PM
Great, so you don't think that global population will plateau
It may or may not. I'm saying we are already past the point where continued growth of the human population makes this a better planet to live on. It may be my age, but I do not see us gaining as much as we are losing, even with all the toys technology brings us.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:56PM
I actually do think that a few more billion people could improve things. It means more cultural output and greater potential audiences for creative work. It means a larger pool of scientists and engineers that are doing research, some of which might help the growth to be sustainable (agriculture, solar/fusion, etc.)
It means more global economic output and a larger number of billionaires, some of whom will fund science and other big projects that might not be attempted otherwise.
In general, it means a greater number of ideas being thought up and shared (and the proportion of Internet users is rising).
Having a population at 12 billion rather than 3 billion, along with some of the other changes we've seen, could be what is needed to save the planet. If that isn't the case, then we will see a "correction".
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:42AM
Population rates are already locked in. World population is going to plateau at 11 billion so you will get your few extra billion ... Almost all In Africa.
Amazing Hans Rosling video will make it all clear but skip to minute 20 if in a hurry
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:43PM
There's a world beyond the internet, and much of it is being trampled and destroyed by the mania for growth.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:35PM
If you can pull it off, it will be at a higher energy cost per life year. I also have some suspicion that the formative experiences of childhood that are carried into adulthood are an aspect of how human society responds to new developments and that we would be losing something in a model of human development that pushes the ratio of children to adults very low.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.