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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: 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.)