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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 bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:11PM
Humanity has been searching for immortality or at least greatly extended life spans since Biblical times at least. The Bible has people who supposedly lived for several centuries, and the implication is that our life spans are shorter now to punish us for sinning or some such. Tolkien ran with that idea with his Numenorean men whose life spans declined from near 500 years to 200 or less, and who lost their paradise in retaliation for pushing for immortality in defiance of divine advice and commands. Greek mythology has a character who used a wish to gain immortality but was tricked and because he didn't say anything about not aging, shriveled from aging until becoming a cricket. Then there are the legends around Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. Quite a lot of moralizing about the subject.
But what I wonder is if longer life spans are good or bad for other reasons. Shouldn't animals have evolved to live longer if it is such a benefit to the survival of the species? It seems an awful loss to continually drop the members who remember and know the most, and for the young to have to learn everything all over again. Animals spend a huge amount of resources raising and teaching their young. Another downside is the lack of long term thinking, so often decried in the poor management of corporations, stock purchasing decisions, and now, slow, creeping problems such as Climate Disruption and threats of the nuclear weapons sort.
With our rise, life is at a huge crossroads. It may indeed be Childhood's End for life though not as envisioned in Clarke's novel. We've gained so much power and knowledge that we can't afford to strive to the max anymore, use any and all available means to triumph over rivals, we have to exercise restraint. So far, we have done so with nuclear weapons. A policy of making as many babies as possible, a Baby Boom, in order to feed the tribe or nation's war machine with a continuous supply of fresh, replacement soldiers ("cannon fodder") is one of those maximum strivings we can no longer feel free to do, not if we are to survive.
And yet there are benefits to the "Funeral Option" as so eloquently put by US officials when the troublesome Kim Il-sung was the aging leader of North Korea. Shorter life spans enable faster adaptation to a changing world, including faster evolution. Forgetting can be beneficial, when it is wrong ideas, wrong thinking, and out of date information that end up being dropped.
I find it interesting that plants can live much longer than animals, with life spans that put Methuselah to shame. Also interesting is that life, both plant and animal, slows down when resources are extremely limited, and one byproduct is longer life.
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:57PM
You skipped the holy grail infatuation, drinking from a cup for immortality... then there's the resurgent holy blood/holy grail (sans graal) theories, which seem oddly apropos to the current discussion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:09PM
But what I wonder is if longer life spans are good or bad for other reasons. Shouldn't animals have evolved to live longer if it is such a benefit to the survival of the species?
You're assuming that evolution has found that single, most optimal design. This is patently false. There's plenty of examples even in human anatomy of blatantly "stupid" design decisions (such as one particular nerve which takes a completely nonsensical route), which only make sense when you look at how they came to be that way through evolution from simpler lifeforms. We see the same thing in human designs and organizations and software; a clean-sheet redesign would clean out the "cruft" and be more optimal, but we don't do that because that takes extra effort than simply reusing the thing we already have.
It's very likely we've evolved to have the lifespans we have simply because that's how it turned out, and nature didn't figure out a better way. Remember also, we are extremely complex lifeforms, and part of the tradeoff there is aging, and part of this is likely a byproduct of cancer-protection mechanisms.
Also remember that we were evolved to attempt to have the best chance of survival in an environment where we had no access to medical services at all. This is precisely why we scar when we're injured; it would be better to take longer to heal, but do so without a scar, but we don't do that because our body wants to close the wound ASAP to reduce the risk of infection. But now we have these things called "bandages" and "Neosporin" that can prevent infection, but how do we reprogram our bodies to account for that, instead of just assuming we still live in a dirty cave or mud hut and that we might go swimming at any time in a river that might have pathogens in it? Modern technology has changed our environment, but our biology hasn't caught up yet.
Animals spend a huge amount of resources raising and teaching their young. Another downside is the lack of long term thinking, so often decried in the poor management of corporations, stock purchasing decisions, and now, slow, creeping problems such as Climate Disruption and threats of the nuclear weapons sort.
Animals (including us) were evolved to learn just enough to survive: how to catch some food, what local plants not to eat, etc. Creating corporations, trading stock, worrying about climate change, and building nuclear weapons were not part of the plan; we managed to do all that on our own due to some accident which gave us bigger brains than we really needed for survival with a Bonobo-like existence. We didn't really need thinking on the timescales you're thinking of back in our hunter-gatherer days; we needed to understand seasons, where to find food, and how to migrate when conditions changed, and that was about it. We really didn't need to think more than a few years out. We also had kids in our teenage years, so keeping our population size stable wasn't a big problem. That's all changed now, so a significantly longer lifespan would definitely be helpful for us as a species.
Shorter life spans enable faster adaptation to a changing world, including faster evolution.
Shorter life spans also mean you keep losing your most experienced people too quickly. Evolution works much too slowly to keep up with what humans are trying to do (such as travel in space). And older people can and do learn new things, and certainly do forget old ones.