Blood from young animals can revitalise old ones
economist.com
economist.com
a new study must be done where only blood is transmitted periodically without those other factors in the picture.
Some might be squeamish about it at first, but they'd probably get used to if they saw a pressing medical need for the procedure, just like they got used to so many other medical procedures that were controversial when they were first introduced.
The Vampires of lore are described as very old people who suck the blood of youngsters to stay alive. The parts about them fearing sunlight, or garlic, or whatever, might just be based on side-effects of this cure for ageing. The inaccuracy of "sucking" instead of transfusion, might be because nobody survived to recount the exact way in which vampires took their blood and what they did with it. All they knew was that bodies of young people would sometimes be found, drained of blood and with tiny syringe-like marks on their necks.
In fact, they might still be among us, ruling our world from the shadows :-)
I tend to think the stories are cover for warnings about people that did have power. The prince sucking the very blood of the villagers is a nice metaphor for the prince taking the resources they need to thrive.
Besides you do that almost everyday, i.e. eat animals younger than you and in certain cuisines part of their blood.
This here is something very different, allowing the blood to be used as is from an young individual in an older one.
I see what you did there :)
This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix, I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world, though.
it's a win all around, regulators just have to be careful and not screw it up.
But paying for blood increases the risk of people lying about the quality of their blood, which is why the administration doesn't incentivize blood donations.
Your argument about criminality is very wrong. Maybe I speak for myself, but I'd much rather be a criminal than a professional blood donor. People are not criminals because they have no other way...
this is where middlemen companies come into play, testing the blood and ensuring level of quality
> People are not criminals because they have no other way
sorry, i was not clear enough in my comment. what i meant is that opening up the legal way to sell blood reduces the incentive for criminals to do blood farming or human trafficking for the same purpose. much like legalizing marijuana will push drug traffickers out of the market.
[0] http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/10-body-parts-you-can-le...
If the tenant stops paying does the baby get delivered prematurely?
This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.
You would not want to force those students to have to choose between morality and 1 order of magnitude more money than what they can do in the official public blood donation center.
The morality of the remuneration is orthogonal. I assumed we were talking about countries where it is moral and legal to remunerate blood donation. I don't think that countries that today do not allow remuneration (for any reason) would allow it for this new use case.
If it is sold as a "rejuvenating cosmetics" with scientific evidence backing it up, it will get bad.
I mean, that's already what they do with sex workers
Between hospitals blood is bought and sold at the price you mention.
Radiolab had an episode about this some time ago.
I feel like the market can find a solution for this that's unworkable for blood banks because of regulations, hospital requirements, scale, etc.
i.e., force applicants to prescreen their blood and permaban them for lying or if their blood fails drug/illness/etc. checks.
And if we are really thinking about catering to the uber rich just raise both prices by an order of magnitude and you'll have plenty of donors and probably a ton of buyers.
But for some years, a lot of prostitutes from Eastern Europe got brought by the mafia and drove the prices way down for everyone. As a result, the market is now filled with exploited girls, working conditions are awful(ler ?), and the libertarian El Dorado of 'young women voluntarily selling a service' is dead, replaced by a dystopia of what has basically become selling drugged meat until the meat is dead or not fresh enough to be sold. The meat comparison is unfortunately not that much of an hyperbole, just go for a jogging in Bois de Boulogne and you'll see true human misery.
I'm afraid the same kind of scenario is not that much of a stretch for blood. It could even be worse, as a prostitute have to at least be presentable so bad treatment has to be a bit restrained.
I think it might make more sense for super rich people to pay people directly to give them their blood, which is morally questionable but maybe not particularly worse than, say, paying for a surrogate mother? It sounds a lot less traumatizing at least, both physically and psychologically. After all many people do donate their blood for free several times a year.
I'm pretty sure you could convince many young people to give up some of their blood for a pretty cheap price actually. No need to resort to kidnapping and slave farms.
Many young people already do give up their blood for a pretty cheap price, so I don't think there's any reason for this to become a black market thing.
Major advances? Blood transfusions and the whole idea sound quite basic to me.
(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)
> Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
-- Martin Luther King
Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, too.
But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.
Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.
If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.
This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]
Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death
[2] - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-ni...
> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.
In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?
I mean, whats wrong with that, really?
Here's the thing .. we live in a dangerous world precisely because technologists decided to ignore the social ramifications of their work and only focus on 'the positive' that comes from it.
I mean, the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese did a lot of positive things for human sciences .. can't we just enjoy the fact that their research into the limits of human endurance has made it possible to be a better military pilot? C'mon people ..
/s
"The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death" https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel-young-...
For now, it seems to be most useful as a rapid-onset suicide prevention treatment.
The other options are pretty much worse, although more common:
- a daily SSRI (thus increases tolerance much faster), and has a larger range of significant side effects, such as anorgasmia, increased depression or emergence of suicidal tendencies, weight gain, "electric zaps"/spontaneous muscle spasm/discontinuation syndrome for months after cessation, dulled affect, increased proclivity towards serotonin syndrome
- leaving depression untreated
http://news.yale.edu/2017/03/01/ketamine-eases-severe-depres...
The method of action of ketamine is thought to be via hydroxynorketamine, not placebo which I don't really see as being pertinent - maybe confirmation bias, but not placebo. I also contend that suicidality is not long-term stable- supposing a typical antidepressants regimen is ineffective and only frustrates a patient, then to not pursue a treatment with a pretty strong effect strength would lead to more suicides as the outcome, imo.
I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.
It's just that weird drug use makes headlines and headlines makes money
Or maybe they don't tell you.
Its extremely common in the hackrrspace scene to encounter developers who are using 'smart drugs' to stay up for 3 or 4 days at a time, or who think that a bump of speed at the right moment can make all the difference in the world to the codebase. Of course, I'm yet to see a case where this so-called boost in productivity is actively achieved, but it seems this isn't as important a fact to the guys in the lab coats ..
A friend in collage used say a little alcohol would help him calm down and code. A few decades later he accepted that he was just an alcoholic. Another friend refers to nicotine as his work drug...
20 years ago I met a guy who said he was using LSD to avoid wasting time sleeping and to boost his creativity. IMO, it's the same deal where people self justify whatever drug they want to use.
http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-selling-h...
What of transplant patients that receive a kidney or liver transplant from a younger donor?
so in near future the use of a blood boy wouldn't be just transfusion, instead it will be more like dialysis where the blood boy plays the role of dialysis machine.
I guess its different only in that as a group 'the young' are distinct from 'the clones'
I'm also reminded of a legend from southern africa that HIV could be cured via sex with a young virgin.
PS OMG, I googled and discovered that bloodcoin already exists.
Market it right and the billionaires might even be able to charge us to give them blood.
Some sites claim it comes from the Mayo Clinic, others list the source as the University of California San Diego, and so on
wight
Even if the figure were low by 10x it would be a pretty bad way to lose weight.
I'm not a biochemist, but my understanding was that the natural, far slower rate at which blood is broken down / discarded is much less conducive to having a good supply of healthy Erythrocytes than what you get when half a litre of blood must be replenished. Upon doing a donation that's a solid supply of fresh red blood cells into your system.
I was referring to it specifically being beneficial to men because they/we do not have menstrual cycle - where blood is refreshed at a higher than average rate as such.
Also. In case of a trauma, it would stand to certain reason that someone who is a regular donor would be better equipped to recover from this than someone who's never experienced blood loss before.
Assuming functional spleen and liver, the human body is also exceptionally good at removing damaged red blood cells. Average life span given no RBC abnormalities is 120 days; there is no 'degradation' of oxygen carrying capacity that happens between a cell freshly minted and one nearing the end of its lifespan.
The human body has significant spare resources in the marrow waiting to spring into action and training is not necessary. Upon significant blood loss, (i.e. Secondary to trauma) regardless of the blood loss naive or the regular donor, reticulocytes (not completely differentiated red blood cells) are liberated from the marrow, 'early' as it were.
A blood donor gives less than an amount of blood that causes physiological changes, BY DESIGN.
Increased red cell production is governed by oxygen demand/oxygen thirst in a complex sensing mechanism by the body and regular donation barely tickles red cell production
So basically the main benefit of donating would be for others; I'm still keeping my upcoming O- donation in my schedule. ;)