Older mouse brains rejuvenated by protein found in young blood
nature.com
nature.com
They tried to recruit one of my acquaintances to work for for them in sales or something of that nature. The pay would have been decent but the company was "creepy as fuck" as my acquaintance put it.
That's very charitable.
A startup company, Ambrosia, has been selling "young blood transfusions" for $8,000 since 2016 under the guise of running a clinical trial, to see if such transfusions lead to changes in the blood of recipients.[1][14] As of August 2017, they had 600 people join.[15] The clinical trial has no control arm and so is neither randomized nor blind. As described, whole blood collected by blood banks that had passed its 42-day storage limit was centrifuged to remove cells, the resulting cell-free plasma pooled from several donations and intravenously transfused into recipients.[15] The company was started by Jesse Karmazin, a medical school graduate without a license to practice medicine.[16] David Wright is the licensed doctor overseeing the clinical trial; in his practice he administers intravenous treatments of vitamins and antibiotics for nontraditional purposes and was disciplined by the California Medical Board for the latter in 2015. Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist from McGill University, suggests that Ambrosia is running this as a trial as they would be unable to get FDA approval to sell this treatment otherwise.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion#Ambros...
How often does this happened? I am continually being spammed by Stanford saying they have a critical shortage, and I do almost the maximum number of donations a year. I would hate to discover that it's all a waste.
Don’t try catching up on your sleep while doing this because they get upset thinking you passed out.
Seems a worthy way to make money to me.
I'm also glad there are people willing to take some calculated risks so we can continue to learn about ourselves and our world.
1. Gathering accurate data
2. Sharing (or intending to share) the accurate data
This seems like a great business? Blood banks get to monetize what would have otherwise been a waste product. And we get more data. Why is it creepier than standard organ donation?
There isn't really an experiment being run, just the waste product --> money pipeline.
You're claiming we have all the clinical data we need on this treatment model?
If you need a transfusion, the risk doesn't matter, but to willingly do it is really foolish.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/1997/lab-mice-glow-wh...
Something like this kind of: https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/custom-model-gener...
Are there actually research groups throwing the kitchen sink at mice and seeing how long they can make them live?
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/issue-....
I suppose if everyone lived, say 5 years longer, and only delayed a disease by 5 years, it would be a break even in cost. Although, who wouldn’t want 5 more healthy years?
There is even a market for blood itself, with the strange stipulation that in the US the donor isn't compensated. (But everyone else along the supply chain is paid handsomely).
I appreciate where you are coming from - It seems like you're saying it's not that far from existing common practices.
But if people find something distasteful and think it's a bad idea, how close it is to other things isn't really relevant. Maybe those should be banned/fixed too, maybe not.
But if people dislike something or find it "yucky", it's fair for them to raise objections.
I used to work in that field and it's actually a great stipulation. Otherwise you'd have poor people coming in to sell their blood to make a living. The place I worked at paid people for plasma (but not for whole blood) and it was a difference like night & day in terms of the kind of people that this attracted. They often came in as often as was legally allowed (every 10(?) days) and looked awful.
Assuming that this discovery is turned into a useful technology, any method of systematizing that technology that doesn't have a mixture of lawyers, bioethicists, sociologists and patient advocates in a policy-making role will introduce new horrors to society, outweighing the gains.
Oh no, this new sector sounds terrible!
I have a friend who donated blood routinely while between jobs. They already pay for this.
Semantic jokes aside, we have some decent coverage of the idea from science fiction already. The one that comes to my mind is the Babylon 5 Season 1, Episode 9: "Deathwalker" where an alien develops a universal anti-agapic and decides to give it to Earth because it requires the destruction of someone living to create a dose.
What we actually need is to find a way to synthesize the protein, should it have any equivalent and effect in humans, under production circumstances, and not require donors at all.
It's only a problem if people don't have other ways to make rent because of it. If this somehow decreases people's other opportunites to get money, then sure, that's bad.
I've had poor friends and family sell plasma for money. They don't feel worse off for having the option.
Edit to say: if there's any efficacy in blood transfusions being useful for neurophysiological benefits, then this procedure should be available for medicinal purposes like enemas I think it's more efficient (and economical for a business) to use synthetic blood, though.
As long as the donors are adequately compensated, I see no issue with it.
Social systems have a way of changing underneath you until it collapses.
From the beginning of time until now the statement was that you held power/money until it was taken from you or until you died (and you couldn't take anything with you regardless of how many riches you were buried with).
You want to, of your own free will and volition, reduce it to just the "until it's taken away from you" part. Which leads me to conclude that either your viewpoint is incredibly naïve or you are at the very, very top of the totem pole and wish to preserve the status quo as long as possible.
We never died the same way or at the same age. Selection in biology invokes some individuals making it to breeding age while others don't.
Unlike costmetic surgery, your gain depends on someone else's loss.
There are likely to be supply/demand issues in a society with where citizens have free access to each others blood for recreational purposes.
How? The 'loss' from donating blood is fairly minimal. If properly compensated everyone could be coming out better off.
edit: see Peter Thiel.
So many things in that show are taken from real life. So much so, I know a guy who used to work in the valley area for tech startups, and he said the show triggered his PTSD.
So if it had any benefit to anybody, instead of most-likely being a poison that the body recycles, it's synthesizable and available all without killing young children.
50% of the replies on this thread are jokes about vampires, or past 'controversies', jokes about the rich, etc...etc...
It is all jokes.
Some are flagged, some are not. It seems arbitrary. Is there a way to challenge this?
Guys could feel jealous missing out on that opportunity but how much it feel to have the most lucrative years of your life be when you're young? What does it say about society that it financially values you the most when you have the least actual power in your life?
Very similar to donating young blood, it's not likely donating blood will lead to the career of managing blood donation. You're useful then you can't own the club you're stripping at or the donation center. It's just you're used then "cool you're old now hope you saved enough for a coding boot camp".
Some research just seems like it could solely increase existing power imbalances.
"Society" is a lie that was invented by corrupted old people in order to extract things from young people in a parasitic manner, by making young people work for them (labour, taxes, rent, you name it), take care of them, be abused by them, fuck them, go die in a war for them, and finally now literally give their blood to be sucked.
"Society" and every derivative from that myth are lies created for the purpose above. Some never understand the scam, most strive to themselves trade their position of host to a position of beneficiary. Very few try to reject the abuse.
It is no coincidence that every single political ideology, economic system and organized religion are built to transfer from the young to the old.
We all participate in society, work in society, build society, rest in society, and benefit from society. People who paid their dues doing these things receive retirement at old age because of society. You can find edge cases where society isn't perfect, but none of these edge cases will justify the sweeping claims you made. You threw the baby out with the bathwater big time. You're pretty much advocating for anarchy and chaos.
Economic systems and religious systems exist because they are useful abstractions. Sometimes they map onto physical reality and correctly measure and explain the movement of commodities and as a result we get a more connected world and more trade. When the abstractions don't serve us well anymore, they get upgraded to address new complexity. That is why we have economic theory. Sometimes these abstractions map onto human emotions and lived experience across the spectrum of ages to give people hope and to answer the questions science cannot. That is why we have religions.
They're all beautiful, they're all abstractions that are useful, and they exist because everyone wants them to. There is no conspiracy by the old to subsume the young.
"Paid their dues" is one of those myths, that translates to telling young people that they owe old people something for being born. Which is of course a lie, nobody is born indebted.
If "anarchy and chaos" is the option to having your blood sucked, I know what I chose.
All human progress is thanks to individuals who have made inventions and discoveries. Since modern man doesn't believe in God, and is too proud to acknowledge the greatness of their fellow man, they instead turn to the fairy-tale myth of a "society" who they say made everything possible, saved the whole mankind from slavery and poverty, and so on.
Feel free to do what you think is good for "society". I will do what's good for me and my fellow man.
But wouldn't it be nice if we could defer death and have another couple decades living in health?