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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

“infusing aged animals with cerebrospinal fluid from younger mice can boost SRF activation and actin assembly to more youthful levels”

It seems like we should transplant more than organs.

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Didn't we go through this with youthful blood and find that simply diluting with saline and albumin had the same effect?

Source?

I copy/pasted the exact text of the comment you are responding to into Google--including the "Didn't we" and the question mark--and it pulled up the source you couldn't find.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2023/09/25/wh...

> In 2020 Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues found that replacing half of an old mouse's blood with just albumin, a blood protein, and saline solution had the same rejuvenating effect as young-mouse blood. Old blood may need filtering and dilution, not supplementing.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/06/15/diluting-blood-plasma-r...

I hope it doesn’t take 10 years for this therapy to be used! Cmon!

this poses a huge risk of creating a prion epidemic. things like CSF are very, very risky

Underrated comment

A larger risk than that which comes from blood transfusions? It seems like prion diseases tend to be brain-based, but I'm not sure why

The prion protein, which is the specific protein that can misfold to cause prion disease, is vastly more abundant in nervous tissue.

So we should only drink the blood and spinal fluid of newborns grown in vats and carefully monitored to make sure that they only contain healthy proteins.

My guess is they don't actually want to do this on humans. This is just the first step, finding out if something in young CSF works. Next you figure out exactly what component of it is responsible, and figure out how to synthesise it.

I have small fibre neuropathy, and living with constant pain is... hard - I'd personally take the odds.

Having seen the harrowing Japanese documentary series Shingeki no Kyojin, prions are the least of my worries.

Just make sure to screen any donors for Eldian ancestry.

Attack on Titan?

We could all become vampires. The old consuming the young to prolong life and youth. It's a common theme in science fiction and fantasy.

We've already seen the wealthy consume the blood of the young (in the form of transfusions) to try and live longer.

See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/347828f8-6e7f-4a9b-92...

Elizabeth Bathory

That was all (very successful) slander to oust a female heir out of her fief btw.

I'd donate for MS patients even if it was just a temporary solution.

Peter Thiel emphatically nods head in agreement

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