From vampires to vampire facials, Humans have long been intrigued by young blood and its potential restorative powers, and scientists have been so intrigued that they’ve even sewn up mice and injected them with fresh blood to see what effect it would have on older bodies.
Just last summer, a group of Harvard Medical School researchers claimed to have extended the lifespan of old mice by connecting them to the circulatory systems of young mice, using a creepy method called “heterochronic parabiosis.”
After spending three months with the furry cubs, the old mice lived an average of 6 to 9 percent longer than the control mice and also developed a kind of “Rejuvenating effect” aging seemed to slow down considerably.
months ago, Another studyThe same research team found that the organs of young mice aged dramatically during parabiosis: when the mice and their blood supply were cut off, the organs of the young mice seemed to recover and become biologically rejuvenated. In other words, the young mice underwent aging. Reversal.
The phrase “age-reversing rejuvenation” sounds a lot like the advertising slogans of so many skin care products on the market, and brings to mind the last time fraudulent start-ups tried to sell anti-aging potions to people desperate to avoid wrinkles.
In 2017, an entrepreneur named Jesse Karmazin began making some pretty outlandish claims. His startup, Ambrosia, offered $8,000 infusions of plasma from 16-year-old donors, billing the procedure as “plastic surgery from the inside out.” With just one injection, Karmazin said, patients could improve their appearance, sleep, and strength, and even cure diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Karmazin “Reverses Aging” He told a reporter At the time, I didn’t think so. “There’s no question at all that it would work.”
In reality, was Many questions were raised, and just two years later the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shut it all down.
The ancient charm of young blood
Karmazin was not the first optimist to hope that the blood of young people might actually be the fountain of youth.
One of Oldest record Stories of drinking blood to rejuvenate oneself date back to ancient Rome, when Pliny the Elder wrote that an epileptic attacked a wounded gladiator “in an attempt to take his life.” More than 1,000 years later, Pope Innocent VIII is rumored to have drunk the blood of three 10-year-old boys in an attempt to stave off impending death.Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.)
In the late 16th century, a Hungarian countess named Elisabeth Bathory was accused of torturing and murdering as many as 600 young women in her enormous hilltop castle. Her first victims were peasant girls who came to the castle seeking work as servants and maids. Bathory is said to have then expanded her influence to include the daughters of nobles whose parents had sent them to the castle to learn court etiquette. Her victims were allegedly tortured in gruesome ways, including being doused in honey and eaten by insects, whipped with nettles, and submerged in ice baths in the middle of winter.
However, Bathory’s depravity is best remembered today for her obsession with virgin blood, which she believed would preserve her beauty and vitality. It is rumored that she not only drank the blood of her victims, but also bathed in it. She became known as the “Blood Countess,” and is thought to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, The Blood Countess. Dracula.
Fast forward to the 1920s, Russian scientist Alexander Bogdanov gave himself many blood transfusions, He claimed to be healthierHe published a book touting the “stimulating” effects of young blood. Ironically, his 12th and final transfusion caused malaria and tuberculosis, leading to his death at the age of 54.
Bogdanov’s tragic end hasn’t deterred tech company CEO Brian Johnson from injecting himself with a liter of his 17-year-old son’s plasma in the summer of 2023. Johnson, who has publicly described an extreme health regime that involves taking more than 100 pills every day, a strict diet and regular checkups in order to live to 200 years old, I said it with X (formerly known as Twitter) said it had “detected no benefit” from transfusions.
Startup’s Bloody Bluff
Since 2005In the 1960s, scientists began combining young and old mice to see what effect it would have on the older mice. The resulting studies all seemed to point to the same thing: there was something about the new blood that made the old rodents feel, act, and look younger. But what that something was, and how long the effect lasted, remained big question marks.
Either way, these experiments excited Karmazin, a Stanford medical student who left residency early to start his own startup, Ambrosia. Clinical Trials—goodWell, something like that. While most clinical trials pay participants, Karmazin charged $8,000 for his trial. Subjects over the age of 35 would receive two liters of plasma from donors between the ages of 16 and 25. Because plasma transfusions are an established treatment, Karmazin did not need FDA approval to conduct the trial.
To advance his research, Karmazin needed young people’s plasma — at least 80 gallons, according to the startup’s founder. But blood banks don’t typically store blood by age or sell plasma for the kind of anti-aging experiments Karmazin proposed. Karmazin declined to say where he ultimately found this trove of plasma.
He also did not release much data from the “clinical trials,” instead publishing the sensational “Investigation resultWhen the study concluded in January 2018, it was reported that people in their 60s had seen their gray hair turn dark, one participant with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease saw improvement after just one treatment, and many others experienced dramatic improvements in inflammation and blood cholesterol levels.
When the startup began offering plasma transfusions ($8,000 for one liter of young donor blood, $12,000 for two liters) in five U.S. cities, the FDA stepped in. In early 2019, the FDA warned consumers not to buy young donor plasma. “There is no proven clinical benefit to transfusing plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent these conditions,” it said in a statement. “We strongly discourage consumers from pursuing this treatment outside of clinical trials with appropriate institutional review board and regulatory oversight.”
Ambrosia announced it was ceasing transfusions that same day, but just a few months later, Karmazin announced the opening of Ivy Plasma, which also provides transfusions, though not technically from adolescents.
Currently, neither company has a web presence.
Keeping Hope Alive
“There is evidence that the aging process is flexible and that it can be slowed,” says James P. White, PhD, a professor at Duke University and member of the research team that extended the lifespan of mice by stitching them together. “Certainly, this is in non-human animals, but we are slowly beginning to understand how aging works.”
White said scientists have been conducting parabiotic experiments for decades, but the study published last summer was a bit different in that the mice remained coupled for a longer period of time: 12 weeks for mice is the equivalent of eight years in humans; previous studies had only kept the mice coupled for five weeks.
“We wanted to see if there were more permanent changes – would old mice be reprogrammed if they were continually fed young blood?” he says. “What surprised us was the reduction in aging, but also that when we separated the mice, they didn’t revert to old age – their biological age was maintained more than we expected.”
White also said that after separation, the older mice seemed to thrive and became more active in their cages.
Although experiments have shown that young blood can slow aging in old mice, scientists still don’t know what it is about blood that makes it so beneficial. “Blood has components: cells, metabolites, soluble factors,” he says. “Something in that mixture is helpful, but we don’t know what it is.”
It’s also possible that young blood is simply diluting the old blood, or that “young mice are absorbing old toxins,” he says.
Whatever is going on, White says it would be a “big leap” to translate these findings into “a clinic where we could give young blood to people for anti-aging purposes.”
At the very least, it is logically impossible to replicate the parabiotic process in humans.
“Parabiosis is a continuous exchange of blood — all the time, every day,” White says. “24/7 transfusions are just not realistic.”
While you’re there teeth Here are some practical tips for staying youthful that you probably don’t want to hear: exercise, eat right, and reduce stress.
For those hoping for a bit more miracles, “there is hope,” White says: “All these crazy experiments aside, we’re on the cusp of understanding the aging process.”
Ashley Stimpson is a freelance journalist who writes about science, conservation, and the outdoors. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, WIRED, National Geographic, Atlas Obscura, and more. She lives in Columbia, Maryland with her partner, her greyhound, and her very mean cat.
