You’ve just been invited to the swankiest party in the city.
Lucky you!
Sure, you may just be a poor college student surviving pay-check-to-pay-check, but for
reasons currently unknown to you, the local movers and shakers at a mansion outside town
really want you to attend.
But when you arrive, you notice everyone seems to be about sixty years older than you.
Immediately your mind is racing, wondering if you’ve been invited to some creepy Eyes
Wide Shut sex party or if you’re about to have your body donated to one of their rich
old brains, like in Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out.
But hey, don’t worry about it!
They don’t want your body (in either sense) they just want your blood.
That’s right – the sweet, red elixir of life.
And no, they’re not part of some deranged blood cult.
They’re actually customers to a new Silicon Valley start up offering a process known as
“young blood transfusion.”
Which, by the way, is literally exactly what it sounds like.
Rich old people are buying young people’s blood to maintain their youth and vitality.
Let’s talk about the how, where, when, and why.
And yes, this really is happening.
Sometimes also called Parabiosis, young blood transfusions take a seat beside cryonics and
head transplants as semi-scientific attempts to pursue immortality.
The fact is, very few people want to die, and the rich even less so, seeing as they’ve
got it pretty good as it is.
Pandering to wealthy old people’s fear of mortality is the entire business model of
Ambrosia LLC, the creepily-named start-up created by entrepreneur Jesse Karmazin.
It’s worth noting that, while Karmazin claims he’s a medical doctor, the exact nature
of his supposed medical credentials has never really been made clear.
Ambrosia LLC offered a unique service: Living beyond your years with regular paid blood
transfusions.
Karmazin wasn’t just promising smoothed wrinkles or slight improvements to your quality
of life, either.
In one interview, he claimed that what the company was offering was pretty close to immortality.
Count Dracula would be inclined to agree.
Before essentially being shut down by the FDA for its shady business practices, more
on that later, Ambrosia LLC claimed to be up and running in five different clinics across
the United States – with locations in Houston, Omaha, Tampa, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The company offered their wealthy, sanguinarian clientele a single litre of teenage blood
– all purchased from medical blood banks – for $8,000, and two litres for $12,000.
That’s $4,000 off the second litre – what a steal!
They even took payments on PayPal, though whether the kind of person in the market for
$12,000 of human blood uses PayPal is an open question.
Ambrosia began holding its first independent clinical trials in 2017, testing whether its
business model really provided any kind of meaningful health benefit.
Tellingly, the results of this study were never actually made public, but Karmazin went
public to assure potential investors and customers they had nothing to worry about.
While this raised eyebrows among medical experts already feeling dubious about the benefits
of Karmazin’s business, rich, elderly weirdos were extremely interested in what he had to
say.
According to the former Chief Executive Officer of Ambrosia LLC, David Cavalier, the company
received over one hundred inquiries about the treatment from prospective customers as
soon as their first website launched.
As the months passed, Ambrosia truly opened for business, and more details emerged about
their round of clinical trials.
There had been 81 participants in the trials, and by the September of 2017, the company
had served a further 69 paying customers.
The ages of these customers ranged from as young as thirty-five to as old as ninety-two.
Even high-profile billionaires like PayPal’s Peter Thiel have expressed interest in undergoing
a Young Blood Transfusion, but the science surrounding Ambrosia’s work is still extremely
shaky.
In public statements about the dealings of the company, Jesse Karmazin has always been
unsettlingly vague.
Speaking about the results of the clinical trials, he said “Some patients got young
blood, and others got older blood, and I was able to do some statistics on it, and the
results looked really awesome, and I thought this is the kind of therapy that I'd want
to be available to me.”
Assurances that the results looked “awesome” didn’t do much to assuage the fears of Karmazin
and Ambrosia’s critics.
Researchers like Irina Conboy called the treatment Ambrosia was offering dangerous, citing adverse
side effects experienced by patients, and saying that the company “quite likely could
inflict bodily harm” on its clientele.
Michael Conboy, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
said of the whole idea of rejuvenating blood transfusions “reeks of snake oil”, also
saying “There’s no evidence in my mind that it’s going to work.”
Now, why it all came crashing down for Karmazin and his vampiric start-up.
In February of 2019, the FDA came out with a devastating condemnation of Young Blood
Transfusion, releasing the following statement: “There is no proven clinical benefit of
infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions,
and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product.
The reported uses of these products should not be assumed to be safe or effective.
We strongly discourage consumers from pursuing this therapy outside of clinical trials under
appropriate institutional review board and regulatory oversight.”
This was essentially the death knell for Ambrosia, leaving its public credibility as anything
more than predatory quack-science in tatters.
On February 19th, Ambrosia released a press statement, saying that they had ceased all
operations.
Like a vampire that’s been staked, Ambrosia was no more.
You may be hoping that Ambrosia is an outlier here, offering a niche treatment to a selection
of desperate old rich people.
But the fact is, this may have wider appeal across the US.
In February of 2018, The Young Blood Symposium hosted by the South Florida Bone Marrow and
Stem Cell Transplant Institute made its case for the widely discredited treatment.
At this symposium, the elderly clientele who’d come from as far as Scotland were reminded
of their imminent deaths by speakers, before being pitched Young Blood Transfusions as
a potential escape from their impending demise.
Critics have unsurprisingly accused companies and events like this of taking advantage of
elderly and uninformed people’s fears and desperation for profit.
Not that taking advantage of desperate people has ever stopped con men before, from the
classic snake oil salesmen of the Old West to salesmen selling deadly, radioactive Radithor
tonic to the unsuspecting public in the early 20th century.
While this may seem like a brand-new health fad invented by bizarre Silicon Valley hucksters,
the seeds of this idea have been around for a long time – and while what Ambrosia was
offering was virtually useless, its core ideas do have some basis in scientific fact.
The term Parabiosis was coined by physiologist Paul Bert all the way back in the Nineteenth
Century as part of his work with animal circulatory systems.
The name means “Living Beside”, and refers to the anatomical joining of two organisms.
In this case, a young blood donor with an older, richer recipient.
One, in theory, helps the other.
The groundwork for later research in this extremely niche field was laid further in
the 1930s by Cornell University biochemist and gerontologist Clive McCay.
Clive dedicated a lot of his time to researching the study of ageing, and found that caloric
restriction through shifting their diets helped ageing rats live longer.
McCay found this fascinating, and decided to research whether rat ageing could be halted
or at least slowed by any other means.
That’s when he started sewing rats together.
In an experiment that would make Dr. Frankenstein or that weird dude from The Human Centipede
proud, McCay and his assistants sewed two rats – one older, one younger – together
by the skin on their sides.
When left to heal in this condition, the two rats grew blood vessels that connected their
circulatory systems into one, big circuit.
When the two rats died, McCay and his team performed an autopsy, and came up with some
truly incredible results.
The cartilage of the older rat looked far more youthful than it had any right to be.
However, while these results are interesting, they couldn’t prove any kind of meaningful
causal relationship.
But this was more than enough to inspire future unconventional blood transfusion experiments.
A lot of these experiments were, admittedly, less than impressive.
Back when McCay was still making his caloric restriction discoveries, Soviet physician
Alexander Bogdanov was using himself as a guinea pig for transfusion experiments.
He injected the blood of a student with malaria and tuberculosis into his own body in what
was likely an attempt at trying to achieve eternal life.
Sadly, this instead killed him.
A lot of blood transfusion experiments end in tragedy or just nothing rather than truly
spectacular results.
While neither Bogdanov and McCay were equipped to know this at the time, the secret behind
the success of some of the experiments – and the supposed science behind modern young blood
transfusions – laid in stem cells.
These are the undifferentiated cells that exist most prominently in developing foetuses,
and can then convert into any cell in the body for development and growth.
A study performed in the early 2000s by Dr. Thomas A. Rando and his associates used McCay’s
experimental design to test the relationship between Parabiosis experiments and stem cell
activity.
Much like McCay, they sewed together old and young mice for five weeks before euthanizing
and examining them.
They found that the older mice experienced muscle regeneration consistent with that of
the younger mice, as well as growing more liver cells at a far more youthful rate.
Dr. Rando’s theory was that the young blood “awakened” dormant stem cells and stimulated
a youthful rate of cell division.
Interestingly, the process actually goes both ways.
The younger mice in this equation seemed to have grown prematurely old after receiving
old blood from their elderly mouse counterparts.
Their tissue regeneration slowed down, and their stem cell multiplication rate also saw
a huge reduction.
Harvard researcher Dr. Amy J. Wagers later also found that young blood helped rejuvenate
the hearts of old mice.
And over at Stanford in 2011, Dr. Saul Villeda found that the same was also true for the
brains of old mice.
When young blood was introduced into the system, the hippocampuses of the old mice's brains
started sprouting new neural connections at an unprecedented rate.
The conclusion?
It’s possible that compounds present in blood can stimulate or dampen stem cell activity
depending on whether the blood is young or old.
You can see why a wealthy old pseudo-vampire might see this research and immediately start
reaching for their check book.
But the fact is, like all science, it’s actually a whole lot more complicated than
the catchy headlines and business pitches about “miracle cures” makes it seem.
Who would have guessed, right?
In 2016, Irina and Michael Conboy released a study that undermined the appeal of a lot
of this previous research.
Their study found that Parabiosis is often only beneficial when the two organisms are
sharing organs and forming a complete circulatory circuit, rather than just having small quantities
of blood injected into them.
Also, the fact that all of these studies have purely been conducted on mice also throws
in serious barriers for the research’s applicability to humans.
And even when these methods are applied to humans, if they theoretically were successful,
there would still be huge risks to the health of patients.
Not only are infection, inflammation, and rejection always a risk in blood transfusions
– especially in transfusions without professional medical oversight – causing unchecked stem
cell multiplication and growth can come with its own dangers.
Irina Conboy pointed out the fact that this could cause incidences of cancer to rise massively
in patients of Young Blood Transfusion, that would truly defeat the point of a process
meant to score its customers longer-to-eternal life.
After explaining all this to the rich people who’ve summoned you here for blood, you’ve
seriously ruined this party.
It’s a real shame, because you didn’t even have a chance to try the hors d'oeuvres
before you’re being escorted out and sent home.
Shame, real shame.
In the end, there really are no easy ways to buy yourself into eternal life.
Maybe having a good diet, reducing stress, and exercising is your best bet.
Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics Show!
Interested in more bloody good fun?
Why not check out “What Is The Blood Rain?” and “Japanese Horrific Serial Killer – Tsutomo
Miyazak (The Human Dracula).”
After all, making interesting videos is in our blood.