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Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

nature.com

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#11
I am stupefied by this.

Many, many times I have considered:

"what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later"

And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful."

But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around to trying this out ?

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#12
post #11

I am stupefied by this. Many, many times I have considered: "what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later" And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful." But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around…

Well, Lance Armstrong thought of it. Worked or him pretty well. Sort of.

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#13
post #11

I am stupefied by this. Many, many times I have considered: "what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later" And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful." But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around…

Listen, people are like...craaazy busy...

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#14
post #11

I am stupefied by this. Many, many times I have considered: "what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later" And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful." But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around…

Is there a method to store blood and have it still be viable for transfusion after that long? I know refrigerated blood only lasts a few weeks...

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#16
Heck, any Heinlein fan could've told you this would work. In the "Future History" series (specifically, Methuselah's Children ), we learn that the first effective rejuvenation technique was to transfuse in younger blood. It didn't become practical, however, until they developed a way of growing new blood in vitro. I imagine that's the next thing scientists will be working on...if successful, we'll get rejuvenation quite a bit earlier than Heinlein's timeline predicted it.

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#17
post #11

I am stupefied by this. Many, many times I have considered: "what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later" And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful." But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around…

Transfusions seem unlikely to work at this point based on evidence to date, probably because the factors involved are very short-lived. E.g. transfusions failed to move the needle in mice:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4215333/

There is a human trial for transfusion of young blood to Alzheimer's patients but this is probably not going to tell us much, because it is so specific, and because the mouse transfusions didn't work.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329831.400-young-blo...

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#18

This reminds me of a PostSecret submission from several months ago: https://postsecretdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/blood.j...

You can tell it's from a real biologist by the time they spent aligning each line of text to the background image.

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#19

What benefits does parabiosis have over taking HGH? The effects of parabiosis in mice sounds almost exactly like the effects of growth hormone

That's what I was wondering... is it just the increased growth hormone levels in the young blood or is it the blood cells themselves?

If I'm reading the article right, it was neither, but actually just the plasma:

> Plasma alone had the same effects. “We didn't have to exchange the whole blood”

Did they remove the growth hormones from the plasma? It doesn't say...

Re: Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

#20
post #16

Heck, any Heinlein fan could've told you this would work. In the "Future History" series (specifically, Methuselah's Children ), we learn that the first effective rejuvenation technique was to transfuse in younger blood. It didn't become practical, however, until they developed a way of growing new blood in vitro. I imagine that's the next thing scientists will be working on...if successful, we'll get rejuvenation qu…

It's likely even simpler than that. At this point it's a matter of brute force to investigate the different factors in young vs old blood, isolate the ones that have the rejuvenating effects, and synthesize away, likely via programming bacteria to produce them.

They have already identified one candidate--GDF11--and there will likely be others. So it may be a matter of injecting yourself with a mix of appropriate synthetics every day or two.

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