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Why vampires live forever

machielreyneke.com

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Re: Why vampires live forever

#91

Post by austinjp »

> Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis

Just to pick a nit...

Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.

Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...

Re: Why vampires live forever

#92

Post by smegger001 »

groby_b wrote: post #68
koakuma-chan wrote: post #42

> The Suspects Peter Thiel Has anyone tried garlic on him? > Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.

> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever. You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong. It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.

as someone that donates plasma twice weekly I wonder what health effects of removing and filtering the blood regularly has if accumulation of byproducts is a major issue

Re: Why vampires live forever

#93

Post by koakuma-chan »

sgt wrote: post #85
koakuma-chan wrote: post #42

> The Suspects Peter Thiel Has anyone tried garlic on him? > Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.

Imagine showing up to a meeting with Thiel wearing a huge garlic and onion necklace.

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

"Garlic"

Re: Why vampires live forever

#95

Post by impossiblefork »

prometheus76 wrote: post #51
jvalencia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble). The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address t…

I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...

Here in Sweden, where we also have free churches such as Baptists, Laestadians etc., the concern was definitely about gambling.

Re: Why vampires live forever

#96

Post by toast0 »

delecti wrote: post #28
johnisgood wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any reasons for this to work on non-vampires? :D

That was my thought as well. At least naively, it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits. A typical donation is half a liter, and a person has about 5 liters of blood, so donating should in theory remove about 10% of the crap you've got circulating, right? Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ign…

> it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits

It's pretty effective if you have excess iron (hemochromatosis) and your local vampires accept your donation; some don't because a donation where you get a significant benefit isn't a donation for the sole reason of helping others (and a free cookie). In that case, traditional bloodletting may be required.

Re: Why vampires live forever

#97

Post by sgt101 »

The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat!

He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.

Re: Why vampires live forever

#98

Post by observationist »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #42

> The Suspects Peter Thiel Has anyone tried garlic on him? > Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.

This is actually one of the mechanisms behind "blood swaps" done by the rich and weird. Donating blood frequently also reduces various accumulated "factors" that reduce kidney stress, encourage healthy new blood, and is overall beneficial to health.

Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.

As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.

I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?

Re: Why vampires live forever

#99

Post by FarmerPotato »

delecti wrote: post #87
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's very effective. It's your metabolism that produces that junk with increasing ratio of stuff that you need. If you just remove blood, the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff does not change. Same with kidney filtering if they can't recognize the difference. Blood transfusion from younger person gives you blood with better ratio.

The article includes a citation that explicitly states the opposite. Specifically citation 20 from the section "The Twist" (which is itself all about this idea): > [20] Mehdipour, M. et al. “Rejuvenation of three germ layers tissues by exchanging old blood plasma with saline-albumin.” Aging 12(10), 8790–8819, 2020. The UC Berkeley team found that diluting old blood plasma with saline and albumin produced rejuvenating…

I was waiting for someone to consider the idea of synthetic dilutants.

But a further horror is: you’re dumping your crud on the person getting your transfusion? I guess it’s better than dying in ER.

Re: Why vampires live forever

#100

Post by robocat »

delecti wrote: post #28
johnisgood wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any reasons for this to work on non-vampires? :D

That was my thought as well. At least naively, it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits. A typical donation is half a liter, and a person has about 5 liters of blood, so donating should in theory remove about 10% of the crap you've got circulating, right? Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ign…

In New Zealand, you are stopped at 75 (or 81 if given an exemption) assuming you started donating before 71.

You can't start donating blood after 71.

From age section: https://www.nzblood.co.nz/become-a-donor/am-i-eligible/detai...

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