August 29, 2014 • 38 mins
Blood: the liquid that we are large sacks of. Join the podcast team for a look at the future of artificial blood, rejuvenating transfusions and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, says everyone, And welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, take a
little walk to the edge of town and go across
(00:20):
the tracks. I'm John in Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm
Joe McCormick. So Hey, guys, Hey, how you doing today?
I'm well, pretty okay. How would you be doing if
there was no blood in your body? Less? Well, yeah,
pretty poorly overall. And blood is pretty awesome for keeping
us alive. Uh, it's kind of an integral for that
(00:42):
whole oxygen carbon dioxide exchange thing that we would depend
upon so much for life. Also kind of squishy, I mean,
without blood, we would be significantly less squishy, less voluminous. Yeah, yeah,
we'd probably be a little more like a you know,
raisins and be kind of beird across the line as well.
(01:03):
Today we wanted to talk about blood and the future
of blood and why blood is awesome and very interesting,
perhaps even more interesting than you might realize, even if
you are a vampire. Yes, Aura, as you have mentioned
in the notes, a certain Elizabeth Bathory, although that a
lot of the the legends attributed to her are possibly apocryphal. Yes, yeah,
(01:27):
so we I don't think we actually have historical proof
that she bathed in blood. But she was a countess
who did many, many horrible things. And why are we
talking about her on this podcast. Maybe we shouldn't because
because it leads into another cool cross promotional opportunity. Joe, Yeah, yeah,
Elizabeth Bathory is not the only one who might have
(01:49):
bathed in blood. Our our own Lauren Vogel Bomb has
bathed in blood. It wasn't a bath. It was more
like a shower, and it wasn't wasn't voluntary, right, You
were being splashed by it, and it wasn't real blood.
It was fake stage blood, right. But it was all
because you did a show on on brain Stuff, an
(02:09):
episode of brain Stuff where you participated in an episode.
It was all about blood and why it's red, right, correct, Yeah,
it was. It was about the color of blood and
the different chemicals in different creatures that create colors of blood.
And in order to do all of this, we really
wanted Dr Anton Jessip, who is a host over on
Stuff to blow your mind are resident monster expert. Indeed,
(02:31):
he is from the university basement. Um and uh he
he had an experiment to run. Um. I was there
in a prom dress. You know. I was trying to
encourage your telekinetic powers. Opportunity knocked and Dr Jessip answered yes,
and thus we have the video. If you'll haven't checked
out the YouTube channels for brain stuff and for stuff
(02:53):
to blow your mind, you definitely should. They got great
stuff going on there. And Lauren, one more question before
we get into the future of blood. Yes, surely. In
your brainstuff video you concluded that the reason blood appears
blue through your skin is because when blood is deoxygenated,
it turns blue. Right. That is so completely incorrect. No, No,
blood is always red, even when it is inside your body,
(03:15):
Isn't It is an optical illusion that it looks blue
in your veins. It's it's how light scatters through your skin.
And uh and it is a darker, deeper red when
it's in your veins. However, it's still red. So so
you're telling me that all those British blue bloods are
are actually red bloods. They're totally red blood unless they're
actually telekinetic crab monsters, in which case their blood is
(03:40):
probably blue because a lot of other creatures like for example,
cephalopods and crustaceans do have blue blood. Well, we'll focus
on human blood. Yeah, tomorrow is when we record the
podcast about the crab Monsters. Today we need to talk
about blood technology. So there's actually a really fascinating future
around blood and one of the first things we wanted
(04:02):
to talk about was the idea of artificial blood. So
before we get into the actual science, I have to
I know that we've just been doing tangents all the
way leading up into this podcast, but this this is
one of those things where the first time I really
uh started thinking about artificial blood was when I watched
a super cheesy horror movie. Have you guys ever seen
Sundown The Vampire in Retreat? I have not. It's the
(04:25):
Vampire in Retreat. Yes, not the vampire retreat, like it's
a resort that they go to. Well, it's almost like that,
because the idea is of the vampire that there's a
colony of vampires who have settled a town in in
in the West, and it's kind of a vampire Western
mash up movie. And Bruce Campbell plays the descendant of
(04:47):
Van Helsing in this um and uh, I believe David
Carradine is the leader of the vampires. Yeah, that sounds
high class. This phenomenal movie. I saw it when it
was on cable back in the you know, nineties or something.
But anyway, the plot of the movie partially revolves around
the fact that that the vampire colony is made up
(05:09):
of two different camps, and one camp is trying to
get away from the typical vampireism thing by creating artificial
blood as a blood substitute that they will drink, therefore
they will no longer have to prey upon the living.
The other camp is more like, Ah, we're superior predators
and we should be you know, preying upon people. That's
(05:29):
what we should be doing. Uh. And it wasn't at
the time. I was thinking, h artificial blood, that actually
would be incredibly useful, right, I Mean, there's there's an
actual need your blood in so many different medical procedures
just for vampires. So you're not just talking about artificial blood.
Is in movie blood something that looks like blood. We're
(05:50):
talking about something that performs the anatomical function of blood.
Right at the very least and and for the most
part throughout history, the thing that people have been trying
to develop is an artificial blood that can, in fact,
uh handle that oxygen carbon dioxide exchange that we need
in order to survive. Now, blood does other stuff too.
(06:12):
It's not just a vehicle for carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide.
That's a big part of it. But because all of
your all of your organs need oxygen in order to function,
and they get oxygen because red blood cells contain the
stuff called hemoglobin that binds to the oxygen in your
lungs and then proceeds to carry it throughout your bodily systems. Yeah,
(06:32):
so exactly, And and that's the main thing that the
artificial blood types have been you know, people have been
trying to find something that could do that as well
as blood can. And it's interesting that the history of
looking into artificial blood stretches back quite a long ways
to the point where we're going. Before um, we had
(06:54):
a lot of scientific knowledge about blood and what it
does and what it's capable of doing. The sleep people
just saying hey, I wonder what would happen if we
put this in us instead? Well, blood is one of
the four humors, right, I mean, that's still solid science
right then it's well, it's not solid science science, but yes,
it was one of the humors. Um. So if you
(07:15):
look back to the seventeenth century, William Harvey was the
first to examine the circulatory system and describe exactly how
blood moves through the body. Uh, And the physicians of
that day decided to experiment with various substances as blood
substitutes for people who would need blood for any particular reason. Um.
(07:38):
And that would include stuff like milk, beer, urine, and
sheep blood. I think beer was the really popular one. Well,
beer was popular for a lot of reasons and that
in the seventeenth century. But it's good to drink, it's
good in your veins, right, yeah, it was very much
in that sane Wait wait wait, wait wait wait urine though,
(08:00):
urine it's not good to drink. And is sheep's blood
good to drink? It's good in sausages. Um. I'm not
gonna I'm not going to argue either of those things.
But what I am going to say is this is
very closely related to that idea of blood letting being
part of the medical procedures of the day. You know,
the the idea of draining away things that were negative
(08:22):
or or harmful to a person. Let yeah, yeah, and
uh and so this was kind of a very primitive
approach obviously, and a lot of people who probably were
not doing too well to begin with lost their lives
as a part of the process of trying these things.
In sixteen sixty seven, it was actually the first successful
(08:43):
blood transfusion to human to human. Now, patients who would
require multiple transfusions died usually during the process, and so
while the first one first one's early ones were successful,
it was a ttimately abandoned as a practice because it
(09:03):
turned out that giving people multiple transfusions would end up
killing them, so that they decided that it actually did
not work. Uh yeah. I don't think that research really
picked back up again until about the eighteen hundreds. During
the age of cholera. Yes, uh, physicians would treat people
who were afflicted with asiatic cholera by injecting milk into them.
(09:26):
The thought at the time was that the milk would
help them regrow their white blood cells, which is not correct. However,
it did, but milk is white, but milk thanks To
be fair, some of the literature does suggest that perhaps
it was actually helping some of the patients, but there
(09:48):
was not any real scientific inquiry as to what the
mechanism was and it didn't get a wide enough acceptance,
so it was pretty much abandoned as well. So whether
or not it was actually effective in treating cholera is
kind of up to debate. It was, Yeah, it's one
(10:09):
of the things where without that scientific rigor, you can't
say right. But other experiments using things like a saltwater
saline as blood replacement seemed to be promising. There were
some experiments with frogs that showed that if you were
to replace a frog's blood with saline, it would continue living,
which seemed really exciting until they saw that if you
(10:29):
just remove a frog's blood entirely, it could continue living
for a short while, which suggests that you could replace
it with pretty much anything that's not going to be
toxic and the frog would not happily, but but would
continue to live for a little while. So then that
that excitement about saline kind of died down. So um,
(10:52):
moving on, they started to look at using animal blood
as replacement for for humans, but animal blood and have
substances in it that are toxic to us, and at
the time the physicians really didn't have the ability or
the equipment to figure out which elements were going to
be toxic how to remove them from the blood, so
(11:14):
that it couldn't really make this an effective means of
treating people without making them far more sick using something
that would end up being toxic. Um and other experiments
ended up leading to things called blood volume izers, which
are not the same as a blood substitute. A volume
isser is something that can mix with blood safely and
not be toxic and can help if you have a
(11:35):
condition that also has like low blood pressure. Let's say
that you're being treated for something and you your blood
pressure starts to drop. This would be able to bring
your blood pressure back up, But the volume isser lacks
any capability of handling any of the other functions of blood.
So if you were you know, you could essentially asphyxiate
(11:56):
to death. I mean, you would die from lack of
oxygen you had too much of this in your system
because it's not carrying it's not carrying the oxygen. But
if it's just if it's one of those things where
the blood pressure is a serious problem, and otherwise you
would be you know, more or less Okay, through whatever procedure,
it was a viable approach in small enough amounts, that
(12:17):
kind of thing can be used until the patient's blood
count gets back up. Yes, But uh, then some some
important research happened in the late eighteen hundreds and early
nineteen hundreds. That's when Leaphold land Steiner discovered blood types
which made human transfusions of blood a lot more safe,
or or I mean they would make human transfusions of
(12:38):
blood a lot more safe once we did a little
bit more research into the chemistry of blood and the
exact role of blood in doing all of this oxygen
circulation we've been talking about this. Obviously, no one knew
that much about it until the early DS and and
the World Wars really helped this research along because perhaps
obviously people were very interested in how to helps save lives.
(13:00):
Was absolutely a requirement at the time. Yeah, there's nothing
like necessity to really push forward innovation, right, We've we've
heard similar things over and over again, especially in this story. Um. Then,
in the nineteen sixties, the first blood substitute was developed.
It was called or it is called still today, per
fluoro carbons or PFCs, and these are synthetic compounds that
(13:24):
have this huge propensity for carrying gases that have been
dissolved in a liquid and hence are useful for keeping
oxygen flowing through a patient's body and also helping to
keep their blood pressure study. As we mentioned, a moment
ago um, you know, usually until they can receive a
transfusion or again grow back their own red blood cells.
It's it's not a permanent blood substitute, right. I've heard
(13:47):
that while it's capable of holding quite a bit of oxygen,
it's not as efficient at transferring it as hemoglobin is.
So it's it's one of those things that can be
used to supplement, but not replace, uh someone's blood. Yes,
I think. I think blood supplement is what I intended
to say instead of blood substitute. But uh and and
(14:08):
and this research at the time I don't think was
quite in humans. Yet they were doing a bunch of
research in mice and h Unfortunately for for the research
at the time, the blood bank system that had been
established thanks to the World Wars was working really well,
and the risks in human trials were so steep that
(14:28):
it was basically abandoned until the late nineteen seventies and
early nineteen eighties when a Vietnam happened. Well, I mean,
the country is always happening, I suppose, but when when
when the when the Vietnam War happened? Yes, Um. Whereupon
a bunch of the blood bank system proved to be
unstable for large scale disaster. And also it was discovered
(14:51):
that viruses like hepatitis and the human immunoe deficiency virus
or HIV could be spread by blood transfusions. So that
was a terrifying time for everyone. And PFCs were developed
for human use and went onto the market. They've never
actually been very popular or commercially viable, which in medical
research is very important because, as we said in a
(15:14):
recent episode, it's very expensive to bring stuff like this
to the market, mostly because a whole lot of pfc
s are acquired in order to really do any good
in your system, like like you were saying, Jonathan, they don't.
They're not extremely efficient at delivering oxygen um, and they
can cause a lot of adverse side effects after use,
especially in the vascular systems of the lungs and the brain,
(15:36):
which people tend to want to keep using. Yeah. So Um.
Then in in the nineteen nineties, as it was kind
of being discovered that p f c s might not
be the best stuff, a another class of substitute was developed,
and that was hemoglobin based oxygen carriers or hbo c s.
(15:56):
And these guys are are interesting because they're made from real,
actual sterilized hemoglobin, being of course, the compound that carries
the oxygen around in your blood. Um. And we get
this hemoglobin from either human blood or cow blood, or
from bacteria that we have genetically modified in order to
produce it, which I find fascinating. Um. But the thing
(16:19):
is that you can't just stick hemoglobin in your blood
stream and expect it to function. When it's in a
red blood cell, it does its job really well, but
when it's just kind of floating around, it breaks down
very quickly into really quite toxic compounds. Yeah. So, so
HBOCs have to contain the hemoglobin some way, and it's
(16:39):
so much of a problem that none have ever been
approved by the f d A. As far as I know,
the only places that they've been licensed for for medical
use are in South African hospitals which had a pretty
huge AIDS crisis that put the blood supply at risk
and also in Russia. However, there there's some recent research
that is making it seem more and more viable as
(17:03):
a solution. There's some people at the University of Essex
are engineering hemoglobin molecules combined with the amino acid tyro scene,
which they say can enable a patient's body to break
the stuff down more safely. Uh. And they just received
some like one point five million pounds in funding that
heavy to pursue it. So I see what you did there.
(17:25):
Thank you. Pounds the currency, the pounds of currency, pounds
of hema globin. Man, you are so good at saying hemoglobin.
I keep wanting to say hemo goblin, which is one
of the most terrifying creatures in the Dungeons and Dragons University.
And when you actually managed to hit that critical blow,
they just explode in blood. That's gross. Uh Okay, So
(17:48):
backing away from exploding blood monsters, what's really cool about
all of all of these these potential blood substitutes is
that their shelf stable for like up to two years,
which is a big improvement over carrying around jars of
human blood, which you you have, well, I mean it's
probably not in jars, but but you have to keep
refrigerated otherwise it will go very bad, very quickly um
(18:12):
and be useless. And furthermore, they are not dependent on
blood type, so you can just keep them out in
the field where where we need them in case of emergency.
But the thing is that, you know, unlike this Bruce
Campbell movie we're talking about, or like true blood, it's
not really blood. But that's okay, because, I mean, because
(18:33):
the entire idea of anyone drinking blood is completely crazy,
right I would imagine, So, I mean, I can't there's
no scientific basis for consuming blood or anything like that,
right WHOA, Joe, I knew there was a reason we
brought you along, maybe not drinking blood. Well that that's
(18:54):
somewhat of a relief. But there have been some really
interesting scientific findings, especially in the past few years, that
proved that young blood is delicious and will make you immortal. Well,
I know that companies are always looking for young blood
to keep things going, but I think that's kind of metaphoric. No,
the liquid the healthy individual tell me more. Joe. Well, okay,
(19:19):
so I was overstating. It won't actually make you immortal
as far as we know, And I totally take back
the delicious part. I'm sure that it's disgusting. I bet
I don't know. Joe has never drank human blood. That's
what I'm saying. Anyway, let's let's move on. Um No, seriously,
here are the facts. So, multiple experiments have shown that
(19:40):
in mice, young blood has measurable rejuvenating effects. So wait,
you mean like you get like a mouse that's you know,
a geriatric mouse, and you give it a transfusion of
young mouse blood and things change for the old mouse.
That is exactly what I'm seeing. You can take young
blood from a young mouse, give it to an older mouse,
(20:02):
and you see broad, widespread and significant health benefits. On
one hand, this sounds totally crazy and Frankensteiny right, like,
you know, the premise of a poorly research sci fi
movie is just part of what's creepy about it is
how simple it is, Right, you just take the young blood,
put it in the old animal health benefits sounds fake,
(20:24):
it's absolutely true and it kind of makes sense. So
when we age, part of what's happening to us is
that there's a marked decline in our body tissues ability
to regenerate itself. Right, it becomes harder for us to
make the new cells we need to stay young. So
if you just think about this in trivial terms, it's
(20:44):
totally normal when a young child gets an injury, you know,
it has a skateboarding accident, gets all scuffed up and
stuff that heals pretty quick. If you think about an
adult getting a comparable injury, suddenly that thing that's no
big deal on a kid is a big deal on
an adult. It takes a lot longer to heal. It's
just generally more debilitating. Oh man, this is a problem,
(21:07):
and so that we suspect that over time, aging does
something to the functioning of stem cells in our body
that are responsible for growing new tissue. But the question
is exactly what's happening and is there any way to
reverse it? Uh So, there was actually a really great
article about this that came out in New Scientists just
a couple of days ago on August twenty and a
(21:28):
lot of what I'm siting here I learned about through that.
So there's this process called hetero chronic parabiosis. I recognize
some of those syllables, but what is that exactly? Para?
I hope I'm pronouncing this right, it's either parabiosis or parabiosis.
I don't know. That's one of those tough words we
(21:48):
forgive you, sorry. Parabioses p A r A b io
s I S. Parabiosis in this case refers to removing
skin patches from two mice and sowing the mice together,
so you end up with a mega mouse like vultron
of mice. You you end up connecting their circulatory system.
(22:09):
So in this way the two mice share a bloodstream.
Their blood becomes one common pool. Not not literally it's
actually still inside the mice, right, but it connects and
and these are these will be referred to as parabiotic mice. So.
The process was first described by a French physiologist named
Paul Bert b E. R. T. I guess it's not
just Burt Paul Bart in the eighteen sixties, and then
(22:33):
later in the nineteen thirties the process was improved upon
by Bunster and Meer, and basically as it is today.
It entails attaching the two mice at parallel elbows and knees,
side by side, and then sewing together an exposed patch
along their sides, and after some length of time, the
pair can safely be separated again if necessary for the experiment.
(22:56):
I want to put it in that this is fascinating
but terrifying. Yeah, yeah, it's as I said, it's starting
to sound like something from Animal Moderately Frankensteiny. Yeah. So,
as you might guess from the name, So that's parabiasis.
As you might guess from the name, hetero chronic parabiasis
would mean mixed time scales, hetero chronic mixed time. So
(23:17):
you're creating a union of parabiotic mice where one mouse
is old and the other mouse is young. So what's
really striking about hetero chronic parabiasies in mice is that
the old mouse seems to benefit greatly from the blood
of the young. Unfortunately, the young mice ended up getting
no benefit at all. And we're obsessed with murders. She
(23:39):
wrote you a just hey, I'm sorry. I'm just saying.
I guess you are the oldest person here. You can
make those jokes. It's okay for him. In the nineteen fifties,
researcher at Cornell named Clive McKay performed experiments with parabiasis
and a quest to learn about prolonging the lifespan of mammals.
(24:00):
McKay and his associates found that old mice who underwent
the procedure showed rejuvenated cartilage. Yeah, so the cartilaginous tissue
in their body actually appeared younger after they had been
joined to a younger mouse. And more recently, a team
led by the Stanford researcher Thomas A. Rando has continued
research in this area. They published a study in Nature
(24:22):
in two thousand five and they showed that after five
weeks of hetero chronic parabiasis, older mice showed improved rates
of muscle healing and liver cell regeneration. Wow, was there
any other sort of improvements in in this kind of
Oh yeah really Yeah. Basically almost everything we've looked at
(24:43):
gets better with young blood. So there's the brain. Multiple
research projects have showed positive cognitive and neurological effects of
young blood and older mice. Just one example was published
this May May of fourteen in Nature Medicine, and it
was a t sam including Solvolita and Tony whis Corey
(25:03):
and they made the bold claim and this is actually
a quote from the abstract of their paper that quote,
exposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract
and reverse pre existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional,
and cognitive level. So the that's the end of the quote,
but that's the entire gam it. So they found really
(25:26):
measurable physical improvements in the brain. The brain structure has
got stronger, including synaptic plasticity, which is a big deal.
And then like the zoomed out level, they saw improvements
in the cognitive function that you can measure with behavioral tests.
So the older mice with cognitive impairments saw improvement in
things like memory and spatial learning, all from young mouse blood.
(25:50):
Then there was the heart research led by the Harvard
scientist Amy Wagers, who by the way, has also done
important work on the brain effects I just mentioned and
on ident finding the cause of these effects in general,
which I'm about to talk about in a minute. But
research out of her lab found that when you introduce
young mouse blood into older mice, it can reduce the
cumulative prevalence of cardiac hypertrophy. So as we get older,
(26:14):
our hearts get bigger, they grow larger and thicker, and
that's not good. It leads to heart failure. All right,
you want it to be Do you want the muscle
to be to be spry right then? Yeah? Sure? Yeah.
And so when you perform the heterochronic parabiasis between an
older mouse with cardiac hypertrophy with a young healthy mouse,
Wagers found that the older mouse's heart shrinks to nearly
(26:38):
the size of the younger mause's heart. So just having
the younger mouse's blood going through that circulatory system fixes
the heart. The heart shrinks back to pretty much the
size of a typical, younger, healthy mouse. This this is
not sounding any less like crazy science fiction? Do did
do these researchers have any idea of what's causing all
(26:59):
of this? Yeah, they have a pretty good idea. So
I mentioned the second ago. In mice, some research has
pointed to the role of protein found in mouse blood
called growth differentiation factor eleven or g DF eleven. Uh.
One reason for thinking it's involved is that g DF
eleven seems to be present in much greater volume in
(27:19):
the blood of younger mice than it is in the
blood of older mice. Experiments have shown in isolation that
g DF eleven alone has some powerful rejuvenating effects. So
separated from the blood, just this protein can accomplish something.
Though I believe in at least some cases, the effect
of g DF eleven alone is not quite as great
(27:39):
as the effects of the direct blood plasma exchange. So
though g DF eleven seems to be a major factor
or even the main factor in these effects, there's probably
more to this effect than just one chemical we can isolate.
In a quote given to a New Scientists, Solveolta said,
counteracting aging may prove to be a combination of inhibiting
(28:00):
aging factors and increasing youthful factors. But all in mice.
So far, right, is I mean? I mean, good for
the mice, sure, yeah, But can I do that? That's
what I was wondering too. You were wondering if Lauren
could do that. I'm wondering if all of us can
do it. I mean, I want to I want to
(28:20):
live forever. Come on, I've by the way, I've I've
reversed my position on this. Yeah. A while back, y'all
were like, yeah, we want to live forever, and I
was like, nah, I thought about it. I was like, yeah,
might as well take it. Let's let's just let's just
go with that. See how it goes. Not forever for
a millenniar two exactly. Yeah, we'd roll with it. Okay,
So that's the future of of this as far as
(28:43):
it relates to humans. Yes, good questions. So we are
probably going to find out if the same thing can
work on humans within the next few years together, are
we No? No, no, fortunately we did not. I saw that, Lauren.
This podcast room is a safe place where we don't
(29:03):
talk about that movie. No, none of it. None of
it fair enough? Sorry, please continue. Okay, So we don't
have to undergo parabias is to see if the same
benefits occur in humans. To test this, we can just
try professionally administered blood or plasma transfusions. Um. Now, don't
(29:26):
try this at home, please, please, seriously, you can mess
up a blood transfusion you try to do it yourself.
It's not a good idea. It would be, it would be.
This should be performed by professionals under laboratory conditions where
they're controlling all of the factors. People know what they're doing,
so don't get carried away. These effects are really exciting,
(29:46):
but please don't do anything stupid. What what about the
straight up vampire method? Oh you mean drinking blood? Uh no, Well,
here's another quote that was actually given to the new
scientist by by Whis Corey, one of the scientists I
mentioned from the earlier study. He said, quote, certainly you
can't drink the blood, although obviously we haven't tried that experiment. Now, well,
(30:10):
that's amusing. I will point out. I will point out
something else. It just seems like that must have been
the question on everybody's mind. Here's something that's just just
to kind of give a little more detail there. So
human blood would be toxic for us to consume in
large amounts the reason. The reason being is that blood
has a lot of iron in it. Our bodies are
(30:31):
not very good at getting rid of excess iron. We
need some iron, but to have too much is going
to lead to something called hemochromatosis, and that is not good.
So it actually is toxic. So while we're joking about this,
clearly that would never be Even even if we were
to make completely synthetic human blood that is otherwise indistinguishable
(30:53):
from the naturally made blood, we would never consume it
because it would be toxic to us. Right, So we're
talking out giving people plasma transfusions generally or also another
option to test would be this g DF eleven protein
in isolation, because as we've discussed in mice, it might
not have the full range of effects or the intensity
(31:14):
we see in the total blood the direct blood sharing,
but that it might have some really important and majorly
significant effects on its own. But this research truly is
coming right up. Whis core A himself is apparently looking
into soon initiate a human trial to see if injecting
young blood plasma to people with Alzheimer's can relieve symptoms
(31:35):
of the disease or even reverse its process. And they're
starting this experiment this October, so next month. So what
are what are we going to find out? I don't know,
but I think this is really exciting. On the other hand,
we want to urge caution, don't try anything at home,
and don't get carried away, because there's a lot left
(31:55):
we need to learn about this before. I'm not just
saying yes, we discovered the fountain of youth. Well, especially
since you know, time and time again we've discovered that
something that is applicable to a different organism is not
applicable to humans. So it may very well turn out
that something that does work within mice will not translate
(32:16):
into into humans. It doesn't mean that we won't find
some alternative to that down the road, but we can
never we can never just assume that because we see
something work in one organism is universal, especially with anything
is complicated as blood, which really does have a lot
of a lot of protein and cellular function and intercellular
function going on. So there's a lot more again than
(32:37):
just just any one or two things. Well, and apart
from artificial blood, and apart from this idea of using
blood transfusions in novel ways in the medical world, there's
also within the future of blood the potential for lab
grown blood creating blood in the laboratory um And in fact,
(33:01):
we are seeing an experiment kind of ramping up right
now and which volunteers will ought to receive blood cultured
from stem cells in two thousand and sixteen. So it's
a couple of years away for this to actually happen,
but the groundwork is being laid right now for this
to become a reality. So the basic idea is to
(33:21):
use stem cells and UH and then to induce them
to develop into red blood cells, or to induce them
to grow into the mesodermic layers from which red blood
cells derive, right, right, that would be that would be
more accurate. Yes, uh so, thank you, but yes, that's
exactly what they're talking about. Now, this this is not
(33:42):
a trivial thing. That's it takes quite a bit of
delicacy to make sure that you develop your stem cells
so that they properly go move into whatever form you
ultimately want them to take. Absolutely, and you also have
to figure out how to scale that so you can
get a useful amount of blood, because it's one thing
(34:04):
to develop it and get a tiny sample, right, and
you're not really developing whole whole blood. You're developing red
blood cells from this procedure. And uh and red blood
cells are very small, as it turns out, like I think,
I think about half a billion can be in a
single drop. Well I know that if you're talking about
(34:25):
a bag of blood, which is a pint more or less, essentially,
approximately two trillions trillion red blood cells are in one
bag and the United States we go through about thirty
two thousand pints of blood every day in the medical world,
So two trillion times thirty two tho per day, that's
(34:49):
how many cells you would have to be manufacturing within
the lab just to end up meeting that demand, which
would if you were able to do that. Frankly, you
would have to go above of that because if you're
thinking three two on average, obviously you would want to
have more than that to be able to take care
of any emergency issues. But if you were able to
(35:10):
do that, then theoretically you could eventually eliminate the need
for things like blood banks or or blood donation because
you could actually manufacture it yourself. Yeah. And for furthermore,
you would be manufacturing stuff that would eliminate the risk
of disease and immune reactions transferring along with someone else's
blood and um Also, you would be eliminating the fuss
(35:32):
that comes with having to sort out all of those
blood types because you could just create all of it
and oh negative, which is the universal donor, right right, Yeah,
the the issues of shortages of specific types of blood
would no longer be a problem if you were able
to to to create that in the lab. Also, and
this may or may not tie into Joe's point, I
have no idea you can. You'd be providing young, strong
(35:56):
cells that would have the potential to survive longer. And
I wonder if these are super fresh, then yeah, yeah,
if this could be used in that kind of research.
If it does turn out that, you know, the key
to the fountain of youth is injecting young blood into
old people, we wouldn't be talking about young people coming
(36:16):
out to donate blood. We'd be talking about growing this
blood in the lave possibility. I mean, this is of
course making a lot of assumptions, the assumption that the
one that that the effect we were talking about in
mice does in fact occur also with humans. Furthermore, that
this ever becomes in any way financially viable, this process
of growing. Yeah, if this is in fact something that
(36:37):
can ultimately be scalable where we could create blood in
the massive volumes that we would need, then it could
be an amazing development for medicine. Oh sure. If any
of these blood substitutes are perhaps a combination of these
technologies pans out at all, it could mean global access
(36:58):
to to clean, life saving transfusion material. And some ninety
million transfusions is the number that I've read occur worldwide
every year. So so it could be a amazing for
a lot of people and and be it could be
a pretty huge business. I mean, not to not to
be crass about it, but there have been estimates that
(37:19):
indicate that it could drive annual sales of over seven
billion dollars in the United States alone every year. So
that means for the money people out there, there's an
economic incentive to invest in this research. Blood is big business.
So now, seriously, though, this is this is one of
those things that clearly I'm very excited to see where
(37:42):
the research leads us to and the potential benefits are.
It's it's difficult to exaggerate how world changing this could
potentially be. So we hope that that the promising research
bears fruit. We will keep an eye on that. And meanwhile,
(38:02):
to our listeners out there, if you have any suggestions,
maybe there's some topic that you've always wanted to know
more about as far as the future goes, you should
let us know. Maybe you want Jonathan to get covered
in blood in a video of his own. You would
not be the first person to have suggested such a thing,
so feel free you can drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook,
(38:24):
or Google Plus. Our handle at all three is f
W Thinking And we'll talk to you again really soon
for more on this topic. In the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota
(38:51):
Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, says everyone, And welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, take a
little walk to the edge of town and go across
(00:20):
the tracks. I'm John in Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm
Joe McCormick. So Hey, guys, Hey, how you doing today?
I'm well, pretty okay. How would you be doing if
there was no blood in your body? Less? Well, yeah,
pretty poorly overall. And blood is pretty awesome for keeping
us alive. Uh, it's kind of an integral for that
(00:42):
whole oxygen carbon dioxide exchange thing that we would depend
upon so much for life. Also kind of squishy, I mean,
without blood, we would be significantly less squishy, less voluminous. Yeah, yeah,
we'd probably be a little more like a you know,
raisins and be kind of beird across the line as well.
(01:03):
Today we wanted to talk about blood and the future
of blood and why blood is awesome and very interesting,
perhaps even more interesting than you might realize, even if
you are a vampire. Yes, Aura, as you have mentioned
in the notes, a certain Elizabeth Bathory, although that a
lot of the the legends attributed to her are possibly apocryphal. Yes, yeah,
(01:27):
so we I don't think we actually have historical proof
that she bathed in blood. But she was a countess
who did many, many horrible things. And why are we
talking about her on this podcast. Maybe we shouldn't because
because it leads into another cool cross promotional opportunity. Joe, Yeah, yeah,
Elizabeth Bathory is not the only one who might have
(01:49):
bathed in blood. Our our own Lauren Vogel Bomb has
bathed in blood. It wasn't a bath. It was more
like a shower, and it wasn't wasn't voluntary, right, You
were being splashed by it, and it wasn't real blood.
It was fake stage blood, right. But it was all
because you did a show on on brain Stuff, an
(02:09):
episode of brain Stuff where you participated in an episode.
It was all about blood and why it's red, right, correct, Yeah,
it was. It was about the color of blood and
the different chemicals in different creatures that create colors of blood.
And in order to do all of this, we really
wanted Dr Anton Jessip, who is a host over on
Stuff to blow your mind are resident monster expert. Indeed,
(02:31):
he is from the university basement. Um and uh he
he had an experiment to run. Um. I was there
in a prom dress. You know. I was trying to
encourage your telekinetic powers. Opportunity knocked and Dr Jessip answered yes,
and thus we have the video. If you'll haven't checked
out the YouTube channels for brain stuff and for stuff
(02:53):
to blow your mind, you definitely should. They got great
stuff going on there. And Lauren, one more question before
we get into the future of blood. Yes, surely. In
your brainstuff video you concluded that the reason blood appears
blue through your skin is because when blood is deoxygenated,
it turns blue. Right. That is so completely incorrect. No, No,
blood is always red, even when it is inside your body,
(03:15):
Isn't It is an optical illusion that it looks blue
in your veins. It's it's how light scatters through your skin.
And uh and it is a darker, deeper red when
it's in your veins. However, it's still red. So so
you're telling me that all those British blue bloods are
are actually red bloods. They're totally red blood unless they're
actually telekinetic crab monsters, in which case their blood is
(03:40):
probably blue because a lot of other creatures like for example,
cephalopods and crustaceans do have blue blood. Well, we'll focus
on human blood. Yeah, tomorrow is when we record the
podcast about the crab Monsters. Today we need to talk
about blood technology. So there's actually a really fascinating future
around blood and one of the first things we wanted
(04:02):
to talk about was the idea of artificial blood. So
before we get into the actual science, I have to
I know that we've just been doing tangents all the
way leading up into this podcast, but this this is
one of those things where the first time I really
uh started thinking about artificial blood was when I watched
a super cheesy horror movie. Have you guys ever seen
Sundown The Vampire in Retreat? I have not. It's the
(04:25):
Vampire in Retreat. Yes, not the vampire retreat, like it's
a resort that they go to. Well, it's almost like that,
because the idea is of the vampire that there's a
colony of vampires who have settled a town in in
in the West, and it's kind of a vampire Western
mash up movie. And Bruce Campbell plays the descendant of
(04:47):
Van Helsing in this um and uh, I believe David
Carradine is the leader of the vampires. Yeah, that sounds
high class. This phenomenal movie. I saw it when it
was on cable back in the you know, nineties or something.
But anyway, the plot of the movie partially revolves around
the fact that that the vampire colony is made up
(05:09):
of two different camps, and one camp is trying to
get away from the typical vampireism thing by creating artificial
blood as a blood substitute that they will drink, therefore
they will no longer have to prey upon the living.
The other camp is more like, Ah, we're superior predators
and we should be you know, preying upon people. That's
(05:29):
what we should be doing. Uh. And it wasn't at
the time. I was thinking, h artificial blood, that actually
would be incredibly useful, right, I Mean, there's there's an
actual need your blood in so many different medical procedures
just for vampires. So you're not just talking about artificial blood.
Is in movie blood something that looks like blood. We're
(05:50):
talking about something that performs the anatomical function of blood.
Right at the very least and and for the most
part throughout history, the thing that people have been trying
to develop is an artificial blood that can, in fact,
uh handle that oxygen carbon dioxide exchange that we need
in order to survive. Now, blood does other stuff too.
(06:12):
It's not just a vehicle for carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide.
That's a big part of it. But because all of
your all of your organs need oxygen in order to function,
and they get oxygen because red blood cells contain the
stuff called hemoglobin that binds to the oxygen in your
lungs and then proceeds to carry it throughout your bodily systems. Yeah,
(06:32):
so exactly, And and that's the main thing that the
artificial blood types have been you know, people have been
trying to find something that could do that as well
as blood can. And it's interesting that the history of
looking into artificial blood stretches back quite a long ways
to the point where we're going. Before um, we had
(06:54):
a lot of scientific knowledge about blood and what it
does and what it's capable of doing. The sleep people
just saying hey, I wonder what would happen if we
put this in us instead? Well, blood is one of
the four humors, right, I mean, that's still solid science
right then it's well, it's not solid science science, but yes,
it was one of the humors. Um. So if you
(07:15):
look back to the seventeenth century, William Harvey was the
first to examine the circulatory system and describe exactly how
blood moves through the body. Uh, And the physicians of
that day decided to experiment with various substances as blood
substitutes for people who would need blood for any particular reason. Um.
(07:38):
And that would include stuff like milk, beer, urine, and
sheep blood. I think beer was the really popular one. Well,
beer was popular for a lot of reasons and that
in the seventeenth century. But it's good to drink, it's
good in your veins, right, yeah, it was very much
in that sane Wait wait wait, wait wait wait urine though,
(08:00):
urine it's not good to drink. And is sheep's blood
good to drink? It's good in sausages. Um. I'm not
gonna I'm not going to argue either of those things.
But what I am going to say is this is
very closely related to that idea of blood letting being
part of the medical procedures of the day. You know,
the the idea of draining away things that were negative
(08:22):
or or harmful to a person. Let yeah, yeah, and
uh and so this was kind of a very primitive
approach obviously, and a lot of people who probably were
not doing too well to begin with lost their lives
as a part of the process of trying these things.
In sixteen sixty seven, it was actually the first successful
(08:43):
blood transfusion to human to human. Now, patients who would
require multiple transfusions died usually during the process, and so
while the first one first one's early ones were successful,
it was a ttimately abandoned as a practice because it
(09:03):
turned out that giving people multiple transfusions would end up
killing them, so that they decided that it actually did
not work. Uh yeah. I don't think that research really
picked back up again until about the eighteen hundreds. During
the age of cholera. Yes, uh, physicians would treat people
who were afflicted with asiatic cholera by injecting milk into them.
(09:26):
The thought at the time was that the milk would
help them regrow their white blood cells, which is not correct. However,
it did, but milk is white, but milk thanks To
be fair, some of the literature does suggest that perhaps
it was actually helping some of the patients, but there
(09:48):
was not any real scientific inquiry as to what the
mechanism was and it didn't get a wide enough acceptance,
so it was pretty much abandoned as well. So whether
or not it was actually effective in treating cholera is
kind of up to debate. It was, Yeah, it's one
(10:09):
of the things where without that scientific rigor, you can't
say right. But other experiments using things like a saltwater
saline as blood replacement seemed to be promising. There were
some experiments with frogs that showed that if you were
to replace a frog's blood with saline, it would continue living,
which seemed really exciting until they saw that if you
(10:29):
just remove a frog's blood entirely, it could continue living
for a short while, which suggests that you could replace
it with pretty much anything that's not going to be
toxic and the frog would not happily, but but would
continue to live for a little while. So then that
that excitement about saline kind of died down. So um,
(10:52):
moving on, they started to look at using animal blood
as replacement for for humans, but animal blood and have
substances in it that are toxic to us, and at
the time the physicians really didn't have the ability or
the equipment to figure out which elements were going to
be toxic how to remove them from the blood, so
(11:14):
that it couldn't really make this an effective means of
treating people without making them far more sick using something
that would end up being toxic. Um and other experiments
ended up leading to things called blood volume izers, which
are not the same as a blood substitute. A volume
isser is something that can mix with blood safely and
not be toxic and can help if you have a
(11:35):
condition that also has like low blood pressure. Let's say
that you're being treated for something and you your blood
pressure starts to drop. This would be able to bring
your blood pressure back up, But the volume isser lacks
any capability of handling any of the other functions of blood.
So if you were you know, you could essentially asphyxiate
(11:56):
to death. I mean, you would die from lack of
oxygen you had too much of this in your system
because it's not carrying it's not carrying the oxygen. But
if it's just if it's one of those things where
the blood pressure is a serious problem, and otherwise you
would be you know, more or less Okay, through whatever procedure,
it was a viable approach in small enough amounts, that
(12:17):
kind of thing can be used until the patient's blood
count gets back up. Yes, But uh, then some some
important research happened in the late eighteen hundreds and early
nineteen hundreds. That's when Leaphold land Steiner discovered blood types
which made human transfusions of blood a lot more safe,
or or I mean they would make human transfusions of
(12:38):
blood a lot more safe once we did a little
bit more research into the chemistry of blood and the
exact role of blood in doing all of this oxygen
circulation we've been talking about this. Obviously, no one knew
that much about it until the early DS and and
the World Wars really helped this research along because perhaps
obviously people were very interested in how to helps save lives.
(13:00):
Was absolutely a requirement at the time. Yeah, there's nothing
like necessity to really push forward innovation, right, We've we've
heard similar things over and over again, especially in this story. Um. Then,
in the nineteen sixties, the first blood substitute was developed.
It was called or it is called still today, per
fluoro carbons or PFCs, and these are synthetic compounds that
(13:24):
have this huge propensity for carrying gases that have been
dissolved in a liquid and hence are useful for keeping
oxygen flowing through a patient's body and also helping to
keep their blood pressure study. As we mentioned, a moment
ago um, you know, usually until they can receive a
transfusion or again grow back their own red blood cells.
It's it's not a permanent blood substitute, right. I've heard
(13:47):
that while it's capable of holding quite a bit of oxygen,
it's not as efficient at transferring it as hemoglobin is.
So it's it's one of those things that can be
used to supplement, but not replace, uh someone's blood. Yes,
I think. I think blood supplement is what I intended
to say instead of blood substitute. But uh and and
(14:08):
and this research at the time I don't think was
quite in humans. Yet they were doing a bunch of
research in mice and h Unfortunately for for the research
at the time, the blood bank system that had been
established thanks to the World Wars was working really well,
and the risks in human trials were so steep that
(14:28):
it was basically abandoned until the late nineteen seventies and
early nineteen eighties when a Vietnam happened. Well, I mean,
the country is always happening, I suppose, but when when
when the when the Vietnam War happened? Yes, Um. Whereupon
a bunch of the blood bank system proved to be
unstable for large scale disaster. And also it was discovered
(14:51):
that viruses like hepatitis and the human immunoe deficiency virus
or HIV could be spread by blood transfusions. So that
was a terrifying time for everyone. And PFCs were developed
for human use and went onto the market. They've never
actually been very popular or commercially viable, which in medical
research is very important because, as we said in a
(15:14):
recent episode, it's very expensive to bring stuff like this
to the market, mostly because a whole lot of pfc
s are acquired in order to really do any good
in your system, like like you were saying, Jonathan, they don't.
They're not extremely efficient at delivering oxygen um, and they
can cause a lot of adverse side effects after use,
especially in the vascular systems of the lungs and the brain,
(15:36):
which people tend to want to keep using. Yeah. So Um.
Then in in the nineteen nineties, as it was kind
of being discovered that p f c s might not
be the best stuff, a another class of substitute was developed,
and that was hemoglobin based oxygen carriers or hbo c s.
(15:56):
And these guys are are interesting because they're made from real,
actual sterilized hemoglobin, being of course, the compound that carries
the oxygen around in your blood. Um. And we get
this hemoglobin from either human blood or cow blood, or
from bacteria that we have genetically modified in order to
produce it, which I find fascinating. Um. But the thing
(16:19):
is that you can't just stick hemoglobin in your blood
stream and expect it to function. When it's in a
red blood cell, it does its job really well, but
when it's just kind of floating around, it breaks down
very quickly into really quite toxic compounds. Yeah. So, so
HBOCs have to contain the hemoglobin some way, and it's
(16:39):
so much of a problem that none have ever been
approved by the f d A. As far as I know,
the only places that they've been licensed for for medical
use are in South African hospitals which had a pretty
huge AIDS crisis that put the blood supply at risk
and also in Russia. However, there there's some recent research
that is making it seem more and more viable as
(17:03):
a solution. There's some people at the University of Essex
are engineering hemoglobin molecules combined with the amino acid tyro scene,
which they say can enable a patient's body to break
the stuff down more safely. Uh. And they just received
some like one point five million pounds in funding that
heavy to pursue it. So I see what you did there.
(17:25):
Thank you. Pounds the currency, the pounds of currency, pounds
of hema globin. Man, you are so good at saying hemoglobin.
I keep wanting to say hemo goblin, which is one
of the most terrifying creatures in the Dungeons and Dragons University.
And when you actually managed to hit that critical blow,
they just explode in blood. That's gross. Uh Okay, So
(17:48):
backing away from exploding blood monsters, what's really cool about
all of all of these these potential blood substitutes is
that their shelf stable for like up to two years,
which is a big improvement over carrying around jars of
human blood, which you you have, well, I mean it's
probably not in jars, but but you have to keep
refrigerated otherwise it will go very bad, very quickly um
(18:12):
and be useless. And furthermore, they are not dependent on
blood type, so you can just keep them out in
the field where where we need them in case of emergency.
But the thing is that, you know, unlike this Bruce
Campbell movie we're talking about, or like true blood, it's
not really blood. But that's okay, because, I mean, because
(18:33):
the entire idea of anyone drinking blood is completely crazy,
right I would imagine, So, I mean, I can't there's
no scientific basis for consuming blood or anything like that,
right WHOA, Joe, I knew there was a reason we
brought you along, maybe not drinking blood. Well that that's
(18:54):
somewhat of a relief. But there have been some really
interesting scientific findings, especially in the past few years, that
proved that young blood is delicious and will make you immortal. Well,
I know that companies are always looking for young blood
to keep things going, but I think that's kind of metaphoric. No,
the liquid the healthy individual tell me more. Joe. Well, okay,
(19:19):
so I was overstating. It won't actually make you immortal
as far as we know, And I totally take back
the delicious part. I'm sure that it's disgusting. I bet
I don't know. Joe has never drank human blood. That's
what I'm saying. Anyway, let's let's move on. Um No, seriously,
here are the facts. So, multiple experiments have shown that
(19:40):
in mice, young blood has measurable rejuvenating effects. So wait,
you mean like you get like a mouse that's you know,
a geriatric mouse, and you give it a transfusion of
young mouse blood and things change for the old mouse.
That is exactly what I'm seeing. You can take young
blood from a young mouse, give it to an older mouse,
(20:02):
and you see broad, widespread and significant health benefits. On
one hand, this sounds totally crazy and Frankensteiny right, like,
you know, the premise of a poorly research sci fi
movie is just part of what's creepy about it is
how simple it is, Right, you just take the young blood,
put it in the old animal health benefits sounds fake,
(20:24):
it's absolutely true and it kind of makes sense. So
when we age, part of what's happening to us is
that there's a marked decline in our body tissues ability
to regenerate itself. Right, it becomes harder for us to
make the new cells we need to stay young. So
if you just think about this in trivial terms, it's
(20:44):
totally normal when a young child gets an injury, you know,
it has a skateboarding accident, gets all scuffed up and
stuff that heals pretty quick. If you think about an
adult getting a comparable injury, suddenly that thing that's no
big deal on a kid is a big deal on
an adult. It takes a lot longer to heal. It's
just generally more debilitating. Oh man, this is a problem,
(21:07):
and so that we suspect that over time, aging does
something to the functioning of stem cells in our body
that are responsible for growing new tissue. But the question
is exactly what's happening and is there any way to
reverse it? Uh So, there was actually a really great
article about this that came out in New Scientists just
a couple of days ago on August twenty and a
(21:28):
lot of what I'm siting here I learned about through that.
So there's this process called hetero chronic parabiosis. I recognize
some of those syllables, but what is that exactly? Para?
I hope I'm pronouncing this right, it's either parabiosis or parabiosis.
I don't know. That's one of those tough words we
(21:48):
forgive you, sorry. Parabioses p A r A b io
s I S. Parabiosis in this case refers to removing
skin patches from two mice and sowing the mice together,
so you end up with a mega mouse like vultron
of mice. You you end up connecting their circulatory system.
(22:09):
So in this way the two mice share a bloodstream.
Their blood becomes one common pool. Not not literally it's
actually still inside the mice, right, but it connects and
and these are these will be referred to as parabiotic mice. So.
The process was first described by a French physiologist named
Paul Bert b E. R. T. I guess it's not
just Burt Paul Bart in the eighteen sixties, and then
(22:33):
later in the nineteen thirties the process was improved upon
by Bunster and Meer, and basically as it is today.
It entails attaching the two mice at parallel elbows and knees,
side by side, and then sewing together an exposed patch
along their sides, and after some length of time, the
pair can safely be separated again if necessary for the experiment.
(22:56):
I want to put it in that this is fascinating
but terrifying. Yeah, yeah, it's as I said, it's starting
to sound like something from Animal Moderately Frankensteiny. Yeah. So,
as you might guess from the name, So that's parabiasis.
As you might guess from the name, hetero chronic parabiasis
would mean mixed time scales, hetero chronic mixed time. So
(23:17):
you're creating a union of parabiotic mice where one mouse
is old and the other mouse is young. So what's
really striking about hetero chronic parabiasies in mice is that
the old mouse seems to benefit greatly from the blood
of the young. Unfortunately, the young mice ended up getting
no benefit at all. And we're obsessed with murders. She
(23:39):
wrote you a just hey, I'm sorry. I'm just saying.
I guess you are the oldest person here. You can
make those jokes. It's okay for him. In the nineteen fifties,
researcher at Cornell named Clive McKay performed experiments with parabiasis
and a quest to learn about prolonging the lifespan of mammals.
(24:00):
McKay and his associates found that old mice who underwent
the procedure showed rejuvenated cartilage. Yeah, so the cartilaginous tissue
in their body actually appeared younger after they had been
joined to a younger mouse. And more recently, a team
led by the Stanford researcher Thomas A. Rando has continued
research in this area. They published a study in Nature
(24:22):
in two thousand five and they showed that after five
weeks of hetero chronic parabiasis, older mice showed improved rates
of muscle healing and liver cell regeneration. Wow, was there
any other sort of improvements in in this kind of
Oh yeah really Yeah. Basically almost everything we've looked at
(24:43):
gets better with young blood. So there's the brain. Multiple
research projects have showed positive cognitive and neurological effects of
young blood and older mice. Just one example was published
this May May of fourteen in Nature Medicine, and it
was a t sam including Solvolita and Tony whis Corey
(25:03):
and they made the bold claim and this is actually
a quote from the abstract of their paper that quote,
exposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract
and reverse pre existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional,
and cognitive level. So the that's the end of the quote,
but that's the entire gam it. So they found really
(25:26):
measurable physical improvements in the brain. The brain structure has
got stronger, including synaptic plasticity, which is a big deal.
And then like the zoomed out level, they saw improvements
in the cognitive function that you can measure with behavioral tests.
So the older mice with cognitive impairments saw improvement in
things like memory and spatial learning, all from young mouse blood.
(25:50):
Then there was the heart research led by the Harvard
scientist Amy Wagers, who by the way, has also done
important work on the brain effects I just mentioned and
on ident finding the cause of these effects in general,
which I'm about to talk about in a minute. But
research out of her lab found that when you introduce
young mouse blood into older mice, it can reduce the
cumulative prevalence of cardiac hypertrophy. So as we get older,
(26:14):
our hearts get bigger, they grow larger and thicker, and
that's not good. It leads to heart failure. All right,
you want it to be Do you want the muscle
to be to be spry right then? Yeah? Sure? Yeah.
And so when you perform the heterochronic parabiasis between an
older mouse with cardiac hypertrophy with a young healthy mouse,
Wagers found that the older mouse's heart shrinks to nearly
(26:38):
the size of the younger mause's heart. So just having
the younger mouse's blood going through that circulatory system fixes
the heart. The heart shrinks back to pretty much the
size of a typical, younger, healthy mouse. This this is
not sounding any less like crazy science fiction? Do did
do these researchers have any idea of what's causing all
(26:59):
of this? Yeah, they have a pretty good idea. So
I mentioned the second ago. In mice, some research has
pointed to the role of protein found in mouse blood
called growth differentiation factor eleven or g DF eleven. Uh.
One reason for thinking it's involved is that g DF
eleven seems to be present in much greater volume in
(27:19):
the blood of younger mice than it is in the
blood of older mice. Experiments have shown in isolation that
g DF eleven alone has some powerful rejuvenating effects. So
separated from the blood, just this protein can accomplish something.
Though I believe in at least some cases, the effect
of g DF eleven alone is not quite as great
(27:39):
as the effects of the direct blood plasma exchange. So
though g DF eleven seems to be a major factor
or even the main factor in these effects, there's probably
more to this effect than just one chemical we can isolate.
In a quote given to a New Scientists, Solveolta said,
counteracting aging may prove to be a combination of inhibiting
(28:00):
aging factors and increasing youthful factors. But all in mice.
So far, right, is I mean? I mean, good for
the mice, sure, yeah, But can I do that? That's
what I was wondering too. You were wondering if Lauren
could do that. I'm wondering if all of us can
do it. I mean, I want to I want to
(28:20):
live forever. Come on, I've by the way, I've I've
reversed my position on this. Yeah. A while back, y'all
were like, yeah, we want to live forever, and I
was like, nah, I thought about it. I was like, yeah,
might as well take it. Let's let's just let's just
go with that. See how it goes. Not forever for
a millenniar two exactly. Yeah, we'd roll with it. Okay,
So that's the future of of this as far as
(28:43):
it relates to humans. Yes, good questions. So we are
probably going to find out if the same thing can
work on humans within the next few years together, are
we No? No, no, fortunately we did not. I saw that, Lauren.
This podcast room is a safe place where we don't
(29:03):
talk about that movie. No, none of it. None of
it fair enough? Sorry, please continue. Okay, So we don't
have to undergo parabias is to see if the same
benefits occur in humans. To test this, we can just
try professionally administered blood or plasma transfusions. Um. Now, don't
(29:26):
try this at home, please, please, seriously, you can mess
up a blood transfusion you try to do it yourself.
It's not a good idea. It would be, it would be.
This should be performed by professionals under laboratory conditions where
they're controlling all of the factors. People know what they're doing,
so don't get carried away. These effects are really exciting,
(29:46):
but please don't do anything stupid. What what about the
straight up vampire method? Oh you mean drinking blood? Uh no, Well,
here's another quote that was actually given to the new
scientist by by Whis Corey, one of the scientists I
mentioned from the earlier study. He said, quote, certainly you
can't drink the blood, although obviously we haven't tried that experiment. Now, well,
(30:10):
that's amusing. I will point out. I will point out
something else. It just seems like that must have been
the question on everybody's mind. Here's something that's just just
to kind of give a little more detail there. So
human blood would be toxic for us to consume in
large amounts the reason. The reason being is that blood
has a lot of iron in it. Our bodies are
(30:31):
not very good at getting rid of excess iron. We
need some iron, but to have too much is going
to lead to something called hemochromatosis, and that is not good.
So it actually is toxic. So while we're joking about this,
clearly that would never be Even even if we were
to make completely synthetic human blood that is otherwise indistinguishable
(30:53):
from the naturally made blood, we would never consume it
because it would be toxic to us. Right, So we're
talking out giving people plasma transfusions generally or also another
option to test would be this g DF eleven protein
in isolation, because as we've discussed in mice, it might
not have the full range of effects or the intensity
(31:14):
we see in the total blood the direct blood sharing,
but that it might have some really important and majorly
significant effects on its own. But this research truly is
coming right up. Whis core A himself is apparently looking
into soon initiate a human trial to see if injecting
young blood plasma to people with Alzheimer's can relieve symptoms
(31:35):
of the disease or even reverse its process. And they're
starting this experiment this October, so next month. So what
are what are we going to find out? I don't know,
but I think this is really exciting. On the other hand,
we want to urge caution, don't try anything at home,
and don't get carried away, because there's a lot left
(31:55):
we need to learn about this before. I'm not just
saying yes, we discovered the fountain of youth. Well, especially
since you know, time and time again we've discovered that
something that is applicable to a different organism is not
applicable to humans. So it may very well turn out
that something that does work within mice will not translate
(32:16):
into into humans. It doesn't mean that we won't find
some alternative to that down the road, but we can
never we can never just assume that because we see
something work in one organism is universal, especially with anything
is complicated as blood, which really does have a lot
of a lot of protein and cellular function and intercellular
function going on. So there's a lot more again than
(32:37):
just just any one or two things. Well, and apart
from artificial blood, and apart from this idea of using
blood transfusions in novel ways in the medical world, there's
also within the future of blood the potential for lab
grown blood creating blood in the laboratory um And in fact,
(33:01):
we are seeing an experiment kind of ramping up right
now and which volunteers will ought to receive blood cultured
from stem cells in two thousand and sixteen. So it's
a couple of years away for this to actually happen,
but the groundwork is being laid right now for this
to become a reality. So the basic idea is to
(33:21):
use stem cells and UH and then to induce them
to develop into red blood cells, or to induce them
to grow into the mesodermic layers from which red blood
cells derive, right, right, that would be that would be
more accurate. Yes, uh so, thank you, but yes, that's
exactly what they're talking about. Now, this this is not
(33:42):
a trivial thing. That's it takes quite a bit of
delicacy to make sure that you develop your stem cells
so that they properly go move into whatever form you
ultimately want them to take. Absolutely, and you also have
to figure out how to scale that so you can
get a useful amount of blood, because it's one thing
(34:04):
to develop it and get a tiny sample, right, and
you're not really developing whole whole blood. You're developing red
blood cells from this procedure. And uh and red blood
cells are very small, as it turns out, like I think,
I think about half a billion can be in a
single drop. Well I know that if you're talking about
(34:25):
a bag of blood, which is a pint more or less, essentially,
approximately two trillions trillion red blood cells are in one
bag and the United States we go through about thirty
two thousand pints of blood every day in the medical world,
So two trillion times thirty two tho per day, that's
(34:49):
how many cells you would have to be manufacturing within
the lab just to end up meeting that demand, which
would if you were able to do that. Frankly, you
would have to go above of that because if you're
thinking three two on average, obviously you would want to
have more than that to be able to take care
of any emergency issues. But if you were able to
(35:10):
do that, then theoretically you could eventually eliminate the need
for things like blood banks or or blood donation because
you could actually manufacture it yourself. Yeah. And for furthermore,
you would be manufacturing stuff that would eliminate the risk
of disease and immune reactions transferring along with someone else's
blood and um Also, you would be eliminating the fuss
(35:32):
that comes with having to sort out all of those
blood types because you could just create all of it
and oh negative, which is the universal donor, right right, Yeah,
the the issues of shortages of specific types of blood
would no longer be a problem if you were able
to to to create that in the lab. Also, and
this may or may not tie into Joe's point, I
have no idea you can. You'd be providing young, strong
(35:56):
cells that would have the potential to survive longer. And
I wonder if these are super fresh, then yeah, yeah,
if this could be used in that kind of research.
If it does turn out that, you know, the key
to the fountain of youth is injecting young blood into
old people, we wouldn't be talking about young people coming
(36:16):
out to donate blood. We'd be talking about growing this
blood in the lave possibility. I mean, this is of
course making a lot of assumptions, the assumption that the
one that that the effect we were talking about in
mice does in fact occur also with humans. Furthermore, that
this ever becomes in any way financially viable, this process
of growing. Yeah, if this is in fact something that
(36:37):
can ultimately be scalable where we could create blood in
the massive volumes that we would need, then it could
be an amazing development for medicine. Oh sure. If any
of these blood substitutes are perhaps a combination of these
technologies pans out at all, it could mean global access
(36:58):
to to clean, life saving transfusion material. And some ninety
million transfusions is the number that I've read occur worldwide
every year. So so it could be a amazing for
a lot of people and and be it could be
a pretty huge business. I mean, not to not to
be crass about it, but there have been estimates that
(37:19):
indicate that it could drive annual sales of over seven
billion dollars in the United States alone every year. So
that means for the money people out there, there's an
economic incentive to invest in this research. Blood is big business.
So now, seriously, though, this is this is one of
those things that clearly I'm very excited to see where
(37:42):
the research leads us to and the potential benefits are.
It's it's difficult to exaggerate how world changing this could
potentially be. So we hope that that the promising research
bears fruit. We will keep an eye on that. And meanwhile,
(38:02):
to our listeners out there, if you have any suggestions,
maybe there's some topic that you've always wanted to know
more about as far as the future goes, you should
let us know. Maybe you want Jonathan to get covered
in blood in a video of his own. You would
not be the first person to have suggested such a thing,
so feel free you can drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook,
(38:24):
or Google Plus. Our handle at all three is f
W Thinking And we'll talk to you again really soon
for more on this topic. In the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota
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