May 16, 2023 • 58 mins
We’ve heard the legends of vampires for thousands of years, and while the vast majority of modern humans relegate the stories to the domain of myth and folklore, more and more experts are wondering if technology will allow us to create something very much like the monsters of myth. Could transfusing blood from the young rejuvenate the bodies of the old? What ethical consequences could we encounter? How far has the research already gone?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Matt, have you ever felt, you know, just like
weirdly tired always? You know, it's just always vibe.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
That's that's my standard feeling throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
So, uh, I guess it's cool to have feel It's
uh not til long ago. In a previous Classic episode,
you pointed out that the phrase UAP has been around
for five years now, and it made me think a
little bit about age. What if there was a way
(00:31):
to mitigate the inevitable uh grind of time. What if
you could just take some blood from someone younger and
you know, get rid of that tired feeling.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Okay, Illuminati, I'm out of here, and.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We hope that you are in for today's classic episode,
The Modern Vampire. It's a true story. Uh. There have
been extensive experiments in the modern day with plasma transfusion
in a way that is ethically fraught and riddled with conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Name is Ben. Our compatriot nol is traveling at the moment,
but we'll be back soon. We are joined with our
super producer Paul Deckin. Most importantly, you are you, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know? Matt,
I propose we begin this episode with a little bit
of a peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
All right.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So for the past gosh to two months almost, Matt
and Noel and I have been kicking the can down
the road regarding a very interesting email we receive about
the Georgia guidestones. And every episode we have told each
(02:15):
other we're going to read this in a shout out
corner at the end of the show. And we've just been,
you know, so much like a dog chasing a ball
that by the time we get to the end of
an episode, we've we've found that we don't have room
to squeeze this in.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, but we're gonna instead of squeezing it in, we're
just going to place it in front of you, right
here in front of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So let's consider this an oddly placed shout out corner.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
The message says, greetings, Ben, Matt Knowle. This email is
in regards to the stuff they Don't want you to know.
Podcast episode titled Who built the Georgia Guidestones, published eighteenth
of November twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
We got there, We got to it eventually, We.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Did it, says. Firstly, there were several pieces of information
left out from your discussions on the topic, and this
is a much longer email than we are going to
read now. We are reading one piece of it that
was most compelling to us, It says. The identity of
RC Christian has since been revealed to be that of
(03:20):
one Herbert Hinney Hnie Kirsten, a doctor from Fort Dodge, Iowa.
This was first reported in the documentary film Dark Clouds
Over Elberton by Chris Pinto. It is also reported that
Kirsten was a supporter of David Duke, the former Grand
Wizard of the Knights of the klu Klux Klan and
(03:41):
proponent of eugenics. He was apparently aided by a friend
of his, Robert Merriman, who helped publish the Common Sense
Renewed book, the one that we mentioned in that episode,
A Whole Bunch, and we actually have a copy of
and it was written this is written to us by
quote a guide to the.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
End, and we thought this was we thought this was
fantastic well, at least it's a fantastic lead on the
true identity of RC Christian. At this point, it has
not been conclusively proven. Not everybody agrees that this is
indeed Herbert Hinney Kirsten or Herbert Heinie Kirsten. But I
(04:21):
think it's Hinny. I think it's Anny, Matt. This has
not been conclusively proven in a way that everybody accepts.
But this is one of the most recent arguments for
the true identity of RC Christian. If you'd like to
learn more, please check out the documentary Dark Clouds over Elberton,
as well as the fantastic documentary that Matt put together.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Now that we put together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Okay, but it's available on Amazon for free, just search
for us. Yeah, Echeton Secret is out the name of
our take on it, and maybe one day we'll just
get it on YouTube as well. Agreed, we should do that,
And this concludes our oddly place onto the show. Let's
(05:10):
get let's get creepy. Let's get creepy immediately. Okay, Oh,
there's a creepy voice, Matt. We've all heard myths about vampires, right, Yes,
some form of a vampire legend exists on every continent,
with the possible exception of Antarctica. There's the typical Dracula
type vampire that's possibly the most familiar type of vampire
(05:33):
here in the West, but there are other creatures as well,
like the swan and the Philippines, or the lamia in
Grecian folklore.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, bloodsuckers, beings that exist on the sanguine delights of
other beings.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
That's a great that's a great description.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's really tough to trace the beginnings
of this myth of what a vampire is, what it
was before it became a capital v vampire that's in
movies and pop culture, and from demons to Dracula, the
creation of the modern vampire myth. The author Matthew Beresford notes, quote,
there are clear foundations for the vampire and the ancient world,
(06:10):
and it is impossible to prove when the myth first arose.
There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of
sorcery and ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into this world
from some other.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Right other being, some other playing some other dimension. In
earlier episodes, we explored the possible origins of the vampire myth,
by which we mean the possible real world seeds of
truth that later grew into this agglomeration of folklore. And
(06:44):
this includes proposed causes such as premature burial, which was
horrifically common for a very very long time, also conditions
medical conditions like porphyria or dementia and so on. And
you can again find those episodes, both video and audio
(07:05):
at our website. Stuff they don't want you to know
dot com on what you're using to listen to this,
oh yes, or on whatever feed you prefer. We should
be out there and tell us if you can't find
us on your preferred feed. But today we are asking
a more topical question. We're not asking whether something like
a vampire ever existed, or even if something like a
(07:27):
vampire currently exists. Instead, we're asking whether it is possible
to create vampires or something like them. Not characters in fiction,
friends and neighbors and you're monsters on the silver screen.
We're talking about real life vampires.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Again, someone something that exists on the blood of others.
And this concept of vampirism has become so prevalent in
our worlds nowadays it's been used as an insult. You
vampire can get out in the light, you vampire or
a piece of a probrium to heap him upon all
kinds of let's say, all two human rosters, right, yeah, you'll.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Hear a probrium is a word for reproacher or insult.
You'll hear this used to refer to certain serial killers
in the past, you know, the vampire of so and so.
And you'll also, of course hear it used to describe
(08:33):
a lot of ancient aristocrats. Of course. The legendary Lad
Tepesh is often cited as the inspiration for ram Stoker's Dracula,
and he was a prince of a place called Wallachia
three different times between fourteen forty eight and his death.
He was the second son of someone named Vlad Dracoul
(08:55):
or Vlad the Dragon, who was the ruler of Wallachia
in fourteen thirty six. Lewis father was known as Dracula
the Dragon. He flat Tepesh, Lad the Third, was the
more notorious of the two. He was known as the
Impaler for his habit of impaling his enemies, rivals, or
just people who caught him on the wrong side of
bed in the morning. He'd have these large wooden stakes
(09:18):
erected and then graphic warning. Here he would have their
bodies forced on the stakes, the stakes going through their
anuses and impaling him that way. He was also infamous
for casually dining as he watched these people die a
very slow, grisly painful death.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So in a way he did get by through the
blood of others, in a very dark way.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Sure, yeah, and in a experiential rather than a physiological
way perhaps, which is I don't know, that's a dangerous
comparison because if we engage in that comparison, we get
to slippery slope where we could argue that all warlords
or even politicians who are in charge of militaries subsist
(10:08):
to a degree on the blood of others.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I don't think that slope is that slippery.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I think we might already have slipped. There's another example,
which is Elizabeth Bathri or Erzbett Bathory, the noble woman
who is based in what is now known as Slovakia.
In the sixteen hundred, she was arrested and accused of
numerous macab crimes. We have just a few examples of
those alleged crimes.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, she would keep her well. Allegedly, she would keep
her servants chained up every night, so their hands were
just so tightly bound that they would turn blue and
sometimes even squirt blood out of them. She used to
beat her servants to the point that there was so
much blood all over the place, on the walls, on
the beds, they had to use ashes and cinders to
(10:56):
soak it all up and scrub it all away. She
even burned her sir with metal sticks allegedly red hot
keys and coins. She ironed the soles of their feet
and even stuck burning rods into their vaginas.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yes, and she didn't stop there with stabbing. She also
pricked them in their mouths and fingernails with needles, cut
their hands, lips and noses, shoes, knives, needles, candles, occasionally
her own teeth to lacerate the genitals of servants, stitch
their lips and tongues together, made them sit on stinging nettles,
(11:32):
bathe with the nettles, force them to cook and eat
their own flesh, or make sausages from it and serve
it to the guests. She was accused of practicing dark magic,
baking magical poisonous cakes in order to kill rival politicians
such as George Thurzo, who was later one of the
(11:52):
guys who arrested her, was also she would cast magic
spells to summon clouds filled with angry cats.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Most famously the most infamously, rather, she was believed to
have bled young servant girls dry, and after exsanguinating their
bodies or training all the blood from them, bathing in
that blood.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yes, and that's probably where you've most likely heard a
lot of these stories where she is the she's a
whole other archetype in a way of things beyond a vampire,
just having to do with bathing in the blood.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Right, and this was characterized as part of a right
or a ritual that would lengthen her lifespan and rejuvenate
her history has to a degree exonerated Bathory of some
of these accusations. At the time of the trial, over
(12:54):
three hundred individuals testified against her for one thing or another,
and her servants were put to Four of her servants
were put to gruesome ends, but given the influence that
she had in society at the time, she was not killed.
(13:15):
She was immured I M m U r ed, which
means they grounded her for the rest of her life. Essentially,
they put her in a windowless room, she was supplied
with food and water, and she was left there to die.
But it looks like it looks like there's some problems
with the claims. Most immediately, the whole idea of bathing
(13:38):
in virgin blood. First, that idea came about centuries after
her death. Someone added that to the story to the
campfire tail.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
That's an issue.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It doesn't mean that she didn't do horrible things, just
means that came along much later. Also, from a scientific perspective,
it's most likely impossible for her to quote bathe and
virgin blood due to coagulation. How would you keep the
(14:15):
blood liquid long enough were there to be an entire
tub of it?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Interesting, I guess it would be in the how you
got the blood.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Out right right and ambient temperature and so on. Yeah,
so god, yeah, we're getting grizzly pretty quickly in this one.
So it's also possible that Bathory was targeted by the
male dominated establishment at the time because vilification or demonization
of women was a common way of removing them from
(14:47):
the political chessboard. This happened in witch hunts, you know
a lot of times. One thing that escapes. Historical explanations
of the witch hunt phenomenon is the following in certain
practices in the inquisition, in certain non inquisition which hunts
(15:08):
the accuser, the person who put the witch to trial,
who is almost always convicted in one way or the other,
they would receive the wealth of the estate, so they
were not objective in their accusations. They were incentivized or incented,
whichever word you prefer, to arrive at a guilty verdict.
(15:32):
So it's quite possible that this was a political hit.
But we say all this because whether or not the
legend is whether or not the legend is true, it
is something iconic. It is an image that is stayed
with us, you me, probably everyone you know has heard
(15:53):
of these grizzly stories about the elites of the world
subsisting on the blood of the innocent and typically the oppressed.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, I mean metaphorically, there's no bones about it. It
kind of is true metaphorically.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Right, right, And so the question literally, then our conclusion becomes,
that's it, right. Vampirism is largely a myth.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And allegory of sorts.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right, Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
There may be more to this whole blood and vampirism
thing than we had initially believed, or at least some
aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, for decades, it turns out, scientists have been experimenting
with the idea of transfusing blood from younger organisms to
older organisms.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, what happens when we put this young blood in here?
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yes, exactly, that's a part of the evil.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Laugh.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I didn't mean it sounds sinister.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
But.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
It's It's true. And you have to wonder sometimes how
much of this research starts from an informed place, and
how much of it starts with someone going, you know
what I wonder? I wonder hear me out, guys. I
have this picture of I have this picture of you
(17:29):
and Paul and Matt Nol and I listeners. I have
this picture of us all sitting around the table and saying,
what will our next experiment be? And then someone like
you just did, Matt goes, Uh, guys, hear me out.
We have a lot of mice. Yeah, and that's where
they started. Uh. They scientists began transfusing blood from young
(17:54):
mice into the bodies of old mice. And as it
turned out, this was not just some weird thing for
math scientists to do.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
For kicks.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
It all goes back to something called parabiosis.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah. This is one hundred and fifty year old surgical
technique that unites the vasculature of the veins and the arteries,
the blood systems essentially of two living animals. And the
word actually comes from the Greek para, meaning alongside in
bios life. So you have two organisms that you've essentially
created conjoined twins out.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Of Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're animals that share a placenta
in a womb. This, Yeah, parabiosis does occur in nature,
as with the example that Matt's sided can join twins
would probably be the most well known example. But we
we be in the human species, learned that we could
(18:47):
do this artificially. And here's the huge plot twist, not
always automatically killing the living things we stitched together. Yeah,
human centipede staff, Well, not quite right, right, Sorry, you're right,
you're right, Matt, they're.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Not that's a digestive system or.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Right, that's exactly right. No, this would just be circulatory
system and a lot less gross, but still gross. In
the lab, you see, parabiosis gives experts a tremendously rare
opportunity to test what factors in the blood in the
circulatory system of one animal do when they enter another animal.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
A question I've always asked myself.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I know, sometimes out loud during meetings.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, what happens if my blood was your blood and
your blood was my blood?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
You know people can hear you when you do that, right?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh? Really?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yes? Oh yes, that's why Noel's not here for this episode.
I think maybe you should just get a creative outlet,
like write poetry or essays.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, I'm going to pick up a guitar, I think.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, I get into some dark metal. Yeah, and you
could create dark power ballads about these experiments. Because experiments
with these rodent pairs, whether rats or mice or what
have you, have led to immensely important breakthroughs in indo chronology,
tumor biology, immunology, and so on. But here's a curious thing, Matt.
(20:23):
Most of those discoveries occurred more than thirty five years ago.
The technique, for some unknown reason, fell out of favor
in the nineteen seventies, and.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
That's so weird.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Well, we did a lot of digging, and we still
can't We still can't find out what happened in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I think most of it is just the EWW factor.
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
In the past few years, however, a couple of laps
relatively small number, have revived the practice of artificial parabiosis,
especially in the field of age research or aging, because
it turns out that by joining the circulatory system of
an old mouse to that of a young mouse, scientists
(21:08):
can produce some remarkable things, which already just sounds so
problematic and spooky to me. But what do they find?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Well in the hot brain muscles, in almost every other
tissue examined, the blood of young mice seems to bring
new life into aging organs, making own mice stronger, smarter,
and healthier. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yeah, I mean even without the voice that's troubling.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
It does good things to the old mice.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Right, and it even makes their fur shinier.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Oh man, I'm sold now.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Now, these labs have begun to identify the components in
this quote unquote young blood that are responsible for these changes.
Nice exact ample. A biochemist and gerontologist named Clive McKay,
based in Cornell University up there in Mythica, New York,
was the first individual to apply PERO biosis to the
(22:11):
study of aging. In nineteen fifty six, he and his
team joined sixty nine pairs of rats together in Pero biosies.
They stitched them up together so that their circulatory systems
were in contact, forming a larger circuit, and the linked
rats included, you know, they all had those differing age ranges.
(22:34):
So one pair was made up of a sixteen month
old rat and a one point five month old rat.
In human terms, that's the same thing as sowing a
forty seven year old person to a five year old child.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
And here's the deal. When you attach a forty seven
year old through the circulatory system to a five year
old sometimes it always doesn't go well well from a
psychology standpoint of the rats. So here's a quote from
the authors who worked on this study. If two rats
(23:10):
are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the
head of the other until it is destroyed.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, that's a quotation from the author's description of their work.
Of this was a pretty experiment because rats are highly
intelligent animals, right, and obviously smart enough to know that
something is not normal if they are stitched up to
(23:40):
another individual, especially if they are not acclimated to that individual. Yeah,
if you woke up and you were sewn to a stranger,
you would have some questions, some concerns. You probably would
not be chill about it. So they also found that
there was a trumble bling phenomenon they couldn't explain at
(24:02):
the time. Back in the fifties. Of the sixty nine
rodents that they paired together, eleven pairs died from a
mysterious condition they called parabiotic disease that occurred. This occurred
about one to two weeks after the partners were joined,
and it was probably a form of tissue rejection. You're
(24:24):
one body going, what the heck is this?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, absolutely well, because in this case you are transferring
all of the blood. You're not taking out a component
of the blood as we're going to see maybe in
the future. Here as we're moving on, you're getting everything.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Excellent point. This is not a transfusion. This is the
This is compiling or mixtaping to separate circulatory systems.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
So, in McKay's first parabiotic aging experiment, after the old
and young recks were joined from anywhere from nine months
to eighteen months, they found in you know, the one
positive thing that seemed to come out of this. The
older animal's bones became similar in weight and density to
the bones of the younger counterparts that they were attached to.
(25:12):
So it did seem like there is something going on
here in at least most in this case of the
cases of the pairs, some kind of beneficial thing for
the older rats, not necessarily for the younger rats. There's
not really much of a benefit at all.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
No, it doesn't. It doesn't seem like there is, because
it's not as if the young rats somehow gain the
wisdom and experience, right. What seems to happen in the
ideal case is that they enter into a type of
symbiosis called commensalism. There are three types of symbiosis. Symbiosis
(25:53):
just means a close relationship between two or more species, right.
The three types are mutualism, where both both parties benefit
or all parties benefit, parasitism where one benefits at the
expense of the other, and commensalism, where one species benefits
somehow and the other species is neither harmed nor helped. Arguably,
(26:19):
this is on the line between commensalism and parasitism, because
while the younger animal is not necessarily being directly harmed.
Its life is going to be hindered. Yeah, because it's
you know.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Attached to this forty seven year old mouse. It's like
six months, well year old mouse. Your music is just
really I don't understand it. I don't know why we're
watching this on TV. Let's watch Soldies.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
So let's fast forward. Yeah, let's get through the seventies,
where again this research mysteriously fell out of favor. A
few years back, a team of researchers Amy Wager, Irena
and Michael Convoy and Thomas Rando partnered up. They've vultroned
up to take their separate areas of research in this
(27:08):
field and combine them to investigate the phenomenon. Specifically, this
group wanted to address a problem with the study of
agent with gerontology as a whole. And here's where we
are now. It seems as if aging itself is a
(27:28):
body wide effect, right nor your body tends to break
down sort of. At the same time, there are environmental
things that can that can affect you. For instance, you
will take more damage depending on how you treat yourself
(27:49):
if you do if you are an athlete and you
have a lot of repetitive exercises, right, then you may
have concussions, or you may have joint problems that might
not have appeared in the same way.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, even if you're just walking around all the time,
your joints in your knees aren't going to be the
same as perhaps the joints in your shoulder if you
aren't very active with your shoulder. Agreed.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, yeah, good point. And the problem is that they
wanted to They wanted to see if they could determine
what coordinates the aging process. In the words of Rando,
why does everything in your body go to hell in
a hand basket at once? Why does this affect multiple
(28:33):
parts of the body simultaneously. So they tried these experiments again,
and they took some lessons learned from the earlier experiments
in the fifties, So they made sure the mice or
the rodents knew each other before they sewed them together.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
And Thomas Rando says that he did not expect the
experiment to work, but it did within five weeks. He said,
the young blood restored muscle and liver cells in the
older mice, notably by causing aged stem cells to start
dividing again. They also found that young blood resulted in
enhanced growth of brain cells in old mice, although that
(29:14):
work was left out of their two thousand and five
paper that described the results. All in all, the results
suggested that blood was the medium of transportation for whatever
the mystery factor or factor was that coordinated aging in
different tissues, which makes sense because blood is a very
(29:36):
well traveled substance in the human body. In two thousand
and eight, the convoys uh Irena and Michael linked muscle
rejuvenation to the activation of something called notch signaling, which
promotes cell division, or, to be more technically accurate, it's
the muscle rejuvenation is dependent upon the de activation of
(30:01):
the transforming growth factor pathway. That's what blocks cell division.
In twenty fourteen, the group identified one of the age
defying factors circulating in the blood.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Oh yeah, it's oxytocin. It's a hormone is best known
for its involvement in childbirth and bonding. We've discussed that
several times in.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Our how your Brain Betrays you when You're in love.
Yeah exactly, I did not mean to sound that bit.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yes, and already a drug approved by the FDA, the
Food and Drug Administration here in the United States. It's
it's approved for inducing labor and pregnant women. You wow,
I forget what it's called. Potocin. Potosin, I think is
what it's called. Yes, my wife didn't have to use it. Huh.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
That's fascinating. That's a good thing, right, you want the
minimum amount of yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
And chemicals going in during pregnancy. But it's used a
lot of times to induce I don't want, I want
to throw anyone under the bus here, but a lot
of times used to induce a labor when staff is
being changed out in a period, so that a new
nurse or a new set of people coming in don't
have to just pick up where the other whole crew left.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Off, okay, because they might not have the background knowledge
of the previous Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm not saying that's not officially what it's used for,
but if you're in a tight spot and you need
to get a baby out, it's also really.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Helpful and oxytocin. It turns out the levels of this
substance to climb with age and both men and women.
And when oxytocin is injected into older mice over a
systematic regimen or schedule, the hormone quickly within a couple
of weeks, regenerates muscles by activating muscle stem cells.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And Wagers was following up on this anti aging work
at Harvard, where she started her own lab in two
thousand and four. She recruited the help of experts in
various organ systems to help her evaluate the specific impact
of young blood on the respective tissues of the organs.
We've got a couple of examples of her findings here.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah. Then she worked with Robin Franklin, who was a
neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge in the UK. They
kind of discovered that young blood promotes the repairing of
damaged spinal cords in older mice. So if you've got
I mean, that's huge. Yeah, there are a lot of
things that you could hopefully apply that to in humans.
(32:26):
If you can work that out in mice.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
The implications of that are pretty astounding.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
It's the implication, it's the implication.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
There was another neuroscientist, Lee Rubin, with whom Wagers found
that young blood sparks the formation of new neurons in
the brain and old factory system again associate with smell.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, huge, huge, if you can apply it and then
with cardiologist Richard Lee at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
mass she found that it reverses age related thickening of
the walls of the heart. Again, you've got heart, you've
got brain, you've got spinal cord. Huge improvements to the
lives of older people, older mice in this case, right possibly.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Now before before Matt and I begin to sound as
if we are telethon infomercial people shilling a new cure
to make your pet mouse live forever, must go to
the immediate question, which is the following. If this works
in mice, If these techniques work in mice, could we
(33:35):
rejuvenate aging humans by feeding them the blood of younger,
healthy humans. We'll tell you the answer, or at least
as far as modern medicine is gone publicly after a
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
As you listen to this episode and as we sit
in this room and record it, research is pushing all
of us in this direction, and it's threatening to collide
head on with what we understand about ethics and morality
in human experimentation, something that we've been doing since humans
could talk and move a scalpel around and or whatever
(34:19):
other implement has been used in the past. We've been
pushing these boundaries, and it seems like we're doing it again.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
One of the most immediate aspects to consider here is
the power and influence of privately funded research or very
financially or socially powerful individuals who are aging and ailing
and interested and interested. Because one thing most people seem
(34:49):
to have in common thanatologists find people who study deathfind
is that no one wants to die.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Nope, it's you know.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
People do at times, unfortunately and tragically take their own lives,
but by and large, humans are hardwired to want to
live for as long as possible, even in the worst
of circumstances. That's why there are so many of us
here today. For example, when a private firm based in
(35:20):
Hong Kong learned of this research, they moved immediately to
get in the game. It turns out they made this
move because the family who owned this corporate dynasty had
a prevalent history of Alzheimer's, and other private entities are
attempting to get in the game. There's one you may
have read about a few years back. Jesse Kremazen wants
(35:44):
he wants to bring this idea, this young blood to
the old transfusion treatment to the public with the creation
of a company called Ambrosia. Ambrusia purports to rejuvenate the
aging and well to do with injects of younger plasma.
Plasma is the essentially the liquid component of blood and.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
The looks kind of yellow, right, it does.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And the plasma is what's stored at blood banks.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, absolutely, and it's it's the stuff that has all
of the antibodies and all the really important stuff, all
the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, all the all the all the important stuff. Plasma
in this case is going to come from people aged
sixteen to twenty five. Currently, Ambrosia has two locations, both
of which I'm reading tea leaves about. But I am
(36:41):
making so many assumptions about this. So one location is
in San Francisco, Yeah, and one's in Tampa, Tampa. So
here's what I'm wondering, And Matt, I bet you're wondering
the same thing. And we want to know your opinion, folks.
San Francisco kind of makes sense to me, home of
like water bars.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
And oxygen bars and all. There we go.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, so maybe there's a maybe there's a tech guru
aspect to this.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Right, got to get that edge.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
However, and then in Tampa there's a what's the most
polite way to.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Say this, there's a ton of old people.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, right on exactly, a significant percentage of the population
is retired.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
That's what I said, all right, I think you.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I think you said it in a bit more evocative
and dare I say accurate way than I did?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
It was concise.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
It was concise. It's important to note here in the
case of Ambrosia that younger does not mean infants. We
said they're sixteen to twenty five. Don't worry. No one
is tossing toddlers into a juicer as far as we know.
Bad image, but necessary. You're necessary for us to say that.
(37:57):
Nor is this company at this point swing people together,
or you know, practicing parabiosis on humans.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Instead, they're offering, as Matt said, straight up transfusions.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. And if you want to get this done, you
can potentially. I can't. I don't think in this lifetime.
Maybe I'll have to check with my accountant. Oh wait,
I don't have an accountant. All right, Well, no, I
can't do this. The pricing plans will enroll almost anybody
over thirty five years of age. The fees, though, are
(38:31):
totaling up to eight thousand dollars per person per I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
What you'd call it pop yeah, per transfusion, but right,
And they say that is covering the expense of the research,
covering the raw cost of retrieving, maintaining, transporting the plasma.
And it makes you wonder what happens to people in
those ten years between twenty five and thirty five. You're
(38:58):
too young to receive the treatment quote unquote treatment, you're
too old to donate. Just got to make it through
that decade long wilderness.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, your blood is just in stasis too, I guess
according to research, just not really getting better. It's not
getting worse, just kind of hanging.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
And ambrosia currently has it has had a lot of press,
and it obviously has a lot of people who believe
in it enough to at least give it a try,
but as quite a few critics. Critics are arguing that
the perobiosis experiments conducted on mice don't offer very much
insight into how a one time transfusion could affect a human.
(39:42):
So Wagers from earlier said that in our studies, circulation
between a young mouse and old mouse was maintained through
this parobiosis for nearly four weeks, almost a month.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, and you're doing this for an hour or so,
a couple hours maybe, right, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Eight grand a pop. Additionally, ethicists are concerned that ambrosia
is that because ambrosia is being financed by the participants,
by the people who will receive these transfusions. I keep
I want to do like an arch sinister voice every
time I say young blood. Yeah, it's just such a
(40:25):
sinister Gary Oldman is Dracula phrase.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
You know, you just have to do like a licking
of your lips sound after you say it.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
That's all yield or yeah. But they're the ethical problem
with this, or one of the ethical problems is that
there are not straight up investors. So if we're talking
about people who are desperate to mitigate the delatorious effects
of aging, then they're going to have a very difficult
(40:55):
time being objective about the results, especially when we in
the idea that the placebo effect does have measurable and
significant physiological impacts upon a human body.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Right yep, man, Well, so let's see where we are
at least as of December twenty sixteen. According to Ambrosia,
they've infused twenty five people with young blood so up
until December twenty sixteen. It is now into twenty eighteen,
so who knows, maybe that number has doubled. We don't
(41:32):
have notes from Ambrosia, but I'm sure we will get
them soon. So Carmezine claims that his participants are seeing
miraculous results, which is something you have to do when
you have a company that does something like this. Patient
with chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, quote feels healthy for
the first time and looks younger, which is nice. And
(41:54):
you know, these kind of antidotes will help, you know,
market the study at least and get more people involved
so we get more data. That can't be a bad thing.
But you know, it's not proof that the plasma infusions
actually work, and that would would be patients you know,
should believe these at all, at least go into it
thinking maybe this will work.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
One of the reasons that drug approval moves so slowly
is that there well, aside from the endemic corruption in
the pharmaceutical industry and the medical medtech industry, typically on paper,
the reason why these things move so slowly is because
they're very important. They're literally putting people's lives in danger potentially,
(42:39):
so there are a lot of hoops to jump through,
and there should be quite a few hoops to jump through.
According to Jonathan Kimmelman, who is a bioethicist at McGill University,
there are a lot of patient funded trials run by
companies that use the trials as a way to sell
products that would not be marketable because they'd have to
be regulated by the FDA.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yes, and speaking of a recent study concluded in November
twenty seventeen. It was done at the Stanford University School
of Medicine. It was a clinical trial looking at the safety, tolerability,
and feasibility of administering infusions, just what we've been talking
about with ambrosia love blood plasma from young donors to
(43:22):
participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Again, very similar
thing that we're trying to treat here with young blood.
Different study, which is a good thing because now you've
got with multiple studies, if you're getting the same results,
then you're getting closer to, you know, actually doing what
a scientific experiment is supposed to do. This trial in particular,
(43:43):
was created to test a hypothesis put forth by this person,
Tony Weisskore. He is a doctor, he's a Stanford Professor
of neurology, and he's also a scientist at the Veterans
Affairs in Palo Alto anyway, in California. His research, he
did research with mice as well, and again found that
(44:04):
factors in the blood of young mice can rejuvenate the
brain tissue and improve cognitive performance in old mice. You
can even see a ted talk of him if you
want to. But anyway, in this one, it's again a company,
a private company that has at least a hand in
getting this research done and having this clinical trial put on.
(44:24):
It's called Alcahest and it quote holds intellectual property associated
with the treatment regimen for this particular trial. And the
Tony Weiss kay gentleman, who was not a part of
this experiment at least according to Stanford, he is the
co founder of this company and also the chair of
its scientific advisory board. So again you've got private interest
(44:51):
to carry out these kinds of trials to see if
there's anything to this young blood transfusion stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Right, And we're all so seeing that a lot of
these studies or trials conducted have relatively small sample sizes.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, in this one there were only eighteen human beings
that were transfused.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
And this is the public state of affairs at the present. However,
there are clear and present dangers with this sort of
experimentation that go far above and way beyond something like
investor ethics and bureaucratic concerns. As we said, a transfusion
(45:33):
is not parabiosis. So at this point there's not a
solid load of widely accepted evidence that indicates any major
health benefits, and that leads critics of places like Ambrosia
to claim they are only praying on the desperate. So far,
we do not know if anyone is practicing human parabiosis.
In the past, there were certain grisly experiments that you
(45:59):
can hear about in little more depth in our Human
Experimentation series. In the past, there were experiments that approached
some stuff like this, But perhaps the most concise way
to describe those experiments is to say that the people
conducting the experiments were in no way concerned about the
(46:20):
benefits or even the survival rate. The benefits to or
the survival rate of their patients, in a better word,
for their patients would have been victims, because we were
talking about wartime experiments by people who were absolute lunatics.
Were there someone or some organization currently experimenting with human
(46:42):
parabiosis at this point, it would almost certainly be secret.
It would be classified because it would be seven shades
of illegal to do so if it's going on currently.
We would not know the age of the participants either,
which is another scary thing.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
If it was done legally, though, they would have to
be over eighteen unless they had I guess permission from
their parents.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I don't know if parents could sign up for that,
but yeah, legally, they would all have to be over
eighteen for some kind of consent to for informed consent
to occur within the US at least, yeah, legally legally, again,
legally for that to happen. If someone is experimenting with
(47:33):
human parabiosis, they're also running the risk of parabiosis disease,
which we mentioned earlier from those experiments in the nineteen fifties,
and the chances. Here's where we get. We go on
some disturbing breadcrumbs. You're ready, Okay, So, if we're experimenting,
(47:55):
if our species experimenting with human parabiosis currently, then there's
that risk.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Was it?
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Eleven of the sixty nine rap pairs right experienced parabiosis disease.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
He just died after a little while fatal rejection.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
The chances of this disease occurring are greatly reduced when
the participants are increasingly similar. For our purposes, when the
participants are increasingly related. So, next breadcrumb, what would your
closest relationship be for this experiment? What other individual would
create the highest chance of success in an experiment with parabiosis? Well,
(48:38):
one question. One might say a child, taking your own child.
One might say a sibling, But we have another We
have another field of technology that is moving at a
rapid pace. Now, what's closer than a sibling, closer than
(49:01):
a child, even closer than a fraternal twin?
Speaker 2 (49:04):
A clone?
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Spot on, Matt, A clone? Oh what? So imagine we've
talked about this before with the possibility of growing organs, right,
growing clones? Four spare organs? Would it be? Is there
a possible future where there would be a clone grown
(49:28):
to act as a filter for your blood that's younger
than you, that is just kept somewhere and you just
plug up to it.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Maybe when you hit a certain age, you have a
bunch of your genetic material put away in a vault somewhere,
and then that's used to begin creating clones of you
at another certain age, or maybe once you hit that age,
like let's say eighteen or so, then you just continuously
throughout the rest of your life, once you hit thirty five,
(49:57):
use these clones to be attached to you for a
little while.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
And there's so little published science on this. There are
absolutely no long term studies, no longitudinal studies of the
nature of this effect. Like, what if someone begins engaging
in some sort of thing like this, let's say, for
(50:22):
the sake of argument, actual parabiosis, right, and let's say
for months every year or ever, Yeah, for month every
year something, they're stitched next to some source of young blood.
And what happens to that? What does their body look
like physiologically when they are sixty five, when they are
(50:45):
seventy five? You know, how long does this go? No
one knows. No one knows because it's unless you're very careful.
It's evil to do that kind of experimentation. Additionally, this
is even weirder. This is not as scary, but it
is weird. Evidence indicates that injecting human blood plasma into
(51:08):
the bodies of elderly mice might have beneficial effects on
the mice.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Hold on, putting human plasma into a mouse helps the mouse.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
That's what it seems to say. There's an article about
this in Nature magazine when we have a quote here.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Oh, yes, they say. Infusing this human plasma into the
veins of elderly mice, they found improved the animal's ability
to navigate mazes and to learn to avoid areas of
their cages that deliver painful electrical shocks. When the researchers
dissected the animal's brains, they found that the cells in
the hippocampus, the region associated with learning and memory, expressed
(51:47):
genes that cause neurons to form more connections in the brain.
This didn't happen in mice treated with blood from older
human donors. So only the young blood helps.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Right, So plasma from older humans did not have much
of an effect. Plasma from younger sources umbilical cords specifically,
by the way, turns out to be top notch. What
could go wrong? What could go wrong with this knowledge? Right? Oh? Gosh. Well,
(52:19):
for now, it appears that any claims that young blood
or plasma will extend human lifespan are false.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Or at least we just don't have the data.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Right, We don't know. The data is just not there. Yeah,
an experiment to test such claims would take upwards of
six years, first waiting for the mice to age, then
for them to die naturally, then analyzing the data. If
we had funding to do this, says Michael Conboy, I
do it, but we don't. Still, he adds, after a
(52:50):
moment of hesitation, I hope that someone somewhere is keep
in mind he's just talking about mice.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah, yeah, mice, just mice, and just in the nicest
of Michael Conboy. Yeah. So, currently it appears the best
possible case we can hope for is the isolation of
some specific proteins or other elements that are found in
young blood. These special reasons that rejuvenation occurs, because this
could lead to amazingly effective treatments for age related ailments.
(53:19):
We're talking to Alzheimer's, dementia and so on, without requiring
people to bathe in the blood of virgins or you know,
suck on human numbilical cords.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The hope would be that our species
could isolate, let's say, a specific protein, and that specific
protein could be marketed right and created in some different way.
And of course this research is very expensive, very complicated.
(53:49):
You'll hear a lot of people say that as the
world or the owners of the world now seek to
move away from an owner ship economy to a service economy,
you'll hear people allege that quote unquote Big Pharma is
not in the business of selling cures. They're in the
business of selling scheduled treatments. So then the concern would be,
(54:14):
you know, is it it's not a cure all that
will help somebody's Alzheimer's, it's a pill that they have
to pay for that they have to take once a day. Well.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Yeah, if you've got a private company that's based on
making profit off of something and growing that company to
hopefully one day sell it or make more money, you
don't usually want to cure something, right, You don't want
to put yourself out of business.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
But then there are people on the other side who
will say that private industry is the is a necessary
factor for this kind of research. Absolutely, but still but
still it does allow and this is not us being alarmist.
It does allow for the possibility of a world in
which the rich find yet another avenue for victimizing the poor.
(55:01):
Imagine a planet's worth of real life Elizabeth Bathorys practicing
non consensual parabiosis. Research is still underweight, and it's safe
to say that we'll hear more about this in the
near to mid future. But Matt and I want to
know what you think. Where do you land on this
(55:22):
research given that it can mitigate the effects of aging,
but we should say not give people immortality so far
as we know, is it worth pursuing and where do
you see it headed?
Speaker 2 (55:33):
So in my opinion, I think you're going to see
more of what the character that's kind of modeled after
Peter Thiel on, Oh what is that what show? HBO
show Silicon Valley, that character that he's just got a
young guy that comes around his house a couple times
a week and they just do a blood transfusion. I
(55:54):
think that's just going to be a thing that's like
how the way uber drivers have There are so many
uber drivers in the world and it's just proliferated. I
think there will just be that the transfusion person.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
A new aspect of the gig economy.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
I really think so. And it's just something you do
on Tuesdays and Thursdays over at you know, Bill's house
or whatever that guy is that lives in the mansion
on the hill.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
I have no doubt that someone will go off the
reservation and try this on their own, especially if they
can afford a relatively unethical doctor to just participate in
this kind of experimentation. But well, then the doctor could
be ethical. It depends really how much they want to
pay the Yeah group, how much work they want to
(56:42):
put into it. But I'm I think it really depends
on what data bears out here. If if there is,
it turns out real tangible results and evidence, then it's
Katie bar the door. We don't know where it stops,
but if it is a way to bilk the frightened
(57:07):
and the aging out of money in an attempt to
I guess pay the ferrymen a couple of extra coins
to stay on his side of the river sticks for
a while. The people will throw money at it, of course.
But here's the question that bugs me the most, Matt.
Speaker 2 (57:25):
How much are the donors of ambrosia getting paid.
Speaker 1 (57:31):
Oh gosh, yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Because I mean, I'm in, you're in. Oh no, I'm
never mind.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
Sorry man. Another question that bugs me is what happened
to parabiosis research when it dropped out, when it fell
out of favor. Why did it disappear from the mainstream
radar for decades? Was it animal rights? Was it something else?
(58:00):
We'd love to hear your opinion. That concludes our episode
for today, but never fear, Matt, Noel, Paul and I
will be back very soon in the meantime.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Stuff they Don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Matt, have you ever felt, you know, just like
weirdly tired always? You know, it's just always vibe.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
That's that's my standard feeling throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
So, uh, I guess it's cool to have feel It's
uh not til long ago. In a previous Classic episode,
you pointed out that the phrase UAP has been around
for five years now, and it made me think a
little bit about age. What if there was a way
(00:31):
to mitigate the inevitable uh grind of time. What if
you could just take some blood from someone younger and
you know, get rid of that tired feeling.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Okay, Illuminati, I'm out of here, and.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We hope that you are in for today's classic episode,
The Modern Vampire. It's a true story. Uh. There have
been extensive experiments in the modern day with plasma transfusion
in a way that is ethically fraught and riddled with conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Name is Ben. Our compatriot nol is traveling at the moment,
but we'll be back soon. We are joined with our
super producer Paul Deckin. Most importantly, you are you, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know? Matt,
I propose we begin this episode with a little bit
of a peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
All right.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So for the past gosh to two months almost, Matt
and Noel and I have been kicking the can down
the road regarding a very interesting email we receive about
the Georgia guidestones. And every episode we have told each
(02:15):
other we're going to read this in a shout out
corner at the end of the show. And we've just been,
you know, so much like a dog chasing a ball
that by the time we get to the end of
an episode, we've we've found that we don't have room
to squeeze this in.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, but we're gonna instead of squeezing it in, we're
just going to place it in front of you, right
here in front of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So let's consider this an oddly placed shout out corner.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
The message says, greetings, Ben, Matt Knowle. This email is
in regards to the stuff they Don't want you to know.
Podcast episode titled Who built the Georgia Guidestones, published eighteenth
of November twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
We got there, We got to it eventually, We.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Did it, says. Firstly, there were several pieces of information
left out from your discussions on the topic, and this
is a much longer email than we are going to
read now. We are reading one piece of it that
was most compelling to us, It says. The identity of
RC Christian has since been revealed to be that of
(03:20):
one Herbert Hinney Hnie Kirsten, a doctor from Fort Dodge, Iowa.
This was first reported in the documentary film Dark Clouds
Over Elberton by Chris Pinto. It is also reported that
Kirsten was a supporter of David Duke, the former Grand
Wizard of the Knights of the klu Klux Klan and
(03:41):
proponent of eugenics. He was apparently aided by a friend
of his, Robert Merriman, who helped publish the Common Sense
Renewed book, the one that we mentioned in that episode,
A Whole Bunch, and we actually have a copy of
and it was written this is written to us by
quote a guide to the.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
End, and we thought this was we thought this was
fantastic well, at least it's a fantastic lead on the
true identity of RC Christian. At this point, it has
not been conclusively proven. Not everybody agrees that this is
indeed Herbert Hinney Kirsten or Herbert Heinie Kirsten. But I
(04:21):
think it's Hinny. I think it's Anny, Matt. This has
not been conclusively proven in a way that everybody accepts.
But this is one of the most recent arguments for
the true identity of RC Christian. If you'd like to
learn more, please check out the documentary Dark Clouds over Elberton,
as well as the fantastic documentary that Matt put together.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Now that we put together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Okay, but it's available on Amazon for free, just search
for us. Yeah, Echeton Secret is out the name of
our take on it, and maybe one day we'll just
get it on YouTube as well. Agreed, we should do that,
And this concludes our oddly place onto the show. Let's
(05:10):
get let's get creepy. Let's get creepy immediately. Okay, Oh,
there's a creepy voice, Matt. We've all heard myths about vampires, right, Yes,
some form of a vampire legend exists on every continent,
with the possible exception of Antarctica. There's the typical Dracula
type vampire that's possibly the most familiar type of vampire
(05:33):
here in the West, but there are other creatures as well,
like the swan and the Philippines, or the lamia in
Grecian folklore.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, bloodsuckers, beings that exist on the sanguine delights of
other beings.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
That's a great that's a great description.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's really tough to trace the beginnings
of this myth of what a vampire is, what it
was before it became a capital v vampire that's in
movies and pop culture, and from demons to Dracula, the
creation of the modern vampire myth. The author Matthew Beresford notes, quote,
there are clear foundations for the vampire and the ancient world,
(06:10):
and it is impossible to prove when the myth first arose.
There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of
sorcery and ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into this world
from some other.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Right other being, some other playing some other dimension. In
earlier episodes, we explored the possible origins of the vampire myth,
by which we mean the possible real world seeds of
truth that later grew into this agglomeration of folklore. And
(06:44):
this includes proposed causes such as premature burial, which was
horrifically common for a very very long time, also conditions
medical conditions like porphyria or dementia and so on. And
you can again find those episodes, both video and audio
(07:05):
at our website. Stuff they don't want you to know
dot com on what you're using to listen to this,
oh yes, or on whatever feed you prefer. We should
be out there and tell us if you can't find
us on your preferred feed. But today we are asking
a more topical question. We're not asking whether something like
a vampire ever existed, or even if something like a
(07:27):
vampire currently exists. Instead, we're asking whether it is possible
to create vampires or something like them. Not characters in fiction,
friends and neighbors and you're monsters on the silver screen.
We're talking about real life vampires.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Again, someone something that exists on the blood of others.
And this concept of vampirism has become so prevalent in
our worlds nowadays it's been used as an insult. You
vampire can get out in the light, you vampire or
a piece of a probrium to heap him upon all
kinds of let's say, all two human rosters, right, yeah, you'll.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Hear a probrium is a word for reproacher or insult.
You'll hear this used to refer to certain serial killers
in the past, you know, the vampire of so and so.
And you'll also, of course hear it used to describe
(08:33):
a lot of ancient aristocrats. Of course. The legendary Lad
Tepesh is often cited as the inspiration for ram Stoker's Dracula,
and he was a prince of a place called Wallachia
three different times between fourteen forty eight and his death.
He was the second son of someone named Vlad Dracoul
(08:55):
or Vlad the Dragon, who was the ruler of Wallachia
in fourteen thirty six. Lewis father was known as Dracula
the Dragon. He flat Tepesh, Lad the Third, was the
more notorious of the two. He was known as the
Impaler for his habit of impaling his enemies, rivals, or
just people who caught him on the wrong side of
bed in the morning. He'd have these large wooden stakes
(09:18):
erected and then graphic warning. Here he would have their
bodies forced on the stakes, the stakes going through their
anuses and impaling him that way. He was also infamous
for casually dining as he watched these people die a
very slow, grisly painful death.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So in a way he did get by through the
blood of others, in a very dark way.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Sure, yeah, and in a experiential rather than a physiological
way perhaps, which is I don't know, that's a dangerous
comparison because if we engage in that comparison, we get
to slippery slope where we could argue that all warlords
or even politicians who are in charge of militaries subsist
(10:08):
to a degree on the blood of others.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I don't think that slope is that slippery.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I think we might already have slipped. There's another example,
which is Elizabeth Bathri or Erzbett Bathory, the noble woman
who is based in what is now known as Slovakia.
In the sixteen hundred, she was arrested and accused of
numerous macab crimes. We have just a few examples of
those alleged crimes.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, she would keep her well. Allegedly, she would keep
her servants chained up every night, so their hands were
just so tightly bound that they would turn blue and
sometimes even squirt blood out of them. She used to
beat her servants to the point that there was so
much blood all over the place, on the walls, on
the beds, they had to use ashes and cinders to
(10:56):
soak it all up and scrub it all away. She
even burned her sir with metal sticks allegedly red hot
keys and coins. She ironed the soles of their feet
and even stuck burning rods into their vaginas.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yes, and she didn't stop there with stabbing. She also
pricked them in their mouths and fingernails with needles, cut
their hands, lips and noses, shoes, knives, needles, candles, occasionally
her own teeth to lacerate the genitals of servants, stitch
their lips and tongues together, made them sit on stinging nettles,
(11:32):
bathe with the nettles, force them to cook and eat
their own flesh, or make sausages from it and serve
it to the guests. She was accused of practicing dark magic,
baking magical poisonous cakes in order to kill rival politicians
such as George Thurzo, who was later one of the
(11:52):
guys who arrested her, was also she would cast magic
spells to summon clouds filled with angry cats.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Most famously the most infamously, rather, she was believed to
have bled young servant girls dry, and after exsanguinating their
bodies or training all the blood from them, bathing in
that blood.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yes, and that's probably where you've most likely heard a
lot of these stories where she is the she's a
whole other archetype in a way of things beyond a vampire,
just having to do with bathing in the blood.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Right, and this was characterized as part of a right
or a ritual that would lengthen her lifespan and rejuvenate
her history has to a degree exonerated Bathory of some
of these accusations. At the time of the trial, over
(12:54):
three hundred individuals testified against her for one thing or another,
and her servants were put to Four of her servants
were put to gruesome ends, but given the influence that
she had in society at the time, she was not killed.
(13:15):
She was immured I M m U r ed, which
means they grounded her for the rest of her life. Essentially,
they put her in a windowless room, she was supplied
with food and water, and she was left there to die.
But it looks like it looks like there's some problems
with the claims. Most immediately, the whole idea of bathing
(13:38):
in virgin blood. First, that idea came about centuries after
her death. Someone added that to the story to the
campfire tail.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
That's an issue.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It doesn't mean that she didn't do horrible things, just
means that came along much later. Also, from a scientific perspective,
it's most likely impossible for her to quote bathe and
virgin blood due to coagulation. How would you keep the
(14:15):
blood liquid long enough were there to be an entire
tub of it?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Interesting, I guess it would be in the how you
got the blood.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Out right right and ambient temperature and so on. Yeah,
so god, yeah, we're getting grizzly pretty quickly in this one.
So it's also possible that Bathory was targeted by the
male dominated establishment at the time because vilification or demonization
of women was a common way of removing them from
(14:47):
the political chessboard. This happened in witch hunts, you know
a lot of times. One thing that escapes. Historical explanations
of the witch hunt phenomenon is the following in certain
practices in the inquisition, in certain non inquisition which hunts
(15:08):
the accuser, the person who put the witch to trial,
who is almost always convicted in one way or the other,
they would receive the wealth of the estate, so they
were not objective in their accusations. They were incentivized or incented,
whichever word you prefer, to arrive at a guilty verdict.
(15:32):
So it's quite possible that this was a political hit.
But we say all this because whether or not the
legend is whether or not the legend is true, it
is something iconic. It is an image that is stayed
with us, you me, probably everyone you know has heard
(15:53):
of these grizzly stories about the elites of the world
subsisting on the blood of the innocent and typically the oppressed.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, I mean metaphorically, there's no bones about it. It
kind of is true metaphorically.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Right, right, And so the question literally, then our conclusion becomes,
that's it, right. Vampirism is largely a myth.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And allegory of sorts.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right, Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
There may be more to this whole blood and vampirism
thing than we had initially believed, or at least some
aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, for decades, it turns out, scientists have been experimenting
with the idea of transfusing blood from younger organisms to
older organisms.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, what happens when we put this young blood in here?
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yes, exactly, that's a part of the evil.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Laugh.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I didn't mean it sounds sinister.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
But.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
It's It's true. And you have to wonder sometimes how
much of this research starts from an informed place, and
how much of it starts with someone going, you know
what I wonder? I wonder hear me out, guys. I
have this picture of I have this picture of you
(17:29):
and Paul and Matt Nol and I listeners. I have
this picture of us all sitting around the table and saying,
what will our next experiment be? And then someone like
you just did, Matt goes, Uh, guys, hear me out.
We have a lot of mice. Yeah, and that's where
they started. Uh. They scientists began transfusing blood from young
(17:54):
mice into the bodies of old mice. And as it
turned out, this was not just some weird thing for
math scientists to do.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
For kicks.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
It all goes back to something called parabiosis.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah. This is one hundred and fifty year old surgical
technique that unites the vasculature of the veins and the arteries,
the blood systems essentially of two living animals. And the
word actually comes from the Greek para, meaning alongside in
bios life. So you have two organisms that you've essentially
created conjoined twins out.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Of Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're animals that share a placenta
in a womb. This, Yeah, parabiosis does occur in nature,
as with the example that Matt's sided can join twins
would probably be the most well known example. But we
we be in the human species, learned that we could
(18:47):
do this artificially. And here's the huge plot twist, not
always automatically killing the living things we stitched together. Yeah,
human centipede staff, Well, not quite right, right, Sorry, you're right,
you're right, Matt, they're.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Not that's a digestive system or.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Right, that's exactly right. No, this would just be circulatory
system and a lot less gross, but still gross. In
the lab, you see, parabiosis gives experts a tremendously rare
opportunity to test what factors in the blood in the
circulatory system of one animal do when they enter another animal.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
A question I've always asked myself.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I know, sometimes out loud during meetings.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, what happens if my blood was your blood and
your blood was my blood?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
You know people can hear you when you do that, right?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh? Really?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yes? Oh yes, that's why Noel's not here for this episode.
I think maybe you should just get a creative outlet,
like write poetry or essays.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, I'm going to pick up a guitar, I think.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, I get into some dark metal. Yeah, and you
could create dark power ballads about these experiments. Because experiments
with these rodent pairs, whether rats or mice or what
have you, have led to immensely important breakthroughs in indo chronology,
tumor biology, immunology, and so on. But here's a curious thing, Matt.
(20:23):
Most of those discoveries occurred more than thirty five years ago.
The technique, for some unknown reason, fell out of favor
in the nineteen seventies, and.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
That's so weird.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Well, we did a lot of digging, and we still
can't We still can't find out what happened in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I think most of it is just the EWW factor.
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
In the past few years, however, a couple of laps
relatively small number, have revived the practice of artificial parabiosis,
especially in the field of age research or aging, because
it turns out that by joining the circulatory system of
an old mouse to that of a young mouse, scientists
(21:08):
can produce some remarkable things, which already just sounds so
problematic and spooky to me. But what do they find?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Well in the hot brain muscles, in almost every other
tissue examined, the blood of young mice seems to bring
new life into aging organs, making own mice stronger, smarter,
and healthier. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yeah, I mean even without the voice that's troubling.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
It does good things to the old mice.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Right, and it even makes their fur shinier.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Oh man, I'm sold now.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Now, these labs have begun to identify the components in
this quote unquote young blood that are responsible for these changes.
Nice exact ample. A biochemist and gerontologist named Clive McKay,
based in Cornell University up there in Mythica, New York,
was the first individual to apply PERO biosis to the
(22:11):
study of aging. In nineteen fifty six, he and his
team joined sixty nine pairs of rats together in Pero biosies.
They stitched them up together so that their circulatory systems
were in contact, forming a larger circuit, and the linked
rats included, you know, they all had those differing age ranges.
(22:34):
So one pair was made up of a sixteen month
old rat and a one point five month old rat.
In human terms, that's the same thing as sowing a
forty seven year old person to a five year old child.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
And here's the deal. When you attach a forty seven
year old through the circulatory system to a five year
old sometimes it always doesn't go well well from a
psychology standpoint of the rats. So here's a quote from
the authors who worked on this study. If two rats
(23:10):
are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the
head of the other until it is destroyed.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, that's a quotation from the author's description of their work.
Of this was a pretty experiment because rats are highly
intelligent animals, right, and obviously smart enough to know that
something is not normal if they are stitched up to
(23:40):
another individual, especially if they are not acclimated to that individual. Yeah,
if you woke up and you were sewn to a stranger,
you would have some questions, some concerns. You probably would
not be chill about it. So they also found that
there was a trumble bling phenomenon they couldn't explain at
(24:02):
the time. Back in the fifties. Of the sixty nine
rodents that they paired together, eleven pairs died from a
mysterious condition they called parabiotic disease that occurred. This occurred
about one to two weeks after the partners were joined,
and it was probably a form of tissue rejection. You're
(24:24):
one body going, what the heck is this?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, absolutely well, because in this case you are transferring
all of the blood. You're not taking out a component
of the blood as we're going to see maybe in
the future. Here as we're moving on, you're getting everything.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Excellent point. This is not a transfusion. This is the
This is compiling or mixtaping to separate circulatory systems.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
So, in McKay's first parabiotic aging experiment, after the old
and young recks were joined from anywhere from nine months
to eighteen months, they found in you know, the one
positive thing that seemed to come out of this. The
older animal's bones became similar in weight and density to
the bones of the younger counterparts that they were attached to.
(25:12):
So it did seem like there is something going on
here in at least most in this case of the
cases of the pairs, some kind of beneficial thing for
the older rats, not necessarily for the younger rats. There's
not really much of a benefit at all.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
No, it doesn't. It doesn't seem like there is, because
it's not as if the young rats somehow gain the
wisdom and experience, right. What seems to happen in the
ideal case is that they enter into a type of
symbiosis called commensalism. There are three types of symbiosis. Symbiosis
(25:53):
just means a close relationship between two or more species, right.
The three types are mutualism, where both both parties benefit
or all parties benefit, parasitism where one benefits at the
expense of the other, and commensalism, where one species benefits
somehow and the other species is neither harmed nor helped. Arguably,
(26:19):
this is on the line between commensalism and parasitism, because
while the younger animal is not necessarily being directly harmed.
Its life is going to be hindered. Yeah, because it's
you know.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Attached to this forty seven year old mouse. It's like
six months, well year old mouse. Your music is just
really I don't understand it. I don't know why we're
watching this on TV. Let's watch Soldies.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
So let's fast forward. Yeah, let's get through the seventies,
where again this research mysteriously fell out of favor. A
few years back, a team of researchers Amy Wager, Irena
and Michael Convoy and Thomas Rando partnered up. They've vultroned
up to take their separate areas of research in this
(27:08):
field and combine them to investigate the phenomenon. Specifically, this
group wanted to address a problem with the study of
agent with gerontology as a whole. And here's where we
are now. It seems as if aging itself is a
(27:28):
body wide effect, right nor your body tends to break
down sort of. At the same time, there are environmental
things that can that can affect you. For instance, you
will take more damage depending on how you treat yourself
(27:49):
if you do if you are an athlete and you
have a lot of repetitive exercises, right, then you may
have concussions, or you may have joint problems that might
not have appeared in the same way.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, even if you're just walking around all the time,
your joints in your knees aren't going to be the
same as perhaps the joints in your shoulder if you
aren't very active with your shoulder. Agreed.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, yeah, good point. And the problem is that they
wanted to They wanted to see if they could determine
what coordinates the aging process. In the words of Rando,
why does everything in your body go to hell in
a hand basket at once? Why does this affect multiple
(28:33):
parts of the body simultaneously. So they tried these experiments again,
and they took some lessons learned from the earlier experiments
in the fifties, So they made sure the mice or
the rodents knew each other before they sewed them together.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
And Thomas Rando says that he did not expect the
experiment to work, but it did within five weeks. He said,
the young blood restored muscle and liver cells in the
older mice, notably by causing aged stem cells to start
dividing again. They also found that young blood resulted in
enhanced growth of brain cells in old mice, although that
(29:14):
work was left out of their two thousand and five
paper that described the results. All in all, the results
suggested that blood was the medium of transportation for whatever
the mystery factor or factor was that coordinated aging in
different tissues, which makes sense because blood is a very
(29:36):
well traveled substance in the human body. In two thousand
and eight, the convoys uh Irena and Michael linked muscle
rejuvenation to the activation of something called notch signaling, which
promotes cell division, or, to be more technically accurate, it's
the muscle rejuvenation is dependent upon the de activation of
(30:01):
the transforming growth factor pathway. That's what blocks cell division.
In twenty fourteen, the group identified one of the age
defying factors circulating in the blood.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Oh yeah, it's oxytocin. It's a hormone is best known
for its involvement in childbirth and bonding. We've discussed that
several times in.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Our how your Brain Betrays you when You're in love.
Yeah exactly, I did not mean to sound that bit.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yes, and already a drug approved by the FDA, the
Food and Drug Administration here in the United States. It's
it's approved for inducing labor and pregnant women. You wow,
I forget what it's called. Potocin. Potosin, I think is
what it's called. Yes, my wife didn't have to use it. Huh.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
That's fascinating. That's a good thing, right, you want the
minimum amount of yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
And chemicals going in during pregnancy. But it's used a
lot of times to induce I don't want, I want
to throw anyone under the bus here, but a lot
of times used to induce a labor when staff is
being changed out in a period, so that a new
nurse or a new set of people coming in don't
have to just pick up where the other whole crew left.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Off, okay, because they might not have the background knowledge
of the previous Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm not saying that's not officially what it's used for,
but if you're in a tight spot and you need
to get a baby out, it's also really.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Helpful and oxytocin. It turns out the levels of this
substance to climb with age and both men and women.
And when oxytocin is injected into older mice over a
systematic regimen or schedule, the hormone quickly within a couple
of weeks, regenerates muscles by activating muscle stem cells.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And Wagers was following up on this anti aging work
at Harvard, where she started her own lab in two
thousand and four. She recruited the help of experts in
various organ systems to help her evaluate the specific impact
of young blood on the respective tissues of the organs.
We've got a couple of examples of her findings here.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah. Then she worked with Robin Franklin, who was a
neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge in the UK. They
kind of discovered that young blood promotes the repairing of
damaged spinal cords in older mice. So if you've got
I mean, that's huge. Yeah, there are a lot of
things that you could hopefully apply that to in humans.
(32:26):
If you can work that out in mice.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
The implications of that are pretty astounding.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
It's the implication, it's the implication.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
There was another neuroscientist, Lee Rubin, with whom Wagers found
that young blood sparks the formation of new neurons in
the brain and old factory system again associate with smell.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, huge, huge, if you can apply it and then
with cardiologist Richard Lee at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
mass she found that it reverses age related thickening of
the walls of the heart. Again, you've got heart, you've
got brain, you've got spinal cord. Huge improvements to the
lives of older people, older mice in this case, right possibly.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Now before before Matt and I begin to sound as
if we are telethon infomercial people shilling a new cure
to make your pet mouse live forever, must go to
the immediate question, which is the following. If this works
in mice, If these techniques work in mice, could we
(33:35):
rejuvenate aging humans by feeding them the blood of younger,
healthy humans. We'll tell you the answer, or at least
as far as modern medicine is gone publicly after a
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
As you listen to this episode and as we sit
in this room and record it, research is pushing all
of us in this direction, and it's threatening to collide
head on with what we understand about ethics and morality
in human experimentation, something that we've been doing since humans
could talk and move a scalpel around and or whatever
(34:19):
other implement has been used in the past. We've been
pushing these boundaries, and it seems like we're doing it again.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
One of the most immediate aspects to consider here is
the power and influence of privately funded research or very
financially or socially powerful individuals who are aging and ailing
and interested and interested. Because one thing most people seem
(34:49):
to have in common thanatologists find people who study deathfind
is that no one wants to die.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Nope, it's you know.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
People do at times, unfortunately and tragically take their own lives,
but by and large, humans are hardwired to want to
live for as long as possible, even in the worst
of circumstances. That's why there are so many of us
here today. For example, when a private firm based in
(35:20):
Hong Kong learned of this research, they moved immediately to
get in the game. It turns out they made this
move because the family who owned this corporate dynasty had
a prevalent history of Alzheimer's, and other private entities are
attempting to get in the game. There's one you may
have read about a few years back. Jesse Kremazen wants
(35:44):
he wants to bring this idea, this young blood to
the old transfusion treatment to the public with the creation
of a company called Ambrosia. Ambrusia purports to rejuvenate the
aging and well to do with injects of younger plasma.
Plasma is the essentially the liquid component of blood and.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
The looks kind of yellow, right, it does.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And the plasma is what's stored at blood banks.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, absolutely, and it's it's the stuff that has all
of the antibodies and all the really important stuff, all
the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, all the all the all the important stuff. Plasma
in this case is going to come from people aged
sixteen to twenty five. Currently, Ambrosia has two locations, both
of which I'm reading tea leaves about. But I am
(36:41):
making so many assumptions about this. So one location is
in San Francisco, Yeah, and one's in Tampa, Tampa. So
here's what I'm wondering, And Matt, I bet you're wondering
the same thing. And we want to know your opinion, folks.
San Francisco kind of makes sense to me, home of
like water bars.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
And oxygen bars and all. There we go.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, so maybe there's a maybe there's a tech guru
aspect to this.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Right, got to get that edge.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
However, and then in Tampa there's a what's the most
polite way to.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Say this, there's a ton of old people.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, right on exactly, a significant percentage of the population
is retired.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
That's what I said, all right, I think you.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I think you said it in a bit more evocative
and dare I say accurate way than I did?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
It was concise.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
It was concise. It's important to note here in the
case of Ambrosia that younger does not mean infants. We
said they're sixteen to twenty five. Don't worry. No one
is tossing toddlers into a juicer as far as we know.
Bad image, but necessary. You're necessary for us to say that.
(37:57):
Nor is this company at this point swing people together,
or you know, practicing parabiosis on humans.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Instead, they're offering, as Matt said, straight up transfusions.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. And if you want to get this done, you
can potentially. I can't. I don't think in this lifetime.
Maybe I'll have to check with my accountant. Oh wait,
I don't have an accountant. All right, Well, no, I
can't do this. The pricing plans will enroll almost anybody
over thirty five years of age. The fees, though, are
(38:31):
totaling up to eight thousand dollars per person per I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
What you'd call it pop yeah, per transfusion, but right,
And they say that is covering the expense of the research,
covering the raw cost of retrieving, maintaining, transporting the plasma.
And it makes you wonder what happens to people in
those ten years between twenty five and thirty five. You're
(38:58):
too young to receive the treatment quote unquote treatment, you're
too old to donate. Just got to make it through
that decade long wilderness.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, your blood is just in stasis too, I guess
according to research, just not really getting better. It's not
getting worse, just kind of hanging.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
And ambrosia currently has it has had a lot of press,
and it obviously has a lot of people who believe
in it enough to at least give it a try,
but as quite a few critics. Critics are arguing that
the perobiosis experiments conducted on mice don't offer very much
insight into how a one time transfusion could affect a human.
(39:42):
So Wagers from earlier said that in our studies, circulation
between a young mouse and old mouse was maintained through
this parobiosis for nearly four weeks, almost a month.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, and you're doing this for an hour or so,
a couple hours maybe, right, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Eight grand a pop. Additionally, ethicists are concerned that ambrosia
is that because ambrosia is being financed by the participants,
by the people who will receive these transfusions. I keep
I want to do like an arch sinister voice every
time I say young blood. Yeah, it's just such a
(40:25):
sinister Gary Oldman is Dracula phrase.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
You know, you just have to do like a licking
of your lips sound after you say it.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
That's all yield or yeah. But they're the ethical problem
with this, or one of the ethical problems is that
there are not straight up investors. So if we're talking
about people who are desperate to mitigate the delatorious effects
of aging, then they're going to have a very difficult
(40:55):
time being objective about the results, especially when we in
the idea that the placebo effect does have measurable and
significant physiological impacts upon a human body.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Right yep, man, Well, so let's see where we are
at least as of December twenty sixteen. According to Ambrosia,
they've infused twenty five people with young blood so up
until December twenty sixteen. It is now into twenty eighteen,
so who knows, maybe that number has doubled. We don't
(41:32):
have notes from Ambrosia, but I'm sure we will get
them soon. So Carmezine claims that his participants are seeing
miraculous results, which is something you have to do when
you have a company that does something like this. Patient
with chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, quote feels healthy for
the first time and looks younger, which is nice. And
(41:54):
you know, these kind of antidotes will help, you know,
market the study at least and get more people involved
so we get more data. That can't be a bad thing.
But you know, it's not proof that the plasma infusions
actually work, and that would would be patients you know,
should believe these at all, at least go into it
thinking maybe this will work.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
One of the reasons that drug approval moves so slowly
is that there well, aside from the endemic corruption in
the pharmaceutical industry and the medical medtech industry, typically on paper,
the reason why these things move so slowly is because
they're very important. They're literally putting people's lives in danger potentially,
(42:39):
so there are a lot of hoops to jump through,
and there should be quite a few hoops to jump through.
According to Jonathan Kimmelman, who is a bioethicist at McGill University,
there are a lot of patient funded trials run by
companies that use the trials as a way to sell
products that would not be marketable because they'd have to
be regulated by the FDA.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yes, and speaking of a recent study concluded in November
twenty seventeen. It was done at the Stanford University School
of Medicine. It was a clinical trial looking at the safety, tolerability,
and feasibility of administering infusions, just what we've been talking
about with ambrosia love blood plasma from young donors to
(43:22):
participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Again, very similar
thing that we're trying to treat here with young blood.
Different study, which is a good thing because now you've
got with multiple studies, if you're getting the same results,
then you're getting closer to, you know, actually doing what
a scientific experiment is supposed to do. This trial in particular,
(43:43):
was created to test a hypothesis put forth by this person,
Tony Weisskore. He is a doctor, he's a Stanford Professor
of neurology, and he's also a scientist at the Veterans
Affairs in Palo Alto anyway, in California. His research, he
did research with mice as well, and again found that
(44:04):
factors in the blood of young mice can rejuvenate the
brain tissue and improve cognitive performance in old mice. You
can even see a ted talk of him if you
want to. But anyway, in this one, it's again a company,
a private company that has at least a hand in
getting this research done and having this clinical trial put on.
(44:24):
It's called Alcahest and it quote holds intellectual property associated
with the treatment regimen for this particular trial. And the
Tony Weiss kay gentleman, who was not a part of
this experiment at least according to Stanford, he is the
co founder of this company and also the chair of
its scientific advisory board. So again you've got private interest
(44:51):
to carry out these kinds of trials to see if
there's anything to this young blood transfusion stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Right, And we're all so seeing that a lot of
these studies or trials conducted have relatively small sample sizes.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, in this one there were only eighteen human beings
that were transfused.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
And this is the public state of affairs at the present. However,
there are clear and present dangers with this sort of
experimentation that go far above and way beyond something like
investor ethics and bureaucratic concerns. As we said, a transfusion
(45:33):
is not parabiosis. So at this point there's not a
solid load of widely accepted evidence that indicates any major
health benefits, and that leads critics of places like Ambrosia
to claim they are only praying on the desperate. So far,
we do not know if anyone is practicing human parabiosis.
In the past, there were certain grisly experiments that you
(45:59):
can hear about in little more depth in our Human
Experimentation series. In the past, there were experiments that approached
some stuff like this, But perhaps the most concise way
to describe those experiments is to say that the people
conducting the experiments were in no way concerned about the
(46:20):
benefits or even the survival rate. The benefits to or
the survival rate of their patients, in a better word,
for their patients would have been victims, because we were
talking about wartime experiments by people who were absolute lunatics.
Were there someone or some organization currently experimenting with human
(46:42):
parabiosis at this point, it would almost certainly be secret.
It would be classified because it would be seven shades
of illegal to do so if it's going on currently.
We would not know the age of the participants either,
which is another scary thing.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
If it was done legally, though, they would have to
be over eighteen unless they had I guess permission from
their parents.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I don't know if parents could sign up for that,
but yeah, legally, they would all have to be over
eighteen for some kind of consent to for informed consent
to occur within the US at least, yeah, legally legally, again,
legally for that to happen. If someone is experimenting with
(47:33):
human parabiosis, they're also running the risk of parabiosis disease,
which we mentioned earlier from those experiments in the nineteen fifties,
and the chances. Here's where we get. We go on
some disturbing breadcrumbs. You're ready, Okay, So, if we're experimenting,
(47:55):
if our species experimenting with human parabiosis currently, then there's
that risk.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Was it?
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Eleven of the sixty nine rap pairs right experienced parabiosis disease.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
He just died after a little while fatal rejection.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
The chances of this disease occurring are greatly reduced when
the participants are increasingly similar. For our purposes, when the
participants are increasingly related. So, next breadcrumb, what would your
closest relationship be for this experiment? What other individual would
create the highest chance of success in an experiment with parabiosis? Well,
(48:38):
one question. One might say a child, taking your own child.
One might say a sibling, But we have another We
have another field of technology that is moving at a
rapid pace. Now, what's closer than a sibling, closer than
(49:01):
a child, even closer than a fraternal twin?
Speaker 2 (49:04):
A clone?
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Spot on, Matt, A clone? Oh what? So imagine we've
talked about this before with the possibility of growing organs, right,
growing clones? Four spare organs? Would it be? Is there
a possible future where there would be a clone grown
(49:28):
to act as a filter for your blood that's younger
than you, that is just kept somewhere and you just
plug up to it.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Maybe when you hit a certain age, you have a
bunch of your genetic material put away in a vault somewhere,
and then that's used to begin creating clones of you
at another certain age, or maybe once you hit that age,
like let's say eighteen or so, then you just continuously
throughout the rest of your life, once you hit thirty five,
(49:57):
use these clones to be attached to you for a
little while.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
And there's so little published science on this. There are
absolutely no long term studies, no longitudinal studies of the
nature of this effect. Like, what if someone begins engaging
in some sort of thing like this, let's say, for
(50:22):
the sake of argument, actual parabiosis, right, and let's say
for months every year or ever, Yeah, for month every
year something, they're stitched next to some source of young blood.
And what happens to that? What does their body look
like physiologically when they are sixty five, when they are
(50:45):
seventy five? You know, how long does this go? No
one knows. No one knows because it's unless you're very careful.
It's evil to do that kind of experimentation. Additionally, this
is even weirder. This is not as scary, but it
is weird. Evidence indicates that injecting human blood plasma into
(51:08):
the bodies of elderly mice might have beneficial effects on
the mice.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Hold on, putting human plasma into a mouse helps the mouse.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
That's what it seems to say. There's an article about
this in Nature magazine when we have a quote here.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Oh, yes, they say. Infusing this human plasma into the
veins of elderly mice, they found improved the animal's ability
to navigate mazes and to learn to avoid areas of
their cages that deliver painful electrical shocks. When the researchers
dissected the animal's brains, they found that the cells in
the hippocampus, the region associated with learning and memory, expressed
(51:47):
genes that cause neurons to form more connections in the brain.
This didn't happen in mice treated with blood from older
human donors. So only the young blood helps.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Right, So plasma from older humans did not have much
of an effect. Plasma from younger sources umbilical cords specifically,
by the way, turns out to be top notch. What
could go wrong? What could go wrong with this knowledge? Right? Oh? Gosh. Well,
(52:19):
for now, it appears that any claims that young blood
or plasma will extend human lifespan are false.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Or at least we just don't have the data.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Right, We don't know. The data is just not there. Yeah,
an experiment to test such claims would take upwards of
six years, first waiting for the mice to age, then
for them to die naturally, then analyzing the data. If
we had funding to do this, says Michael Conboy, I
do it, but we don't. Still, he adds, after a
(52:50):
moment of hesitation, I hope that someone somewhere is keep
in mind he's just talking about mice.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah, yeah, mice, just mice, and just in the nicest
of Michael Conboy. Yeah. So, currently it appears the best
possible case we can hope for is the isolation of
some specific proteins or other elements that are found in
young blood. These special reasons that rejuvenation occurs, because this
could lead to amazingly effective treatments for age related ailments.
(53:19):
We're talking to Alzheimer's, dementia and so on, without requiring
people to bathe in the blood of virgins or you know,
suck on human numbilical cords.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The hope would be that our species
could isolate, let's say, a specific protein, and that specific
protein could be marketed right and created in some different way.
And of course this research is very expensive, very complicated.
(53:49):
You'll hear a lot of people say that as the
world or the owners of the world now seek to
move away from an owner ship economy to a service economy,
you'll hear people allege that quote unquote Big Pharma is
not in the business of selling cures. They're in the
business of selling scheduled treatments. So then the concern would be,
(54:14):
you know, is it it's not a cure all that
will help somebody's Alzheimer's, it's a pill that they have
to pay for that they have to take once a day. Well.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Yeah, if you've got a private company that's based on
making profit off of something and growing that company to
hopefully one day sell it or make more money, you
don't usually want to cure something, right, You don't want
to put yourself out of business.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
But then there are people on the other side who
will say that private industry is the is a necessary
factor for this kind of research. Absolutely, but still but
still it does allow and this is not us being alarmist.
It does allow for the possibility of a world in
which the rich find yet another avenue for victimizing the poor.
(55:01):
Imagine a planet's worth of real life Elizabeth Bathorys practicing
non consensual parabiosis. Research is still underweight, and it's safe
to say that we'll hear more about this in the
near to mid future. But Matt and I want to
know what you think. Where do you land on this
(55:22):
research given that it can mitigate the effects of aging,
but we should say not give people immortality so far
as we know, is it worth pursuing and where do
you see it headed?
Speaker 2 (55:33):
So in my opinion, I think you're going to see
more of what the character that's kind of modeled after
Peter Thiel on, Oh what is that what show? HBO
show Silicon Valley, that character that he's just got a
young guy that comes around his house a couple times
a week and they just do a blood transfusion. I
(55:54):
think that's just going to be a thing that's like
how the way uber drivers have There are so many
uber drivers in the world and it's just proliferated. I
think there will just be that the transfusion person.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
A new aspect of the gig economy.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
I really think so. And it's just something you do
on Tuesdays and Thursdays over at you know, Bill's house
or whatever that guy is that lives in the mansion
on the hill.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
I have no doubt that someone will go off the
reservation and try this on their own, especially if they
can afford a relatively unethical doctor to just participate in
this kind of experimentation. But well, then the doctor could
be ethical. It depends really how much they want to
pay the Yeah group, how much work they want to
(56:42):
put into it. But I'm I think it really depends
on what data bears out here. If if there is,
it turns out real tangible results and evidence, then it's
Katie bar the door. We don't know where it stops,
but if it is a way to bilk the frightened
(57:07):
and the aging out of money in an attempt to
I guess pay the ferrymen a couple of extra coins
to stay on his side of the river sticks for
a while. The people will throw money at it, of course.
But here's the question that bugs me the most, Matt.
Speaker 2 (57:25):
How much are the donors of ambrosia getting paid.
Speaker 1 (57:31):
Oh gosh, yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Because I mean, I'm in, you're in. Oh no, I'm
never mind.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
Sorry man. Another question that bugs me is what happened
to parabiosis research when it dropped out, when it fell
out of favor. Why did it disappear from the mainstream
radar for decades? Was it animal rights? Was it something else?
(58:00):
We'd love to hear your opinion. That concludes our episode
for today, but never fear, Matt, Noel, Paul and I
will be back very soon in the meantime.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Stuff they Don't want you to know is a production
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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