March 2, 2018 • 57 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):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Ben. Our compatriot Noel is traveling at the moment,
but we'll be back soon. We are joined with our
super producer Paul Decon. 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
(00:45):
of a peak behind the curtain. So for the past
gosh two months almost, Matt and Noel and I have
been kicking the can down the road regarding a very
interesting email we received about the Georgia guidestones. And every
(01:06):
episode we have told each 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 head. Yeah,
(01:26):
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. So let's consider this an
oddly placed chat at corners. The message says, greetings Ben,
Matt Noel. This email is in regards to the stuff
they don't want you to know. Podcast episode titled Who
Built the Georgia Guidestones published of November. We got there,
(01:51):
We got to it eventually, we did uh. 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're going to read now. We're reading at
one piece of it that was the most compelling to us,
it says. The identity of R. C. Christian has since
(02:11):
been revealed to be that of one Herbert Hinny h
I n I E. 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 Clue Klux Klan and
(02:33):
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 has written to us by
quote a guide to the end, and we thought this
(02:54):
was We thought this was fantastic. At least it's a
fantastic on the true identity of R. C. Christian. At
this point, it has not been conclusively proven. Not everybody
agrees that this is indeed Herbert Henny Kirsten or Herbert
Heinie Kirsten. But I think it's Hinny, I think it's
(03:15):
any Matt. I've 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 R. C. Christian.
If you'd like to learn more, please check out the
documentary Dark Clouds over Alberton as well as, uh, the
fantastic documentary that Matt put together. No, that we put together. Okay,
(03:38):
but it's available on Amazon for free, just search for us. Yeah,
Etcherton Secret is out the name of our take on it. Uh,
and maybe one day we'll just get it on YouTube
as well. Agreed we should do that and this concludes
our oddly placed onto the show. Let's get let's get creepy.
(04:04):
Let's get creepy immediately. Okay, oh that'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 here in
(04:26):
the West, but there are other creatures as well, like
the swang in the Philippines or the lamia in Grecian
uh folklore. Yeah, bloodsuckers, beings that exist on the sanguine
delights of other beings. That's a great that's a great
description there. 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
(04:50):
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
in the ancient world, 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 sumone into this world from some other right other being,
(05:15):
some other playing uh, some other dimension. In earlier episodes,
we explored the possible origins of the vampire myth, the
by which we mean the possible real world seeds of
truth that that later grew into this agglomeration of folklore.
(05:36):
And 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
(05:57):
audio at our website. Stuff they don't want, you know,
dot com um to do on whatever feed 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
(06:19):
if something like a 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 nor monsters
on the silver screen. We're talking about real life vampires again,
someone something that exists on the blood of others. And
(06:43):
this concept of vampireism has become so prevalent in our
worlds nowadays. It's been used as an insult, you vampire,
get out in the light, your vampire, or a piece
of opprobrium to heap them upon all kinds of let's say,
all too human rosters. Right yeah, here, opprobrium is word
(07:06):
for reproach or 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 here it used to describe a lot of ancient aristocrats.
(07:28):
Of course. The legendary Lad Tepish 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 Drakul or Vlad the Dragon,
(07:49):
who was the ruler of Volachi in fourteen thirty six,
and although his father was known as Dracula the Dragon,
he flat tepish lad. The third was the more notorious
of the to He was known as the Impaler for
his habit of impaling his enemy's rivals or just people
who caught him on the wrong side of bed in
the morning. He'd have these large wooden stakes erected and
(08:11):
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, grizzly,
painful death. So in a way he did get by
(08:33):
through the blood of others, in a very dark way.
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 if we engage in that comparison,
we get to a slippery slope where we could argue
(08:54):
that all war lords or even politicians who are in
charge of military areas subsist to a degree on the
blood of others. I don't think that slope is that slippery.
I think we might already have slipped. Uh. There's another example,
which is Elizabeth Bathory or Orsbet Bathory, the noblewoman who
(09:14):
is based in what is now known as Slovakia. In
the six hundred, she was arrested and accused of numerous
maccab crimes. We have just a few examples of those
alleged crimes. Yeah, she would keep her well. Allegedly, she
would keep her servants chained up every night so their
their hands were just so tightly bound that they would
(09:35):
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 and the beds, they had to use ashes
and cinders to soak it all up and scrub it
all away. She even burned her servants with metal sticks
allegedly red hot keys and coins. She ironed the souls
(09:58):
of their feet, and even stuck burning rods into um
their vaginas. Yes uh, 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. She used knives, needles, candles,
occasionally her own teeth to laceerate the genitals of servants,
(10:19):
stitched their lips and tongues together, made them sit on
stinging nettles, bathe with the nettles, forced 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 Thursoh, who was later
(10:44):
one of the guys who arrested her. Uh. She was
also she would cast magic spells to summon clouds filled
with angry cats, most famously the most infamously rather, she
was believed to a bled young servant girls dry and
after and exanguinating their bodies or training all the blood
from them, bathing in that blood. Yes, and that's probably
(11:08):
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. Right, and this was
characterized as part of a right or ritual that would
(11:32):
lengthen her lifespan and rejuvenate her history has to a
degree exonerated bath Thy of some of these accusations. At
the time of the trial, over three hundred individuals testified
against her for one thing or another, and her servants
(11:54):
were put to Four of her servants were put to
some ends. But given the influence that she had in
society at the time, she was not killed. She was
immured I am m U r e D, which means
they grounded her for the rest of her life. Essentially,
(12:17):
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
in virgin blood. First, that idea came about centuries after
(12:39):
her death. Someone added that to the to the story
to the camp fire tail. 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
(12:59):
to quote bathe and virgin blood due to coagulation. How
would you how would you keep the blood liquid long
enough for there to be an entire tub of it? Interesting?
I guess it would be in the how you got
the blood out right right and ambient temperature and so on. So, yeah,
(13:23):
we're getting grizzly pretty Quickilly 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 the political chessboard.
This happened in witch hunts, you know a lot of times.
(13:47):
One thing that escapes historical explanations of the witch hunting
phenomenon is the following in certain practices in the inquisition,
in certain non inquisition which hunts the accuser, the person
who put the witch to trial, who is almost always
convicted in one way or the other. Uh, they would
(14:10):
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. So
it's quite possible that this was a political hit. But
we say all this because whether or not the legend is,
(14:35):
whether or not the legend is true, it is something iconic.
It is an image that is stayed with us. You mean,
probably everyone you know has heard of these grizzly stories
about the elites of the world subsisting on the blood
of the innocent and typically the oppressed. Yeah, I mean metaphorically,
(15:00):
there's no bones about it. It kind of is true metaphorically, right, right,
And so the question, literally than our conclusion becomes that's it, right.
Vampirism is largely a myth in allegory of sorts. Right.
(15:23):
Here's where it gets crazy. There maybe more to this
whole blood and vampireism thing than we we had initially
believed early some aspect of it. Yeah, for decades, it
turns out, scientists have been experimenting with the idea of
transfusing blood from younger organisms to older organisms. Yeah, what
(15:48):
happens when we put this young blood in here? Yes, exactly.
That's a pardon the evil laugh. It didn't mean it
sounds sinister, but 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,
(16:12):
you know what I wonder? I wonder, like hear me out, guys,
I have this picture of I have this picture of
you and Paul and Matt Nolan, I listeners, I have
this picture of us all sitting around the table and
saying what will our next experiment be? And then someone
(16:32):
like you just did Matt goes Uh, guys, hear me out.
We have a lot of mice, and that's where they started.
They scientists began transfusing blood from young mice into the
bodies of old mice. And as it turned out, this
was not just some weird thing for Matt scientists to
(16:54):
do for for kicks. It all goes back to something
called parabiosis. Yeah. This is a hundred 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 and bios life. So you have two organisms that
(17:15):
you've essentially created conjoined twins out of Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We're animals that share a placenta in a womb. This, Yeah,
parabiosis does occur in nature, as with the with the
example that Matt's side, it can. Joined twins would probably
be the most well known example. But we we being
(17:37):
the human species, learned that we could do this artificially.
And here's the huge plot twist. Not always automatically killing
the living things we stitched together human centipede style. Well
not quite right, right, Sorry, you're right, you're right, Matt. Uh,
(17:58):
they're not. That's a digestive system or 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
(18:21):
do when they enter another animal. It's a question I've
always asked myself, I know, sometimes out loud during meetings,
what happens if my blood was your blood and your
blood was my blood? You know people can hear you
when you do that, right, Yes, yes, that's why no
one's not here for this episode. I think maybe you
(18:43):
should just get a creative outlet, like right, poetry or
essays or yeah, I'm going to pick up a guitar.
I think, yeah, I get into some real dark metal,
and you could create dark power ballads about these experiments.
Because experiments with these rodent pairs, whether rats or mice
(19:05):
or what have you, have led to immensely important breakthroughs
inn indochronology, tumor biology, immunology, and so on. But here's
a curious thing, Matt. 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 well,
(19:26):
we did a lot of digging, and we still can't
We still can't find out what happened in the seventies.
I think most most of it is just the factory sure.
In the past few years, however, a couple of labs
relatively small number, have revived the practice of artificial parabiosis,
(19:50):
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 mouth, scientists
can produce some remarkable things, which already just sounds so
problematic and spooky to me. But what do they find. Well,
in the hot brain, muscles, and almost every other tissue examined,
(20:15):
the blood of young mice seems to bring new life
into aging organs, making own mice stronger, smarter, and healthier. Yeah, yeah,
I mean even without the voice. That's troubling. It does.
It does good things to the old mice, right, and
(20:36):
it even makes their fur shinier. Now, these labs have
begun to identify the components in this quote unquote young
blood that are responsible for these changes. For example, a
biochemist and gerontologist named Clive McKay, based in Cornell University
(20:58):
up there in Mythiccan, New York, was the first individual
to apply parabiosis to the study of aging. In nineteen
fifty six, he and his team joined sixty nine pairs
of rats together in para biosis. They stitched them up
together so that their circulatory systems were in contact formula
(21:19):
larger circuit and the linked rats included you know, they
all had those differing age ranges. 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
(21:39):
person to a five year old child. And here's the deal.
When you when you attach a forty seven year old
um through the circulatory system to a five year old
sometimes it always doesn't go well um from a psychology
standpoint of the rats. So here here's a quote from
the authors who worked on the study. If two rats
(22:03):
are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the
head of the other until it is destroyed. Yeah, that's
a quotation from the author's description of their work of
this wasn't a pretty experiment because rats are highly intelligent animals, right,
(22:24):
and obviously smart enough to know that something is not
normal if they are stitched up to another individual, especially
if they are not acclimated to that individual. If you
woke up and you were sown to a stranger, you
would have some questions, some concerns. You probably would not
(22:46):
be chill about it. So they also found that there
was a troubling phenomenon they couldn't explain at the time.
Back in the fifties. Of the sixty nine rodents that
they paired together, eleven pairs died from mysterious condition they
called parabiotic disease that occurred. This occurred about one to
(23:08):
two weeks after the partners were joined, and it was
probably a form of tissue rejection. Just yeah, your one
body going, what the heck is this? Yeah? Absolutely well,
because in this 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.
(23:29):
Here as we're moving on, you're getting everything. Excellent point.
This is not a transfusion. This is the This is
compiling or mix taping two separate circulatory systems. So in
in McKay's first parabiotic aging experiment, after the older young
rex were joined for from anywhere from nine months to
(23:51):
eighteen months, they found in you know, the the one
positive thing that seemed to come out of this um,
the older animals bones became similar weight and density to
the bones of the younger counterparts that they were attached to.
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
(24:13):
the older rats, not necessarily for the younger rats. There's
not really much of a benefit at all. 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
(24:35):
they enter into a type of symbiosis called commence all
is um. There are three types of symbiosis. Symbiosis just
means a close relationship between two and more species, right.
The three types are mutual is um, where both both
(24:55):
parties benefit or all parties benefit, parasitism where one benefits
at the spence of the other and commence ali is um,
where one species benefits somehow and the other species is
neither harmed nor helped. Arguably, this is on the line
between commence ali is um and parasitism, because while the
(25:18):
younger animal is not necessarily being directly harmed, it's life
is going to be hindered because it's you know, attached
to this forty seven year old mouse. It's like six
year old. I was like, your music is just really
I don't understand it. I don't know why we're watching
this on TV. Let's watch oldies. So let's fast forward.
(25:41):
Let's get through the seventies, where again this research mysteriously
fell out of favor. A few years back, a team
of researchers Amy Wagers, Irena and Michael Conboy and Thomas
Rando partnered up. They've vultron up to take their separate
areas research in this field and combine them to investigate
(26:03):
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 body wide effect. Right now, your
(26:25):
your body tends to break down sort of. At the
same time, there are environmental things that can that can
affect you. For instance, Um, you will take more damage
depending on how you treat yourself if you do. If
you are an athlete and you have a lot of
repetitive exercises, right then you may have concussions or you
(26:49):
may have joint problems that might not have appeared in
the same way. Yeah, even if you're just walking around
all the time, your joints and your knees aren't going
to be the same as perhaps the joints in your
shoulder if you aren't very active with your shoulders. Yeah, yeah,
good point. And the problem is that they wanted to
(27:11):
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 handbasket
at once? Why does this affect multiple parts of the
body simultaneously. So they tried these experiments again, and they
(27:32):
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. 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,
(27:55):
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 work was
left out of their two thousand five paper that described
the results. All in all, the results suggested that blood
(28:17):
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 well traveled substance
in the human body. In two thousand eight, the convoys
uh Arena and Michael linked muscle rejuvenation to the activation
(28:40):
of something called notch signaling, which promotes cell division, or,
to be more technically accurate, it's the muscile rejuvenation is
dependent upon the d activation of the transforming growth factor pathway.
That's what blocks cell division into a thousand and fourteen,
(29:01):
the group identified one of the age defying factors circulating
the blood. 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 our um how your brain
betrays you when you're in love. Yeah, exactly. I did
not mean to sound that bit. Yes, um, and already
(29:23):
a drug approved by the FDA, the Food and Drug
Administration here in the United States. Uh, it's it's it's
approved for inducing labor and pregnant women. Um you wow,
I forget what it's called. Uh potosan potosin I think
is what it's called. Uh. Yes, my my wife didn't
have to use it. Huh. That's fascinating. That's a good thing, right,
(29:43):
you want the minimum amount of yeah, and chemicals going
in during pregnancy. But it's used a lot of times
to induce Um. I don't 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 pear. It so that a new nurse or a
new set of people coming in don't have to just
(30:04):
pick up where the other whole crew left off, okay,
because they might not have the background knowledge of the
previous Yeah. I'm not saying that 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 helpful and oxytocin. It turns out the levels of
this substance decline with age and both men and women.
And when oxytocin is injected into older mice over a
(30:26):
systematic regiment or schedule, the hormone quickly within a couple
of weeks, regenerates muscles by activating muscle stem cells. 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 organs systems
to help her evaluate the specific impact of young blood
(30:50):
on the respective tissues of these organs. We've got a
couple of examples of her findings here. Yeah. Then she
worked with Robin Franklin, who was a neuroscientist at the
University of Cambridge in the UK. UH they kind of
discovered that young blood promotes the repairing of damage spinal
(31:10):
cords in older mice. So if you've got I mean,
that's that's huge. There are a lot of things that
you could hopefully apply that to in humans. If you
can work that out in mice. The implications of that
are pretty astounding. It's the implication, it's the implication. There
was another neuroscientist, Lee Ruben, with whom Wagers found that
(31:33):
young blood sparks the formation of new neurons in the
brain and old factory system against associated with spell. 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,
(31:55):
you've got spinal cord. Huge improvements to the lives of
older people, older mice in this case, right, possibly people
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
(32:19):
the immediate question, which is the following. If this works
in mice, If these techniques work in mice, could we
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
(32:41):
word from our sponsor, 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
(33:04):
been doing since humans could talk and move a scalpel
around and or whatever other implement has been used in
the past. We've been pushing these boundaries, and it seems
like we're doing it again. One of the most immediate
aspects to consider here is the power and influence of
privately funded research or the very financially or socially powerful
(33:31):
individuals who are aging and ailing and interested and interested.
Because one thing most people seem to have in common,
fanatologists find people who study death find is that no
one wants to die. No, it's you know, people do
at times, unfortunately and tragically take their own lives, but
(33:55):
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 Hong Kong
learned of this research, they moved immediately to get in
(34:15):
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 Krimazen wants who wants
(34:36):
to bring this idea, this this young blood to the
old transfusion treatment to the public with the creation of
a company called Ambrusia. Ambrusia purports to rejuvenate the aging
and well to do with injections of younger plasma. Plasma
is the essentially the liquid component of blood and that
(34:58):
looks kind of yellow, right, it does. And the plasma
is what's stored at blood banks. 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, all
the all the all the important stuff. Plasma in this
(35:19):
case is going to come from people aged sixteen to currently.
Ambrosia has two locations, both of which I'm reading tea
leaves about. But I I'm making so many assumptions about this.
So one location is in San Francisco and ones in Tampa, Tampa.
(35:41):
So here's what I'm wondering and and Matt, I bet
you're wondering the same thing. And we we want to
know your opinion. Folks. San Francisco kind of makes sense
to me, home of like water bars and oxygen. There
we go. Yeah, so maybe there's a maybe there's a
(36:01):
tech guru aspect to this, right, you gotta get that edge. However,
and then in Tampa there's a what's the most polite
way to say this, there's a ton of old people. Yeah,
right on exactly a significant percentage of the population is retired.
That's all right. I think you I think you said
(36:23):
it in a in a bit more evocative and dare
I say accurate way than I did? It was concise,
It was concise. It's important to note here in the
case of Ambrosia that younger does not mean infants. We
said their sixteen. Don't worry. No one is tossing toddlers
into a juicer as far as we know. Bad image,
(36:45):
but necessary, You're necessary for us to say that. Nor
is this company at this point sewing people together or
you know, practicing parabiosis on humans. Instead, they're offering, as
Matt said, straight up transfusions. Yea. And if you want
to get this done. You can um, potentially, I can't.
(37:08):
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 um And
the pricing plans will enroll almost anybody over thirty five
years of age. The fees, though, are totaling up to
eight thousand dollars per person per I don't know what
you'd call it pop yeah, per transfusion right uh. And
(37:33):
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
too young two receive the treatment quote unquote treatment, you're
(37:56):
too old to donate. Just gotta make it through that
decade long wilderness. 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. And ambrosia
currently has it's had a lot of press, and it
obviously has a lot of people who believe in it
(38:17):
enough to at least give it a try. But as
quite a few critics. Critics are arguing that the parabiosis
experiments conducted on mice don't offer very much insight into
how a one time transfusion could affect a human. So
Wagers from earlier said that in our studies, circulation between
(38:42):
a young mouse and old mouse was maintained through this
parabiosis for nearly four weeks, almost a month. And you're
doing this for an hour or so, a couple of
hours maybe, right, I don't know, eight Granda pop. Additionally,
ethicists are concerned that ambrosia is that because ambrosia is
(39:02):
being financed by the participants, by the people who will
receive these transfusions. I keep I wanted to do like
an arch sinister voice every time I say young blood.
It's just such a sinister Gary oldman is Dracula phrase.
You know, you just have to do like a licking
(39:23):
of your lips sound after you say it. That's all children. Yeah,
But there 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 dilatory effects of aging, then they're going to
(39:45):
have a very difficult time being objective about the results,
especially when we factor in the idea that the placebo
effect does have measurable and significant physiological impacts upon a
human body. Right man, Well, so let's let's see where
(40:07):
we are. At least as of uh December, according to Ambrosia,
they've infused twenty five people with young blood so up
until December. It is now uh into so who knows,
maybe that number has doubled. We don't have notes from Ambrosia,
but I'm sure we will get them soon. Um. So
(40:28):
uh Karmazine claims that his participants are seeing miraculous results. Um,
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 you know,
these kind of antidotes will help, you know, market the
study at least and get more people involved so we
(40:50):
get more data that 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 to believe these at all, at least go into
it thinking maybe this will work right. Yeah. One of
the reasons that drug approval moves so slowly is that
(41:12):
the well, aside from the endemic corruption in the pharmaceutical
industry and the medical troup medtech industry um 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,
so there are a lot of hoops to jump through,
(41:33):
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 f D A. Yes, And speaking
(41:53):
of a recent study concluded in November, uh it was
done at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There was
a clinical trial looking at the safety, tolerability, and feasibility
of administering infusions just what we've been talking about with
ambrosia of blood plasma from young donors to participants with
(42:14):
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. UM. This trial in particular
(42:35):
was created to test a hypothesis put forth by this person,
Tony Weiss Corey. 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 UM,
he did research with mice as well, and again found
(42:55):
that factors in the blood of young mice can rejuvenate
the brain tissue and improve cognitive performance an 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. It's called Alcahest and it quote holds
(43:19):
intellectual property associated with the treatment regimen for this particular trial.
And uh this uh, the Tony Weiss Karay 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, private interest to carry out these
(43:44):
kinds of trials to see if there's anything to this
young blood transfusion stuff, right, And we're also seeing that
a lot of these studies or trials conducted have relatively
small sample sizes. Yeah, and in this one there were
only eighteen human beings that were transfused. And this this
(44:05):
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 uh, you know, bureaucratic concerns. As we said,
a transfusion is not parabiosis. So at this point there's
(44:26):
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 grizzly experiments
(44:50):
that you can hear about in a 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
(45:10):
concerned about the 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
(45:32):
experimenting with human 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. If it
(45:54):
was done legally, though, they would have to be over
eighteen unless they had, I guess permission from their parents.
I don't know if parents could sign up for that,
but yeah, legally, they would all have to be over
eighteen for for some kind of consent to for informed
consent to occur within the US at least yeah, legally legally, again,
(46:20):
legally for that to happen. If someone is experimenting with
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,
(46:46):
if our species experimenting with human parabiosis currently, then there's
that risk. Was eleven of the sixty nine rat pairs
right experienced parabiosis disease died after a littlehile fatal rejection.
The chances of this disease occurring are greatly reduced when
the participants are increasingly similar. For our purposes, when the
(47:11):
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 a experiment with parabiosis? Well,
one question, One might say a child, taking your own child.
(47:35):
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
a child, even closer than a fraternal twin? A clone?
(47:57):
Spot on Matt, a clone? What so imagine we've talked
about this before with the possibility of growing organs, right,
or growing growing clones four spare organs, would it be?
Is there a possible future where there would be a
clone grown to act as a filter for your blood
(48:22):
that's younger than you, that is just kept somewhere and
you just plug up to it. 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
(48:42):
eighteen or so, then you just continuously throughout the rest
of your life, once you hit thirty five, use these
clones to be attached to you for a little while.
And there's so little published science on this. There're absolutely
no long terms buddies, no longitudinal studies of the nature
(49:05):
of this effect. Like what if what if someone begins
engaging in some sort of thing like this, let's say,
for the sake of argument, actual parabiosis, right, and let's
say for a month every year or every yeah, for
month every year something, they're they're stitched next to some
(49:27):
source of young blood, and what happens to that. What
is what does their body look like physiologically when they
are sixty five, when they're 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
(49:53):
is not as scary, but it is weird. Evidence indicates
that injecting human blood plasma into the bodies of elderly
mice might have beneficial effects on the mice. Hold on,
putting human plasma into a mouse helps the mouse, That's
what it seems to say. There's a there's an article
about this in Nature magazine when we have a quote here,
(50:17):
Oh yes, they 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,
(50:38):
expressed genes that caused 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. Right,
So plasma from older humans did not have much of
an effect. Plasma from younger sources uh umbilical cords specifically,
by the way, turns out to be hop notch. What
(51:01):
could go wrong? What could go wrong with this knowledge? Right? Oh? Gosh? Well,
for now, it appears that any claims that young blood
or plasma will extend human lifespan are false, or at
least we just don't have the data, right, We don't know.
(51:21):
The data is just not there. Yeah, and experiment to
test such claims would take upwards of six years, first
waiting for the mice to age them for them to
die naturally, than analyzing the data. If we have funding
to do this, says Michael conboy, I do it, but
we don't. Still, he adds, after a moment of hesitation,
(51:43):
I hope that someone somewhere is keep in mind he's
just talking about mice. Yeah, just mice, just mice, and
just in the nicest of way. Michael conboy. Um. Yeah. So,
so currently it appears the best possible case we can
hope for is the isolation of some civic proteins or
other elements that are found in young blood. These special
(52:04):
reasons that rejuvenation occurs, because this could lead to amazingly
effective treatments for age related ailments. 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. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The hope would be that
our species could isolate, let's say, a specific protein, and
(52:28):
that specific protein could be marketed, right, created in some
different one. And of course this research is very expensive,
it's very complicated. Uh. You will hear a lot of
people say that as the world or the owners of
(52:48):
the world now seek to move away from an ownership
economy to a service economy, you'll hear people alleged that
quote unquote big Pharma is not in the business of
selling cure. There in the business of selling scheduled treatments.
So then the concern would be, you know, is it
it's not a cure all that will help somebody's Alzheimer's,
(53:10):
It's a pill that they have to pay for that
they have to take once a day. Well, 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 want to put yourself
out of business. But then there are people on the
(53:30):
other side who will say that private industry is the
is a necessary factor for this kind of research. But
but still, but still, uh. 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. Imagine a planet's worth
(53:57):
of real life Elizabeth Bathy's practice seeing 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 research given that it
can mitigate the effects of aging, but we should say
(54:18):
not give people immortality so far as we know, is
it worth pursuing and where do you see it headed?
So in my opinion, I think you're going to see
more of what the the character that's kind of modeled
after Peter Teal on what is that what show an
HBO show, Silicon Valley, that that character that he's just
(54:39):
got a young guy that comes around his house a
couple of times a week and they just do a
blood transfusion. I think that's just gonna be a thing.
That's like how the way uber drivers have. There are
so many uber drivers in the world, it's just proliferated.
I think there will just be that the transfusion person
(55:00):
new aspect of the gig economy. I really think so.
And it's just something you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays
over at uh you know, Bill's house or whatever that
guy is that lives in the mansion on the hill.
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 two just participate in
(55:24):
this kind of experimentation. But uh well, and the doctor
could be ethical. It depends really and how much they
want to pay the group, how much work they want
to put into it. But I'm I think it really
depends on what data bears out here. If if there is,
(55:45):
it turns out real tangible results and evidence, then it's
Katie Barr the door you know, we don't know where
it stops. But if it is a way to build
the frightened and the aging out of money in an
attempt to I guess, pay the ferryman a couple of
(56:08):
extra coins to stay on his side of the river
sticks for a while, and people will throw money at it,
of course. But here's the question that bugs me the most, Matt.
How much are the donors of Ambrosia getting paid? Oh gosh, yeah,
that's a good question, because you're in sorry man um.
(56:34):
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? We'd love
to hear your opinion. That concludes our episode for today,
(56:56):
but never fear, Matt, Noel, Paul and I will be
back there very soon. In the meantime. You can find
us on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook. You
can find us on Twitter, where we're conspiracy stuff most
of the time. Sometimes conspiracy stuff show actually just once
on Instagram. Also, if you don't want to do any
of that stuff, if you don't want to go to
our website Stuff they don't want you to know dot com.
(57:16):
You can just send us an email. It's the best way.
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Ben. Our compatriot Noel is traveling at the moment,
but we'll be back soon. We are joined with our
super producer Paul Decon. 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
(00:45):
of a peak behind the curtain. So for the past
gosh two months almost, Matt and Noel and I have
been kicking the can down the road regarding a very
interesting email we received about the Georgia guidestones. And every
(01:06):
episode we have told each 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 head. Yeah,
(01:26):
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. So let's consider this an
oddly placed chat at corners. The message says, greetings Ben,
Matt Noel. This email is in regards to the stuff
they don't want you to know. Podcast episode titled Who
Built the Georgia Guidestones published of November. We got there,
(01:51):
We got to it eventually, we did uh. 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're going to read now. We're reading at
one piece of it that was the most compelling to us,
it says. The identity of R. C. Christian has since
(02:11):
been revealed to be that of one Herbert Hinny h
I n I E. 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 Clue Klux Klan and
(02:33):
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 has written to us by
quote a guide to the end, and we thought this
(02:54):
was We thought this was fantastic. At least it's a
fantastic on the true identity of R. C. Christian. At
this point, it has not been conclusively proven. Not everybody
agrees that this is indeed Herbert Henny Kirsten or Herbert
Heinie Kirsten. But I think it's Hinny, I think it's
(03:15):
any Matt. I've 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 R. C. Christian.
If you'd like to learn more, please check out the
documentary Dark Clouds over Alberton as well as, uh, the
fantastic documentary that Matt put together. No, that we put together. Okay,
(03:38):
but it's available on Amazon for free, just search for us. Yeah,
Etcherton Secret is out the name of our take on it. Uh,
and maybe one day we'll just get it on YouTube
as well. Agreed we should do that and this concludes
our oddly placed onto the show. Let's get let's get creepy.
(04:04):
Let's get creepy immediately. Okay, oh that'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 here in
(04:26):
the West, but there are other creatures as well, like
the swang in the Philippines or the lamia in Grecian
uh folklore. Yeah, bloodsuckers, beings that exist on the sanguine
delights of other beings. That's a great that's a great
description there. 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
(04:50):
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
in the ancient world, 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 sumone into this world from some other right other being,
(05:15):
some other playing uh, some other dimension. In earlier episodes,
we explored the possible origins of the vampire myth, the
by which we mean the possible real world seeds of
truth that that later grew into this agglomeration of folklore.
(05:36):
And 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
(05:57):
audio at our website. Stuff they don't want, you know,
dot com um to do on whatever feed 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
(06:19):
if something like a 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 nor monsters
on the silver screen. We're talking about real life vampires again,
someone something that exists on the blood of others. And
(06:43):
this concept of vampireism has become so prevalent in our
worlds nowadays. It's been used as an insult, you vampire,
get out in the light, your vampire, or a piece
of opprobrium to heap them upon all kinds of let's say,
all too human rosters. Right yeah, here, opprobrium is word
(07:06):
for reproach or 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 here it used to describe a lot of ancient aristocrats.
(07:28):
Of course. The legendary Lad Tepish 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 Drakul or Vlad the Dragon,
(07:49):
who was the ruler of Volachi in fourteen thirty six,
and although his father was known as Dracula the Dragon,
he flat tepish lad. The third was the more notorious
of the to He was known as the Impaler for
his habit of impaling his enemy's rivals or just people
who caught him on the wrong side of bed in
the morning. He'd have these large wooden stakes erected and
(08:11):
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, grizzly,
painful death. So in a way he did get by
(08:33):
through the blood of others, in a very dark way.
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 if we engage in that comparison,
we get to a slippery slope where we could argue
(08:54):
that all war lords or even politicians who are in
charge of military areas subsist to a degree on the
blood of others. I don't think that slope is that slippery.
I think we might already have slipped. Uh. There's another example,
which is Elizabeth Bathory or Orsbet Bathory, the noblewoman who
(09:14):
is based in what is now known as Slovakia. In
the six hundred, she was arrested and accused of numerous
maccab crimes. We have just a few examples of those
alleged crimes. Yeah, she would keep her well. Allegedly, she
would keep her servants chained up every night so their
their hands were just so tightly bound that they would
(09:35):
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 and the beds, they had to use ashes
and cinders to soak it all up and scrub it
all away. She even burned her servants with metal sticks
allegedly red hot keys and coins. She ironed the souls
(09:58):
of their feet, and even stuck burning rods into um
their vaginas. Yes uh, 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. She used knives, needles, candles,
occasionally her own teeth to laceerate the genitals of servants,
(10:19):
stitched their lips and tongues together, made them sit on
stinging nettles, bathe with the nettles, forced 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 Thursoh, who was later
(10:44):
one of the guys who arrested her. Uh. She was
also she would cast magic spells to summon clouds filled
with angry cats, most famously the most infamously rather, she
was believed to a bled young servant girls dry and
after and exanguinating their bodies or training all the blood
from them, bathing in that blood. Yes, and that's probably
(11:08):
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. Right, and this was
characterized as part of a right or ritual that would
(11:32):
lengthen her lifespan and rejuvenate her history has to a
degree exonerated bath Thy of some of these accusations. At
the time of the trial, over three hundred individuals testified
against her for one thing or another, and her servants
(11:54):
were put to Four of her servants were put to
some ends. But given the influence that she had in
society at the time, she was not killed. She was
immured I am m U r e D, which means
they grounded her for the rest of her life. Essentially,
(12:17):
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
in virgin blood. First, that idea came about centuries after
(12:39):
her death. Someone added that to the to the story
to the camp fire tail. 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
(12:59):
to quote bathe and virgin blood due to coagulation. How
would you how would you keep the blood liquid long
enough for there to be an entire tub of it? Interesting?
I guess it would be in the how you got
the blood out right right and ambient temperature and so on. So, yeah,
(13:23):
we're getting grizzly pretty Quickilly 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 the political chessboard.
This happened in witch hunts, you know a lot of times.
(13:47):
One thing that escapes historical explanations of the witch hunting
phenomenon is the following in certain practices in the inquisition,
in certain non inquisition which hunts the accuser, the person
who put the witch to trial, who is almost always
convicted in one way or the other. Uh, they would
(14:10):
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. So
it's quite possible that this was a political hit. But
we say all this because whether or not the legend is,
(14:35):
whether or not the legend is true, it is something iconic.
It is an image that is stayed with us. You mean,
probably everyone you know has heard of these grizzly stories
about the elites of the world subsisting on the blood
of the innocent and typically the oppressed. Yeah, I mean metaphorically,
(15:00):
there's no bones about it. It kind of is true metaphorically, right, right,
And so the question, literally than our conclusion becomes that's it, right.
Vampirism is largely a myth in allegory of sorts. Right.
(15:23):
Here's where it gets crazy. There maybe more to this
whole blood and vampireism thing than we we had initially
believed early some aspect of it. Yeah, for decades, it
turns out, scientists have been experimenting with the idea of
transfusing blood from younger organisms to older organisms. Yeah, what
(15:48):
happens when we put this young blood in here? Yes, exactly.
That's a pardon the evil laugh. It didn't mean it
sounds sinister, but 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,
(16:12):
you know what I wonder? I wonder, like hear me out, guys,
I have this picture of I have this picture of
you and Paul and Matt Nolan, I listeners, I have
this picture of us all sitting around the table and
saying what will our next experiment be? And then someone
(16:32):
like you just did Matt goes Uh, guys, hear me out.
We have a lot of mice, and that's where they started.
They scientists began transfusing blood from young mice into the
bodies of old mice. And as it turned out, this
was not just some weird thing for Matt scientists to
(16:54):
do for for kicks. It all goes back to something
called parabiosis. Yeah. This is a hundred 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 and bios life. So you have two organisms that
(17:15):
you've essentially created conjoined twins out of Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We're animals that share a placenta in a womb. This, Yeah,
parabiosis does occur in nature, as with the with the
example that Matt's side, it can. Joined twins would probably
be the most well known example. But we we being
(17:37):
the human species, learned that we could do this artificially.
And here's the huge plot twist. Not always automatically killing
the living things we stitched together human centipede style. Well
not quite right, right, Sorry, you're right, you're right, Matt. Uh,
(17:58):
they're not. That's a digestive system or 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
(18:21):
do when they enter another animal. It's a question I've
always asked myself, I know, sometimes out loud during meetings,
what happens if my blood was your blood and your
blood was my blood? You know people can hear you
when you do that, right, Yes, yes, that's why no
one's not here for this episode. I think maybe you
(18:43):
should just get a creative outlet, like right, poetry or
essays or yeah, I'm going to pick up a guitar.
I think, yeah, I get into some real dark metal,
and you could create dark power ballads about these experiments.
Because experiments with these rodent pairs, whether rats or mice
(19:05):
or what have you, have led to immensely important breakthroughs
inn indochronology, tumor biology, immunology, and so on. But here's
a curious thing, Matt. 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 well,
(19:26):
we did a lot of digging, and we still can't
We still can't find out what happened in the seventies.
I think most most of it is just the factory sure.
In the past few years, however, a couple of labs
relatively small number, have revived the practice of artificial parabiosis,
(19:50):
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 mouth, scientists
can produce some remarkable things, which already just sounds so
problematic and spooky to me. But what do they find. Well,
in the hot brain, muscles, and almost every other tissue examined,
(20:15):
the blood of young mice seems to bring new life
into aging organs, making own mice stronger, smarter, and healthier. Yeah, yeah,
I mean even without the voice. That's troubling. It does.
It does good things to the old mice, right, and
(20:36):
it even makes their fur shinier. Now, these labs have
begun to identify the components in this quote unquote young
blood that are responsible for these changes. For example, a
biochemist and gerontologist named Clive McKay, based in Cornell University
(20:58):
up there in Mythiccan, New York, was the first individual
to apply parabiosis to the study of aging. In nineteen
fifty six, he and his team joined sixty nine pairs
of rats together in para biosis. They stitched them up
together so that their circulatory systems were in contact formula
(21:19):
larger circuit and the linked rats included you know, they
all had those differing age ranges. 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
(21:39):
person to a five year old child. And here's the deal.
When you when you attach a forty seven year old
um through the circulatory system to a five year old
sometimes it always doesn't go well um from a psychology
standpoint of the rats. So here here's a quote from
the authors who worked on the study. If two rats
(22:03):
are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the
head of the other until it is destroyed. Yeah, that's
a quotation from the author's description of their work of
this wasn't a pretty experiment because rats are highly intelligent animals, right,
(22:24):
and obviously smart enough to know that something is not
normal if they are stitched up to another individual, especially
if they are not acclimated to that individual. If you
woke up and you were sown to a stranger, you
would have some questions, some concerns. You probably would not
(22:46):
be chill about it. So they also found that there
was a troubling phenomenon they couldn't explain at the time.
Back in the fifties. Of the sixty nine rodents that
they paired together, eleven pairs died from mysterious condition they
called parabiotic disease that occurred. This occurred about one to
(23:08):
two weeks after the partners were joined, and it was
probably a form of tissue rejection. Just yeah, your one
body going, what the heck is this? Yeah? Absolutely well,
because in this 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.
(23:29):
Here as we're moving on, you're getting everything. Excellent point.
This is not a transfusion. This is the This is
compiling or mix taping two separate circulatory systems. So in
in McKay's first parabiotic aging experiment, after the older young
rex were joined for from anywhere from nine months to
(23:51):
eighteen months, they found in you know, the the one
positive thing that seemed to come out of this um,
the older animals bones became similar weight and density to
the bones of the younger counterparts that they were attached to.
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
(24:13):
the older rats, not necessarily for the younger rats. There's
not really much of a benefit at all. 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
(24:35):
they enter into a type of symbiosis called commence all
is um. There are three types of symbiosis. Symbiosis just
means a close relationship between two and more species, right.
The three types are mutual is um, where both both
(24:55):
parties benefit or all parties benefit, parasitism where one benefits
at the spence of the other and commence ali is um,
where one species benefits somehow and the other species is
neither harmed nor helped. Arguably, this is on the line
between commence ali is um and parasitism, because while the
(25:18):
younger animal is not necessarily being directly harmed, it's life
is going to be hindered because it's you know, attached
to this forty seven year old mouse. It's like six
year old. I was like, your music is just really
I don't understand it. I don't know why we're watching
this on TV. Let's watch oldies. So let's fast forward.
(25:41):
Let's get through the seventies, where again this research mysteriously
fell out of favor. A few years back, a team
of researchers Amy Wagers, Irena and Michael Conboy and Thomas
Rando partnered up. They've vultron up to take their separate
areas research in this field and combine them to investigate
(26:03):
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 body wide effect. Right now, your
(26:25):
your body tends to break down sort of. At the
same time, there are environmental things that can that can
affect you. For instance, Um, you will take more damage
depending on how you treat yourself if you do. If
you are an athlete and you have a lot of
repetitive exercises, right then you may have concussions or you
(26:49):
may have joint problems that might not have appeared in
the same way. Yeah, even if you're just walking around
all the time, your joints and your knees aren't going
to be the same as perhaps the joints in your
shoulder if you aren't very active with your shoulders. Yeah, yeah,
good point. And the problem is that they wanted to
(27:11):
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 handbasket
at once? Why does this affect multiple parts of the
body simultaneously. So they tried these experiments again, and they
(27:32):
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. 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,
(27:55):
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 work was
left out of their two thousand five paper that described
the results. All in all, the results suggested that blood
(28:17):
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 well traveled substance
in the human body. In two thousand eight, the convoys
uh Arena and Michael linked muscle rejuvenation to the activation
(28:40):
of something called notch signaling, which promotes cell division, or,
to be more technically accurate, it's the muscile rejuvenation is
dependent upon the d activation of the transforming growth factor pathway.
That's what blocks cell division into a thousand and fourteen,
(29:01):
the group identified one of the age defying factors circulating
the blood. 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 our um how your brain
betrays you when you're in love. Yeah, exactly. I did
not mean to sound that bit. Yes, um, and already
(29:23):
a drug approved by the FDA, the Food and Drug
Administration here in the United States. Uh, it's it's it's
approved for inducing labor and pregnant women. Um you wow,
I forget what it's called. Uh potosan potosin I think
is what it's called. Uh. Yes, my my wife didn't
have to use it. Huh. That's fascinating. That's a good thing, right,
(29:43):
you want the minimum amount of yeah, and chemicals going
in during pregnancy. But it's used a lot of times
to induce Um. I don't 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 pear. It so that a new nurse or a
new set of people coming in don't have to just
(30:04):
pick up where the other whole crew left off, okay,
because they might not have the background knowledge of the
previous Yeah. I'm not saying that 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 helpful and oxytocin. It turns out the levels of
this substance decline with age and both men and women.
And when oxytocin is injected into older mice over a
(30:26):
systematic regiment or schedule, the hormone quickly within a couple
of weeks, regenerates muscles by activating muscle stem cells. 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 organs systems
to help her evaluate the specific impact of young blood
(30:50):
on the respective tissues of these organs. We've got a
couple of examples of her findings here. Yeah. Then she
worked with Robin Franklin, who was a neuroscientist at the
University of Cambridge in the UK. UH they kind of
discovered that young blood promotes the repairing of damage spinal
(31:10):
cords in older mice. So if you've got I mean,
that's that's huge. There are a lot of things that
you could hopefully apply that to in humans. If you
can work that out in mice. The implications of that
are pretty astounding. It's the implication, it's the implication. There
was another neuroscientist, Lee Ruben, with whom Wagers found that
(31:33):
young blood sparks the formation of new neurons in the
brain and old factory system against associated with spell. 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,
(31:55):
you've got spinal cord. Huge improvements to the lives of
older people, older mice in this case, right, possibly people
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
(32:19):
the immediate question, which is the following. If this works
in mice, If these techniques work in mice, could we
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
(32:41):
word from our sponsor, 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
(33:04):
been doing since humans could talk and move a scalpel
around and or whatever other implement has been used in
the past. We've been pushing these boundaries, and it seems
like we're doing it again. One of the most immediate
aspects to consider here is the power and influence of
privately funded research or the very financially or socially powerful
(33:31):
individuals who are aging and ailing and interested and interested.
Because one thing most people seem to have in common,
fanatologists find people who study death find is that no
one wants to die. No, it's you know, people do
at times, unfortunately and tragically take their own lives, but
(33:55):
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 Hong Kong
learned of this research, they moved immediately to get in
(34:15):
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 Krimazen wants who wants
(34:36):
to bring this idea, this this young blood to the
old transfusion treatment to the public with the creation of
a company called Ambrusia. Ambrusia purports to rejuvenate the aging
and well to do with injections of younger plasma. Plasma
is the essentially the liquid component of blood and that
(34:58):
looks kind of yellow, right, it does. And the plasma
is what's stored at blood banks. 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, all
the all the all the important stuff. Plasma in this
(35:19):
case is going to come from people aged sixteen to currently.
Ambrosia has two locations, both of which I'm reading tea
leaves about. But I I'm making so many assumptions about this.
So one location is in San Francisco and ones in Tampa, Tampa.
(35:41):
So here's what I'm wondering and and Matt, I bet
you're wondering the same thing. And we we want to
know your opinion. Folks. San Francisco kind of makes sense
to me, home of like water bars and oxygen. There
we go. Yeah, so maybe there's a maybe there's a
(36:01):
tech guru aspect to this, right, you gotta get that edge. However,
and then in Tampa there's a what's the most polite
way to say this, there's a ton of old people. Yeah,
right on exactly a significant percentage of the population is retired.
That's all right. I think you I think you said
(36:23):
it in a in a bit more evocative and dare
I say accurate way than I did? It was concise,
It was concise. It's important to note here in the
case of Ambrosia that younger does not mean infants. We
said their sixteen. Don't worry. No one is tossing toddlers
into a juicer as far as we know. Bad image,
(36:45):
but necessary, You're necessary for us to say that. Nor
is this company at this point sewing people together or
you know, practicing parabiosis on humans. Instead, they're offering, as
Matt said, straight up transfusions. Yea. And if you want
to get this done. You can um, potentially, I can't.
(37:08):
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 um And
the pricing plans will enroll almost anybody over thirty five
years of age. The fees, though, are totaling up to
eight thousand dollars per person per I don't know what
you'd call it pop yeah, per transfusion right uh. And
(37:33):
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
too young two receive the treatment quote unquote treatment, you're
(37:56):
too old to donate. Just gotta make it through that
decade long wilderness. 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. And ambrosia
currently has it's had a lot of press, and it
obviously has a lot of people who believe in it
(38:17):
enough to at least give it a try. But as
quite a few critics. Critics are arguing that the parabiosis
experiments conducted on mice don't offer very much insight into
how a one time transfusion could affect a human. So
Wagers from earlier said that in our studies, circulation between
(38:42):
a young mouse and old mouse was maintained through this
parabiosis for nearly four weeks, almost a month. And you're
doing this for an hour or so, a couple of
hours maybe, right, I don't know, eight Granda pop. Additionally,
ethicists are concerned that ambrosia is that because ambrosia is
(39:02):
being financed by the participants, by the people who will
receive these transfusions. I keep I wanted to do like
an arch sinister voice every time I say young blood.
It's just such a sinister Gary oldman is Dracula phrase.
You know, you just have to do like a licking
(39:23):
of your lips sound after you say it. That's all children. Yeah,
But there 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 dilatory effects of aging, then they're going to
(39:45):
have a very difficult time being objective about the results,
especially when we factor in the idea that the placebo
effect does have measurable and significant physiological impacts upon a
human body. Right man, Well, so let's let's see where
(40:07):
we are. At least as of uh December, according to Ambrosia,
they've infused twenty five people with young blood so up
until December. It is now uh into so who knows,
maybe that number has doubled. We don't have notes from Ambrosia,
but I'm sure we will get them soon. Um. So
(40:28):
uh Karmazine claims that his participants are seeing miraculous results. Um,
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 you know,
these kind of antidotes will help, you know, market the
study at least and get more people involved so we
(40:50):
get more data that 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 to believe these at all, at least go into
it thinking maybe this will work right. Yeah. One of
the reasons that drug approval moves so slowly is that
(41:12):
the well, aside from the endemic corruption in the pharmaceutical
industry and the medical troup medtech industry um 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,
so there are a lot of hoops to jump through,
(41:33):
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 f D A. Yes, And speaking
(41:53):
of a recent study concluded in November, uh it was
done at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There was
a clinical trial looking at the safety, tolerability, and feasibility
of administering infusions just what we've been talking about with
ambrosia of blood plasma from young donors to participants with
(42:14):
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. UM. This trial in particular
(42:35):
was created to test a hypothesis put forth by this person,
Tony Weiss Corey. 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 UM,
he did research with mice as well, and again found
(42:55):
that factors in the blood of young mice can rejuvenate
the brain tissue and improve cognitive performance an 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. It's called Alcahest and it quote holds
(43:19):
intellectual property associated with the treatment regimen for this particular trial.
And uh this uh, the Tony Weiss Karay 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, private interest to carry out these
(43:44):
kinds of trials to see if there's anything to this
young blood transfusion stuff, right, And we're also seeing that
a lot of these studies or trials conducted have relatively
small sample sizes. Yeah, and in this one there were
only eighteen human beings that were transfused. And this this
(44:05):
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 uh, you know, bureaucratic concerns. As we said,
a transfusion is not parabiosis. So at this point there's
(44:26):
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 grizzly experiments
(44:50):
that you can hear about in a 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
(45:10):
concerned about the 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
(45:32):
experimenting with human 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. If it
(45:54):
was done legally, though, they would have to be over
eighteen unless they had, I guess permission from their parents.
I don't know if parents could sign up for that,
but yeah, legally, they would all have to be over
eighteen for for some kind of consent to for informed
consent to occur within the US at least yeah, legally legally, again,
(46:20):
legally for that to happen. If someone is experimenting with
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,
(46:46):
if our species experimenting with human parabiosis currently, then there's
that risk. Was eleven of the sixty nine rat pairs
right experienced parabiosis disease died after a littlehile fatal rejection.
The chances of this disease occurring are greatly reduced when
the participants are increasingly similar. For our purposes, when the
(47:11):
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 a experiment with parabiosis? Well,
one question, One might say a child, taking your own child.
(47:35):
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
a child, even closer than a fraternal twin? A clone?
(47:57):
Spot on Matt, a clone? What so imagine we've talked
about this before with the possibility of growing organs, right,
or growing growing clones four spare organs, would it be?
Is there a possible future where there would be a
clone grown to act as a filter for your blood
(48:22):
that's younger than you, that is just kept somewhere and
you just plug up to it. 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
(48:42):
eighteen or so, then you just continuously throughout the rest
of your life, once you hit thirty five, use these
clones to be attached to you for a little while.
And there's so little published science on this. There're absolutely
no long terms buddies, no longitudinal studies of the nature
(49:05):
of this effect. Like what if what if someone begins
engaging in some sort of thing like this, let's say,
for the sake of argument, actual parabiosis, right, and let's
say for a month every year or every yeah, for
month every year something, they're they're stitched next to some
(49:27):
source of young blood, and what happens to that. What
is what does their body look like physiologically when they
are sixty five, when they're 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
(49:53):
is not as scary, but it is weird. Evidence indicates
that injecting human blood plasma into the bodies of elderly
mice might have beneficial effects on the mice. Hold on,
putting human plasma into a mouse helps the mouse, That's
what it seems to say. There's a there's an article
about this in Nature magazine when we have a quote here,
(50:17):
Oh yes, they 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,
(50:38):
expressed genes that caused 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. Right,
So plasma from older humans did not have much of
an effect. Plasma from younger sources uh umbilical cords specifically,
by the way, turns out to be hop notch. What
(51:01):
could go wrong? What could go wrong with this knowledge? Right? Oh? Gosh? Well,
for now, it appears that any claims that young blood
or plasma will extend human lifespan are false, or at
least we just don't have the data, right, We don't know.
(51:21):
The data is just not there. Yeah, and experiment to
test such claims would take upwards of six years, first
waiting for the mice to age them for them to
die naturally, than analyzing the data. If we have funding
to do this, says Michael conboy, I do it, but
we don't. Still, he adds, after a moment of hesitation,
(51:43):
I hope that someone somewhere is keep in mind he's
just talking about mice. Yeah, just mice, just mice, and
just in the nicest of way. Michael conboy. Um. Yeah. So,
so currently it appears the best possible case we can
hope for is the isolation of some civic proteins or
other elements that are found in young blood. These special
(52:04):
reasons that rejuvenation occurs, because this could lead to amazingly
effective treatments for age related ailments. 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. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The hope would be that
our species could isolate, let's say, a specific protein, and
(52:28):
that specific protein could be marketed, right, created in some
different one. And of course this research is very expensive,
it's very complicated. Uh. You will hear a lot of
people say that as the world or the owners of
(52:48):
the world now seek to move away from an ownership
economy to a service economy, you'll hear people alleged that
quote unquote big Pharma is not in the business of
selling cure. There in the business of selling scheduled treatments.
So then the concern would be, you know, is it
it's not a cure all that will help somebody's Alzheimer's,
(53:10):
It's a pill that they have to pay for that
they have to take once a day. Well, 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 want to put yourself
out of business. But then there are people on the
(53:30):
other side who will say that private industry is the
is a necessary factor for this kind of research. But
but still, but still, uh. 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. Imagine a planet's worth
(53:57):
of real life Elizabeth Bathy's practice seeing 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 research given that it
can mitigate the effects of aging, but we should say
(54:18):
not give people immortality so far as we know, is
it worth pursuing and where do you see it headed?
So in my opinion, I think you're going to see
more of what the the character that's kind of modeled
after Peter Teal on what is that what show an
HBO show, Silicon Valley, that that character that he's just
(54:39):
got a young guy that comes around his house a
couple of times a week and they just do a
blood transfusion. I think that's just gonna be a thing.
That's like how the way uber drivers have. There are
so many uber drivers in the world, it's just proliferated.
I think there will just be that the transfusion person
(55:00):
new aspect of the gig economy. I really think so.
And it's just something you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays
over at uh you know, Bill's house or whatever that
guy is that lives in the mansion on the hill.
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 two just participate in
(55:24):
this kind of experimentation. But uh well, and the doctor
could be ethical. It depends really and how much they
want to pay the group, how much work they want
to put into it. But I'm I think it really
depends on what data bears out here. If if there is,
(55:45):
it turns out real tangible results and evidence, then it's
Katie Barr the door you know, we don't know where
it stops. But if it is a way to build
the frightened and the aging out of money in an
attempt to I guess, pay the ferryman a couple of
(56:08):
extra coins to stay on his side of the river
sticks for a while, and people will throw money at it,
of course. But here's the question that bugs me the most, Matt.
How much are the donors of Ambrosia getting paid? Oh gosh, yeah,
that's a good question, because you're in sorry man um.
(56:34):
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? We'd love
to hear your opinion. That concludes our episode for today,
(56:56):
but never fear, Matt, Noel, Paul and I will be
back there very soon. In the meantime. You can find
us on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook. You
can find us on Twitter, where we're conspiracy stuff most
of the time. Sometimes conspiracy stuff show actually just once
on Instagram. Also, if you don't want to do any
of that stuff, if you don't want to go to
our website Stuff they don't want you to know dot com.
(57:16):
You can just send us an email. It's the best way.
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com.
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.