October 27, 2015 • 52 mins
Global myth cycles are rife with blood-drinkers and blood bathers. Often, the tale centers around the notion of young blood as a fountain of youth. The aging countess or decrepit monster needs only to drink from young veins in order to restore a failing body. Yet science has a way of catching up with myth, and in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the history of medicinal blood drinking and the startling scientific reality of rejuvenation through transfusions of young blood.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the Stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and dot Joe McCormick, and hey,
it's Halloween season. Today's episode is kind of HALLOWEENI we
also want to remind you to feature to check out
(00:23):
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is, uh,
the main site. That's where you find all of the podcast,
all the videos of various blog posts. And we have
a two interesting things going on this month. Monster Science,
the video series that I've been doing in the past
here is coming back these last two weeks of October
four new episodes with the sort of vhs leyden Um
(00:45):
horror cinema themed explorations of science. All right, so let's
get rolling with this. I want to kick off by
just asking you. It's just a very basic question here, Joe.
Do you see yourself as you eventually enter old age?
Do you see yourself drinking the blood of the young
in order to sustaining your unnatural life? M Now, are
(01:06):
we're talking about the blood of the young human or
the blood of any young animal? I mean, I assume
the young deman. I mean that's where the vitality is.
That's what human life force is. If I'm going to
keep my own human life force going, that's a good
place to go, right it could be. But then again,
if we follow our our magical intuitions and the history
of our practices, I think animal blood rituals have been
(01:26):
fairly common in human history, right, yeah, and certainly not
only animal blood rights, but even into early pseudo scientific
ideas of of taking elements from particularly virile seeming specimens
and and using those tissues in our own body. You know,
I think I would feel rude drinking the blood of
young humans. But what I might do is a kind
(01:48):
of mithraic ritual where I would get into some contraption
and have a bull on a grate above me and
then just bathe in its showering blood as it is butchered. Okay, well, yeah,
that that was that way. It's not like the direct
bathing or the direct consumption of the blood. There's a
there's a buffer, a mythic buffer zone there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
And then of course you get all of the all
(02:09):
of the wonderful attributes to the bull, right, the strength,
the power, the virility, it's good stuff. Yeah, Or potentially
just like a bull Testies young person blood smoothie, that
that might end up being my like vampiric morning ritual
when I'm an old person. Now, Robert, obviously you brought
this up for a reason. Are are you thinking about
(02:31):
drinking blood anytime soon? Well? I can't help but think
about it a little bit, just based on some of
our the research we've been doing here, uh, some some
mythic research and historical research, and most importantly some modern
scientific research into the advantages of taking another individual's blood
into your own body. That that sounds like you're hedging there,
(02:53):
you know, so, so not necessarily always just drinking blood,
but but at least some way taking blood, taking someone's blood, Yeah,
I mean, because certainly there are various ways of of
of taking another individual's blood and gaining some sort of
life essence from it. Right, Probably the most notable mythological,
(03:13):
folkloric example of this, if not actual historical fact, is
that of Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathing Right, the blood Countess. Right,
So she was one according to the historical record, I mean,
we can never really know. She was apparently one of
the most prolific serial killers in human history. Yes, I mean,
(03:34):
we're talking to like six fifty victims during her reign,
and the charges level against we're pretty out there, right,
I mean, and that's one of the problems looking back
at it. To what extent are these uh, these charges
in Bellish, To what extent are they outright slander? Right? Right?
But at least what she was charged with was the
murder of hundreds of I think it was mostly young girls. Yes, Yeah,
(03:55):
there were charges that that young virsion girls were favorite victim. Yeah.
And the story goes that Countess Bathie feared aging, that
she didn't want to become old and shriveled and and
see her youth to evaporate before her eyes, and she
got a pretty interesting idea in her head what if
(04:16):
she could maintain her youth with the blood of the young. Again,
we we don't know to what extending Any of this
is history. A lot of it's probably just made up
legend about her. It is pretty certain, I think, I
think most historians think that she did really or was
involved in the killing of lots of young girls. But
(04:36):
you know, her motivations for it, and whether she actually
bathed in their blood or consume their blood or anything
like that that. I think that's a lot shakier. Yeah,
you don't really see many of any historians say yeah,
I think she actually bathed in the blood of virgins.
More likely they tend to run the gannet between she
was just a victim of conspiracy, uh, but was also
(04:57):
a part of a bread and murderous, an awful family
who Yeah, she was a really awful ruler who probably
got what was coming to her. So you can sort
of pick and choose and decide where you're gonna fall
in there. But the the idea, the myth of the
thing that the folkloric idea of this evil, rich ruler
(05:17):
uh bathing in a young person's blood in order to
stay young, that continues to resonate, and and of course
it also has various um racist and sexist qualities to
it as well. And besides from this, you know sort
of out the outskirts of Europe, Yeah, Eastern European. She's exotic,
she's dangerous, uh, And of course all she wants to
(05:41):
do is is a peer young. She's so vain and
so hateful towards those who actually have beauty and youth
that she would murder them and bathe in their blood.
Now there's a tangent about Elizabeth Bathory that I cannot resist.
It's not really related, but I remember back when I
was in high school, coming across it was either a
seat or a tape of a metal band called Bathory
(06:03):
that I thought was the funniest CD cover I've ever
seen because the bad calligraphy on the name Bathory made
it look like it said bat Lord. Wouldn't that be
a great metal band? That Lord sounds good too? And
also you know, vampirick and also so I like it. Uh. Now,
when we get into mythology and folklore, of course, there
(06:24):
are way too many examples of blood drinkers and vampireic creatures.
They're far too many examples of blood rituals to even
go into right there. Just it's a common trope throughout
human history. Um, we even had and we have so
many examples even of our own culture. One that came
to mind when we were talking the other day was
(06:44):
the nineteen seventies TV show called The Immortal. I've never
seen this. I only saw it because there was a
brief time in the late nineties, I think maybe the
early two thousands where they were showing reruns on the
Sci Fi Channel, and it was one of these shows
where it was like it was an ABC it was
an ABC Movie of the Week and then a very
brief television show that didn't take off, And it was
(07:06):
kind of from The Incredible Hulk mold. So you have
this going from town to town. Yeah, somebody's chasing him.
There's something this overarching plot of these people who are
after him. But then from in each town that he
goes to, he has this ability to help people or
their new sub villains to deal with. Also, like The
Incredible Hulk, he's got a power that's both a blessing
and a curse. Yes, So his his whole deal in
(07:27):
this show is that his blood uh is essentially kind
of magic, right, It's this wonderful, wonderful blood. In a
transfusion of this blood will basically wipe out any of
your illnesses and it can allow you to live longer.
So it's a it's it's it's a longevity uh drug
in this man's veins. It's like a biological anti virus program. Yeah.
(07:49):
And so of course there's a particular rich old dude
who wants nothing more than to just keep him closed
up in his mansion to himself, so he can just
have as much of his blood as he needs to
keep going and make him the mad Max blood bag
on the front of his car. Yeah yeah, right there
in the front of his limo. Uh so, but of
course the hero doesn't doesn't dig that, so he escapes,
(08:10):
he's on the run, and uh you know, it's a
it's a very nineteen seventies kind of an incredible Hulk delivery,
but it's kind of a cool idea and it definitely
ties in with a lot of the actual science we're
going to discuss later in the episode. Well, there there
are multiple ways that I think people would imagine blood
could have a power to rejuvenate, to invigorate, to give
(08:32):
you the strength of the young, and I think they
sort of occur along a scale of magical thinking. Like
on one hand, there's a much more straightforward, I think
material kind of approach to it, where you'd think, well,
there's something about young people's blood that gives them their
body strength, and so it must be nutritious in a way.
You know, you can imagine people wanting to consume it
(08:54):
with a with a fairly secular mindset, as long as
they don't know much about modern medicine. Um. But then
there's also the magical end where you start getting into
magical associative thinking, where where properties of a thing can
be absorbed by coming into contact with its essence. And
then you get into some of these funeral cannibal rights
(09:18):
where an individual will partake of the flesh of a
loved one after they have died in order to absorb
part of them. And then there's the whole realm of
what James Frasier called homeopathic magic, where light cures likes
and the thinking here would go that the blood of
the young must cure the old and turned back the clock,
because that's just that's what it is. That's the the
(09:40):
inherent nature of how how different properties interact with each other. Yeah,
So throughout the history of using homeopathic magical medicine, the
idea might be that you take a thing associated with
another thing to cure that second thing. So, you know,
if you had problems with your hand, you might consume
(10:00):
the paw of an animal or the hand of a
person or something like that, you know, or a problem
if you had headaches, you might consume ground up skull
or something like that. So yeah, if your if your
problem is aging, you can consume youth. And what is
the essence of youth more than the juice of young people?
Young people's blood. And another influence I can also think
(10:23):
of that might have made people over the centuries want
to imbibe the blood of the young in order to
avoid aging or to restore vigor and vitality, is the
sort of bodily humor thinking. You know that you had
the four temperaments that went along with the bodily humors theory,
and in that traditional order of temperaments, the sanguine temperament,
(10:47):
the one that's associated with blood is the one that's
like positive and excitable and high energy and playful. It's
still there in our language, like to be sanguine about
something is to be optimistic or positive about it. So
I don't know if that association within the body Humor's
theory is a symptom of this underlying association we have
(11:08):
between blood and then youth and vigor and vitality, or
if the association between blood and youth and vigor comes
from the bodily humor's theory. Yeah, that's that's an interesting take.
I hadn't thought about that. You know, another thing that
comes to mind, at least for the modern era, is
that since we we talked before about how we can't
help but think of ourselves and think of reality in
(11:29):
terms of whatever our technology is. So uh, you know,
for a while, certainly in the industrial age, we've we've
looked at the body as biomechanical, and here we're having
to deal with all our automobiles, and what do you
have to do with your automobile? You have to take
out the old oil, right and get some new oil
in there. So maybe on a subliminal level, even a
subconscious level, rather we end up thinking of of ourselves
(11:54):
as an automobile and like, well, maybe I'm just filled
with all this old oil, and what if I could
get that old oil out and get a you know,
a a transfusion of new oil. Yeah, So I could
see where we might buy into the concept, um, Yeah,
at a subconscious level, just based on our technology. And
it's also of course easy to to think of it
just as pure metaphor, right, because we're we're surrounded by
(12:19):
you know, largely youth obsessed culture. You see plenty of
examples of of middle age and older individuals who is
grasping after that youth right made sometimes quite literally in
the form of rich old men with very young romantic partners. Now,
I can't remember where I read this. I think it
was in one of our sources, maybe let me know,
But there was a suggestion that the idea of grasping
(12:43):
back after youth might also be a fairly recent thing
in the history of humanity, because it's only recently that
humans have begun to regularly live to old age. In
some parts of the world, I mean, more often there
was high infant mortality, more people side in middle age
or younger. Uh, And now it's pretty common that if
(13:04):
you have access to good, high quality medical care, you
can usually live to a decently long age. Well, that's
that's an interesting take on it there too. Yeah. Yeah,
so maybe that is kind of something we should have
looped in with the biomechanical body as a more modern
view on on vampiod diets. Now, before we really get
(13:24):
into the topic, though, we probably just have to talk
about the consumption of blood as a food, like what
does that mean? What does that entail? And it's a
it's pretty interesting, uh, to stop and study that, particularly
when you look at animals that are obligate. Sango VORs
that that feed exclusively on blood, like the vampire bat
say that category again obligates, So that's great blood only.
(13:49):
They go to the they go to the restaurant. They
need to see the blood only menu. They're not gonna
eat the salad. They're not gonna eat the steak. It's
just the blood. That's the corner that they've they've painted
themselves into evolutionarily, well, from a lay person's point of view,
it would seem like blood would be a perfectly nutritious thing.
I mean, the conventional wisdom is that the blood is
the life, right, Yeah, I mean it's the life, it's
(14:11):
the life blood. This is the stuff itself. This is
like the pure essence. This is like humanity straight. Yeah,
you think that's kind of ore the magical mythic realm
to it. But when you actually look at something like
a vampire bat um and you look at its consumption
of blood, I mean it's basically consuming protein and water.
(14:31):
There's there's no fat for the bat to store away,
So unlike their insect and fruit eating kin, they can't hibernate,
they can't migrate because they lack the fat stores. Instead,
they have to feed every night, lapping up to their
body weight in order to survive, and um, it sounds
like a very difficult limited diet. Yeah. Yeah, And and
(14:55):
there are a lot of fascinating theories about how it
occurred that they may have started out feeding on parasite
that contain the blood, and then eventually that they decided
weren't decided. Eventually they evolve more in the direction of
feeding exclusively and directly on the blood, as opposed to
the creatures that feed on blood. Oh, interesting, how an
intermediary could come in there? What was that story I
(15:15):
was reading about a while back about there's a particular
species of African jumping spider that likes human blood but
not drinking it directly from humans, right, praise on mosquitoes
that contain it. Yeah, so it's the same, the same
sort of situation where yeah, eventually you just give up
the middleman and just going straight for this might come
straight to us. Yeah, And so that's one of the
(15:36):
reasons that it's hard to imagine a human feeding exclusively
on blood to get into or even even a humanoid
certainly a larger creature, just because the energy levels required.
But we know fully well that humans do sometimes consume blood,
don't they. I mean, I I have seen a blood sausage,
but I don't think I've ever eaten one. I don't
(15:56):
know that I have either, unless, I mean, after I
would reading about it, I thought, well, maybe I've had
it on an airplane. It didn't realize it because I've
like I've flown some some some particularly some Asian airlines
before where there's like some sort of a sausage meat
that I couldn't identify looking at pictures. Maybe that was
blood sausage. I don't know, but you see some version
(16:17):
of blood sausage in a lot of different cultures, and uh,
including I was. I found this interesting. The red tofu
found in some parts of China, the blood tofu blood tofuu. Yeah,
it's made from like pigs blood or something. Yeah, so
it's not not really tofu. So any any vegetarians out
there see that on the menu, you might, and you know,
ask a few questions about it before you order it. Uh.
(16:39):
And then of course there are various blood festivals. There's
a Nepalese Yak blood festival in which they drink blood.
They are various traditions throughout the world. Where blood is
consumed directly as sort of a culinary ritual. And certainly
in the American tradition, what everyone the whole thing is
to have a big rare steak, right, And certainly that
is blood leaking out of that meat. You know, I've
(17:02):
heard that all my life, but I think I've actually
read recently that that is not true. That the that
a the like the meat you would buy package the
grocery store, is mostly drained of blood. There's really not
going to be much blood in it. Uh. And that
when you cut into a bloody steak, you know, like
a nice rare steak, and all that red liquid comes out,
that's mostly just a mixture of water and then some
(17:24):
other protein. I think it might have been myoglobin. Okay, well,
you know, maybe I'm thrown off here by vampire movies
in which like a newly turned vampire starts sucking steaks
to stay alive. I feel like that trope has shown up,
I think inhabit and perhaps in Chronos as well. I
can't remember Chronos. That's a great one. So yeah, maybe
(17:45):
maybe this is an example of my my knowledge is
that has based more fiction than reality. But but either way,
humans have not been averse to consuming blood throughout history
as part of their diet, but not exclusively. Well, now
that leads us to just again the idea of medicinal
consumption of blood. Occasional consumption of blood is part of
(18:05):
some actual treatment of malady or illness, or just some
sort of a ritualistic practice, and there are a number
of cool examples of this. Drawing up most of these
examples from two different sources here, there's an excellent article
by Maria Dolan from Smithsonian Magazine titled The Gruesome History
of Eating corpses as Medicine, and of course that goes
(18:27):
into a lot more than just blood consumption, but also
flesh consumption. Is great article. I'll include a link to
it on the landing page for this episode. And there's
also another great article, Young Blood, by Jess Zimmerman writing
for Ian Magazine. I really liked both of these articles too,
that were great reads. But yeah, so some of the facts.
According to a description by Plenty the Elder, who is
(18:48):
a Roman historian, apparently Romans loved to drink the blood
of gladiators who were killed in the arena in ancient Rome,
so you'd have people down there. It out. I guess
one of them gets skewered with one of those little
pokey pokey Roman swords, the blood starts to come out,
and people just be like, give me some don't count
(19:09):
out the trident, dude. I always like to try it
ent and that guy, to whatever extent, that was actually
a thing and not just an artistic motif. But I
always I was always rooting for him because he had
more of the uphill battle. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah,
I would drink his blood because clearly he's he's he's smart, powerful,
but smart. Yeah, so that's what I want before I
go into podcasts. Again, I'm not sure exactly where this
(19:32):
falls on that scale I talked about earlier, like the
the sort of secular this is some kind of material
nutrition thinking to the magical I'm gaining the power and
essence of the gladiator thinking, I'd imagine this falls more
to the magical side, right, Yeah, I would think so. Um,
And it seems like it based on what I was reading.
(19:53):
It may have its roots in Truscan funeral rights, so
it may go beyond just you know, the near near
bloodthirsty aspect of the culture at the time. And I've
also read there's a two thousand three paper title between
Horror and Hope Gladiator's blood as a cure for UH
epileptics in Ancient Medicine, And this is published in the
(20:13):
Journal of Historical Neuroscience. And this article posited that spontaneous
recovery from some forms of epilepsy may be responsible for
the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness UH from drinking the blood
of a gladiator. So it's one of those things where
it seemed to work enough of the time, so why
(20:33):
not because it's also it's just it's just good fun.
It's just part of the part of going out on
the town and enjoying a gladiatorial contest. Well, yeah, the
false cure working by this method, I think was a
common feature of ancient medicine. You always read about these
types of medicines that that ancient people's thought would be
effective at curing X, Y or Z, when we now know,
(20:54):
you know, this has no effect at all. Why do
people think this? What might have happened really often is
that somebody took some of this in an unrelated way.
They just got better and it's like, look, it worked,
or they might have received a placebo effect boost from
from obtaining it. And then likewise, since uh, either they
(21:15):
had to pay a certain amount to obtain this gladiator
blood or it was such a big deal to get
it that you end up tweaking your memories enough to where,
of course it was a gladiator blood. I didn't drink
the blood of a dead slave and not benefit from
it and a monster, do you think, I am? No, no, no,
that that makes sense too, because we you know, we
(21:36):
go through all kinds of mental justification to justify things
that were difficult to get. So if you spend a
lot of money on appliance or a piece of furniture,
you end up coming up with ways of thinking this
was a good investment. The same could be true some
gladiator blood. I'm quite sure. So we we see this
trend throughout history, and we're gonna roll through some of
(21:56):
the examples, and some of these you're gonna get into
a very alleged territory because it's a popular motif as well,
to slander your enemy by saying they drink your people ahead. Yeah,
quite common in fact. Like so, one example would be
Pope Innocent the Eighth who died in fourtwo, and the
(22:17):
story is that he was one of the first people
to receive an attempted blood transfusion. But I think the
stories seemed to be all over the place. It's like
some say that he got blood from willing donors, or
that he drank the blood of Jewish children, or yeah, yeah,
sort of a reverse of the blood libel often leveled
(22:38):
against Jews in medieval times, saying that they're they're they're
drinking the blood of of of gentile children or processing
it into some sort of abait good. Yeah. So so
obviously that was not true with Pope Innocent the Eighth.
I'd say grain AsSalt there, yeah, yeah, and not just
as a flavor, the blood of the young boy. No, no,
(23:00):
no drinking. But but obviously the idea there was that
while you had an ailing, dying pope, maybe giving them
the blood of someone younger could help stave off death, right, yeah,
And of course you have various um minds that are
that are chiming in on this. Fifteenth century philosopher Marsilio
Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person,
(23:23):
might I give you a health boost? So so you
have that to to boost you or to encourage you
to try it. So I assume I still living young person. Um, well,
you know they're young people. So unless you're just you're
lucky and they're not, you're probably gaining it from a
young person. Also, you know they're young people. They don't
have a lot of money. Maybe they want to make
(23:45):
a few bucks on the side by draining a little
blood off into a into a little uh little glass
for a little goblet for elderly members of the society.
I find the arm specification here kind of funny, like
is that just an accident? End have said, well, the
easiest place to get it is from the arm or
did the arm matter? To him? Was like, now if
(24:05):
you drink it from there, from their butt cheek, you're
not going to get the same restorative power. Well, he
must be referring to to obtaining it from a young,
probably willing person here, and then they're not draining them
whole because yeah, the arm is far enough away from
your center of being. It's it's it's not close to anything.
Uh that's too important, so yeah. Yeah. And then of course,
(24:29):
up through the Renaissance, you you still had all these
beliefs that consuming the flesh or the blood of humans
in various ways could cure all kinds of diseases, right,
Oh yeah, yeah, sixteen and seventeenth century, you had many Europeans,
including royalty priests, even scientists of the day that are
that are trying remedies that are made from human bone,
(24:50):
from fat, or from blood. Uh, in order to treat
everything from headache to epilepsy. And despite some of the
science we're gonna get into later in this episode, I
think we can assume probably none of that actually worked. Um,
let's see some other points here. At sixteenth century Italian
alchemist recommended taking children under the age of thirteen, shutting
(25:11):
them in a well enclosed room, sizening out the air
which would be quote filled with the breath and expired
substance of these five young virgins there for curative powers.
But again this is an alchemist, so yeah again grain
of salt. And of course through all these different rituals
that come up, the blood needs to be fresh, you needs.
(25:31):
It's not just a matter of finding a dead body
and draining it like the body needs either needs to
be still alive or very very very quickly exterminated. So
there you can think of the gladiatorial arena. Of course,
you've got somebody killed right there in front of you,
so you know it's fresh. Or you could go to
the other route, of the less valorous route, and stand
(25:53):
around waiting for a prisoner to be executed. Ah. Yes,
and here we see this, this tradition of the of
the gladiators blood being carried on really into two fairly
recent times. UM. I was reading one of the sources
here of that article by Maria Dolan Smithsonian said that
in nineteen o eight we saw the last known attempt
(26:15):
made in Germany to swallow blood from a an executed
criminal at the scaffold. Because for for a long time,
apparently this was the thing. You would go to an
execution and you drop a few coins for a cup
of still warm blood from the executed Because the executioner
he's kind of a magical boundary walker right between life
(26:36):
and death, between accepted society and the outside. Often he's
wearing a hood, right, and so this is where where
you can go to him. He's a master of life
and death, so he can give you some of the
juice of life and death. Um. And again they're no
more gladiatorial contest. This is your best bet at getting
a young person's blood, because because that's the best kind.
(26:58):
You gotta get the young virgin nor the young man's
so the virile young blood, that's where the magic is. Yeah,
and along those lines, I think sometimes people recommended trying
to get blood from people who were still alive. I
guess like we were talking about was probably meant by
the arm and the young person earlier. But people like
paracelsis where we're suggesting that you should should drink fresh blood. Right, Yeah,
(27:19):
sixteenth century Germans with physician general Renaissance man, you know,
just hit his hands and everything, great Renaissance weirdo. And
he believed yet the blood was probably good for drinking.
And it was one of his followers that took this
even further by suggesting that you take blood from a
living body. And again there there there's a tradition here
of of learned men at least contemplating the prospect. Leonardo
(27:44):
da Vinci said, we preserve our life with the death
of others in a dead thing in since a life remains,
which when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living,
regains sensitive and intellectual life. That's an interesting take on digestion. Yeah,
so I'm the sources are there. You have some you have,
you have learned men who are talking about the potential
(28:06):
benefits of drinking blood. You have rituals and rights throughout history,
so it continues to seem to make a certain amount
of sense. Of course, if freshness isn't quite so necessary
to you, you could probably just work it into some
various recipes, right, you can make a marmalade out of it. Yeah,
apparently there was a Franciscan apothecary recipe from sixteen seventy
(28:26):
nine for a human blood based marmalade um. And as
this as wen we end up eventually sort of transferring
out of this. As as as medical science advances, suddenly
the the idea becomes more about tissue. I mean, we're
keeping the basic idea of absorbing the essence of some
other more vital person's body intact, but we're just switching
(28:50):
from blood to well, maybe we need to implant some testicles. Yeah, yeah,
you see this. In the eighteen nineties and paris Um,
Charles Edward Brown Sequad was with a champion of testes
implantation um, Sergei Voronoff, would physically remove healthy testicles from
young animals and implant the glands into patients. So you know,
(29:16):
the thing is like that they're they're off base here,
but it's it's forecasting like real science to come and
real usable principles of of tissue and oregan transplants sometimes
between species. And of course blood transfusions are an essential
part of modern medical science. And it's not so much
that you absorb the blood of the young to gain
(29:37):
the power of the gladiator. But if you are ailing,
if if you have a blood deficiency you need blood
for some reason, of course you can get a blood
donation from someone. Yeah, I mean to fall back on
the biomechanical automobile example, it's like it's not so much
that you know, say what you will about old oil
and new oil. The machine needs oil to run, and
if the oil leaking out, you've got to add some more. Obviously,
(30:00):
it's the difference between you wouldn't try to steal the
oil from a sports car to gain the vitality of
the sports car. You just need oil from somewhere. It
can come from wherever, and so in this we end
up working back up to our modern age, to our
very modern age, as in studies that have come out
this year the last few years where we again see
(30:22):
this motif re emerge that you could take young blood,
specifically young blood into your older body and benefit from
it both physically and mentally. So we've talked about the mythology,
the magical thinking of absorbing the powerful essence of a strong, young, vigorous,
(30:44):
vital person by claiming their blood and making it your own.
But there is some actual science that runs bizarrely close
to this magical tradition. And this science has been in
development for a long time. I think it's it's been
sort of brewing for more than a century based on
some old techniques, but it's only in the past decade
(31:07):
or maybe a little more than the people have really
started to catch on to exactly how potent this type
of therapy could be. Yeah, really to the point now
where it's it's very promising. Yeah. Uh, And we don't
know yet what all of the implications are going to be.
But let's get into the details of why you would
take the blood of the young and give it to
(31:29):
the old in a medical context. Yeah. And one of
the a couple of big studies here that that that
we're drawing from. One of them was the two thousand,
fourteen Stanford University Medical Center study. UH. And and these
these efforts, of course involved prior studies and continuing studies.
This is very much a it's a network of findings. Yeah,
it's not just like a one off by any means. Yeah.
(31:51):
So it had already been before this one particular study,
had already been established that, uh, there was some indication
that some reins of the brains of old mice, when
given the blood of young mice, would produce more nerve cells.
And so obviously that's a good thing. But unfortunately the
reverse also held true. So when you gave young mice
(32:13):
exposure to the blood of old mice, they suffered for
it that they had decreased health outcomes, we might say. Right. So,
this time the researchers checked both for changes within nerve
circuits and individual nerve cells, uh, in order to to
demonstrate improvements in learning and memory. So first they examined
(32:33):
the pairs of mice whose circulatory systems had been surgically conjoined.
And this is the process we've been we've been doing
for a while, UM, a process known as parabiosis. Yeah.
We actually talked about this process on an episode of
Forward thinking that I recorded with my co hosts on
that show last year. But parabiosis is a very interesting, creepy,
(32:59):
weird procedure that that really gives a lot of people
the willies, but it has led to some very interesting
and promising medical outcomes, so I think it's really worth
talking about. So in this case, parabiosys, it comes from
the words meaning sort of beside life, so side to
side life essentially, and it refers to taking a patch
(33:21):
of skin off of two mice and then sowing the
mice together. Okay, so basically like hooking up the plumbing,
the circulatory plumbing. Yeah, so you're creating a common circulatory
system and causing the two mice to share a blood
stream and the blood becomes one common pool. They're parabiotic.
(33:42):
And the process collaboration, Yeah, exactly, they were working together,
they're they're getting closer. So this was a process that
was described by a French physiologist named Paul Barrett. It
spelled like bert I believe in French, that'd be Barrett.
I apologize if I'm wrong about that. In the sixties,
I think it, and then later in the nineteen thirties,
(34:03):
the process was improved upon by a pair of people
named Bunster and Meer. But essentially it entails taking two
mice side by side and attaching them at parallel elbows
and knees, and then sewing together an exposed patch of
skin along the sides, and of course then the natural
mammalian healing process kicks in the sides attached together, they
(34:28):
fuse the skin joins and the capillaries connect, and then
the mice can share this blood system and then apparently
after some length of time, the pair can be separated
again if necessary for the experiment. So that's the parabiasis.
But what is hetero chronic parabiasis, because that's what they
were really practicing here. Hetero chronic would mean mixed time right,
(34:50):
mixed time scales. So when you're creating parabiotic mice that
are hetero chronic, that means one old mouse and one
young mouse. And this is where the fund comes in,
because apparently when you join one old mouse and one
young mouse, you get startling results. In the nineteen fifties,
there was a guy at Cornell named Clive mackay, and
(35:13):
McKay performed experiments on parabiasis, essentially trying to learn what
he could about how to prolong lifespan. Can can you
take mammals and make them live longer by sharing blood
in this way? And what they found was that the
old mice who got paired up, who got sewn together
with a young mouse, showed rejuvenated cartilage, meaning that the
(35:37):
cartilage andist tissue in their body actually appeared younger. Uh.
And more recently, this line of research was picked up
on by a researcher named Thomas A. Rando who continue
continued this and published a study in Nature in two
thousand five. And this showed that if you took two
of these mice and you sewed them together, one old
mouse and one young mouse, and you left him that
(35:58):
way for five weeks, eventually the older mice showed improved
rates of muscle healing and liver cell regeneration. So that's
very interesting and promising. I read a Nature News piece
about this line of research that had a very funny
part where it said quote after the team published its results,
Rando's phone started ringing incessantly. Some of the calls were
(36:21):
from men's health magazines looking for ways to build muscle.
Others were from people fascinated by the idea of forestalling death.
They wanted to know whether young blood extended lifespan. So
already the vultures who don't want to die and don't
want to grow old are starting to pounce, said, I
find a young person without any limbs and just kind
(36:43):
of sew them out of my back like a living,
rejuvenating back back. You'd become master Blaster from from Thunderdome,
except it it would be you. I guess you'd be Blaster,
and then you'd have a master on your back who
is actually your blood slavey stitch on a millennial and
and hit the clubs right. But anyway, that's all of
(37:04):
the heterochronic parabiases, and that sort of brings us back
up into the research of the more recent years, including
this study. Yeah, and this study the hippocampus was really
craz key. You. Now, this is a part of the
brain brain that's critical for forming certain types of memories,
notably used in recollection and recognition of spatial patterns. Experience
(37:25):
physically alters it, and and various quote detrimental, anatomical and
functional changes occur there as an individual ages. So as
you get older, you're this part of your brain. I
think the brain in general, but especially this part of
your brain sees decline. Right. And it's also like one
of the examples is often thrown out, and I think
this has come up on the podcast before. You have
(37:45):
London cabbies who have who actually have have larger hippocampuses
due to the uh, you know, all the their knowledge,
their physical knowledge of the city. They not yeah, the knowledge. Um,
it's like or an order of warlocks, the kind of
warlocks of their own kind. Um. But in old mice
(38:07):
with new blood, they quote found consistent differences in a
number of biochemical, anatomical, and electrophysiological measures known to be
important to nerve cell circuits encoding of new experiences for
retention in the cerebral cortex. So essentially what's happening here
is the hippocamp i of older mice resemble that of
(38:28):
younger mice. They made greater amounts of various substances that
hippocampal cells are known to produce when learning is taking place,
So we see not only a tissue boost here, but
in actual mental boost like it's it's recharging the hippocampus,
recharging the mind of the young mouse. They also found
that hippocampal nerve cells from older members members of these uh,
(38:52):
these old young parabiotic pairs words, also showed an enhanced
ability to strengthen the connection between one nerve cell and another,
which again is essential to learning and forming new memories,
forging those internal pathways in the mind. And older mice
and fused with young blood also did better on food
hunting tests, such as one in particular where they would
(39:14):
have a food platform that's submerged in a water filled container. Okay,
so in this study they're not just looking at the
anatomical information. They're not just saying, hey, you know, what
is the number of cells we can find in this
part of the brain, but they're actually testing behavior how
it works in the field. Yea. Indeed, they also found
they performed better and freeze tests. Now, this is where
(39:37):
mice are trained to freeze and fear when plucked into
a particular environment. And while old mile mice usually perform
worse than the young, freezing for shorter periods of time,
betraying a lack of recognition. So, in other words, you've
been training to fear this environment, and if you the faster,
you recognize it and freeze and fear the longer you're frozen.
That shows that you're you're recalling it. But older mice
(40:00):
get desensitized to this. They don't recognize their conditions as
quickly correct. But when they have that that rejuvenating influx
of young blood, they perform better on the freeze test. Yeah,
but this kind of thing makes you wonder what is
it about the blood, because surely it's not it's not
(40:21):
a magical essence. It's not the gladiator strength being carried
through the magical properties of the blood. But it must
be some kind of material that's in the blood that's
doing this work of rejuvenation in the older mouse's brain.
So it would be interesting to see if we could
narrow down what it is in the blood that's causing
this change. And one of the interesting things that you
(40:44):
mentioned in a note about this is that apparently it
didn't work if you heat it up the blood plasma, right, Yeah,
So what apparently happens when you heat up the blood
is that it be natures or breaks apart key proteins.
And so there could be some blood borne protein means
that we've yet to identify and exploit that are are
central to this, uh, this this taking place. Yeah, and
(41:06):
then of course another study has I think identified what
they think are at least one of the key proteins.
That's right. A series of recent Harvard studies and these
are also using the stitch together old young mouse pairs
and uh. This research headed by stem cell researcher Amy Wagers,
(41:26):
isolated a specific protein from mouse blood growth differentiation factor
at eleven or g DF eleven, and this seems to
regulate stem cell activity and it's abundant in young mice,
but it's level drops at the animals a right, So
if you look at blood from a young mouse that's
got plenty of g DF eleven, you look at blood
from an old mouse, it has a lot less. So
(41:47):
this would seem to be something that you could be
re supplying to older mice by giving them the blood
plasma of younger mice. Yeah, And indeed they found that
injections of d d F eleven can reduce the thickening
of the heart to take with quickly comes with aging
in mice. They've also found that GDF eleven works nearly
as well as parabiosis in helping aging mouth mice recover
(42:08):
from muscle injuries, and it boost their performance on running
and grip strength tests. Grip strength huh yeah, grip strength
little mouse squeezies, I guess. Yeah, so you wouldn't just
be like a mentally rejuvenated mouse in a in a
weak decrepit body like it can actually give you some
some juice back to So along with the Easter Island
(42:30):
fungal agent reppams and also known as rapamune by fiser uh.
Along with that and caloric restriction. Uh, this is one
of only three intervention shown to reverse aging and multiple tissues.
So it's pretty pretty big. Yeah, but we do also
want to show caution here and say that it hasn't
(42:53):
yet been successfully demonstrated in humans, and that most of
the researchers who are trying to explain this to the public,
they always want to emphasize that this isn't necessarily like
a way to cheat death. It hasn't been shown to
prolonged life unnaturally. I mean it might if if the
(43:13):
data turns up, but it hasn't been shown to do
that yet. Instead, it's talking about showing renewed capacity in
certain tissues in older organisms. Yeah. So the more likely
use of this technology, this, uh, this procedure would be
for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the treatment of heart disease,
as opposed to some sort of futuristic slightly morbid longevity
(43:39):
treatment for the rich and privileged. Uh And and some
of the other caveats that are thrown out there is
the old mice that are used in many of these
experiments are essentially middle aged mice, and we're not sure
what the effects would be if they would be less
pronounced with truly old mice, or indeed with truly old humans.
But the cool thing is that since uh since blood
(44:02):
blood transfusions are routinely given to patients, trials like this
would not be would not have to have um authorization
from the US Food and Drug Administration. Uh So researchers
can test this out in humans, sooner read it than later. Now.
Of course, if they're testing this on humans, we're not
talking about parabiasis, not at all. They wouldn't be uh
(44:22):
so well, I mean, who knows. I really don't think
they would ever be thinking about sewing too humans together,
sewing you together with your grandpa to see if it
if it makes him healthier and you less healthy. And
another way that this would not be used is drinking blood,
because that's not what we're talking about. In fact, there
was a funny way I mentioned this in the Forward
(44:44):
Thinking podcast, but there was a New Scientist article interviewed
a guy named Tony whis Corey who was one of
the people working on this subject, and they got a
quote from him where he's like, certainly you can't drink
the blood, although obviously we haven't tried that experiment, so
I don't know if he was trying to say maybe
you could drink the blood that I don't think. So.
(45:05):
I don't think drinking the blood will do it. It
seems like it it's uh involving the direct transfusion of
the plasma, specially that g DF eleven, the growth growth
differentiation factor eleven, and then maybe some other elements in
the blood or the plasma. Yeah, I mean it has
to be circle tory to circulatory, not circular tory to
gastroid testinal. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's like cooking
(45:28):
your electricity up here to your planning system. But speaking
of Tony whist Corey, there is apparently under this particular
researcher and ongoing project that's studying the effect on human
Alzheimer's patients, and I think this is very interesting. The
last public update I found about this was a Nature
(45:49):
News article from January, so earlier this year, saying that
the experiment had started in September and it was a randomized,
cebo controlled, double blind trial, UH testing the safety and
efficacy of using young plasma to treat Alzheimer's disease. That
that was what they said, And then that they said
(46:10):
that six out of eighteen people who had originally been
planned for the experiment, who were all older than fifty,
had already started receiving the treatment, So they had already
been getting plasma that came from people who were below
the age of thirty. And so we haven't seen the
results of this yet, but I think it's going to
be really really interesting to see how this experiment turns out. Yeah,
(46:35):
I mean, when you sort of cut away all of
the mythic ghastliness that is built up with the idea
of reusing human blood or consuming it, or or the
old growing strong and the blood of the young, there's
a lot of there are a lot of wonderful possibilities
here for the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer's and heart disease. Yes, certainly.
(46:56):
Though then again, on the other side, there have been
other researchers who have been quick to warn that there
would be limits to even this type of procedure. Like
let's say that the results on the study come back
and they say, WHOA, Giving older people younger people's blood
has amazing effects even in humans, and it's been shown
(47:16):
in this double blind, placebo controlled trial. Uh, so we've
got a real, very important phenomenon on our hands. Even then,
you might want to show some caution because there was
a quote given to that Nature News piece I was
talking about from from that that same researcher that I
talked about earlier, Thomas A. Rando, and he said that
(47:37):
this could result in too much cell division. He said,
my suspicion is that chronic treatments with anything plasma drugs
that rejuvenate cells in old animals is going to lead
to an increase in cancer. Even if we learn how
to make cells young, it's something we'll want to do judiciously.
And that makes a lot of sense to me. So,
if you've got a problem, which is that there's not
(47:58):
enough cell division and cell growth in the body because
you've gotten old, if you want to fix it by
spurring lots of cell division and cell growth. That is
what leads to cancer. It's it's the balance of life.
I guess, yeah, But then again, I can easily imagine
it's an area where, again this is just speculating, where
(48:20):
an older individual has to make that choice. And I'm like, well,
I could certainly, I can certainly afford to hook this
young person up to meet some of their blood and
I'm gonna be a little sharper, my tissue is gonna improve,
I'm gonna feel a little younger, but I'm also going
to be more prone to cancer. You know, we're humans.
We're really suck at weighing a short term versus long term, right,
(48:42):
So I can I can see them saying, you know what,
I'm gonna feel young this week, and I'll worry about
cancer next week. I guess you could always go back
and forth, right, you could get maybe say, in the future,
we get really really good at treating cancer. So people
are taking way too many stem cells or blood transfusions
from the young get think this rejuvenated effect, but then
also getting cancer. And then they're just using our strongest
(49:05):
cancer fighting methods to fight off the cancer. And in
time to get some more rejuvenating juice from the young.
I think that these scenarios, as fun as they are
to imagine, somehow I don't think it's quite gonna work
out that way, because I I don't want this to
be the case. But what I suspect is that we
will see some result from this, but it will be
(49:28):
kind of modest, you know. But again, you combine that
with magical thinking, you combine that with the cebo effect,
you combine that with kind of a desperate willingness to
try something. I'm pretty confident you're gonna have some older,
well off individuals. She is going to make this happen
for himself or himself. Uh. One last thing I think
(49:51):
we should say again before the end of this episode is, unfortunately,
if you are reading anything about this, research that up
to this point has said that lud or plasma from
the young will make you live forever unnaturally extend your lifespan.
So far that is not true. That has not been
shown in any experiment that we could find evidence of,
(50:12):
so for now that ain't the case. Unfortunately. All Right,
So there you have it a little of the history,
the science and mythology of old people drinking young people's blood,
old people taking young blood into themselves, essentially the curative
properties of young blood. My main takeaway from this is
I want to drink whatever substance it is that will
(50:37):
help me look like Gary Oldman does at the beginning
of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. You mean the old bun
hair or the bun hair the young flashback out of
version with the with the cool armor. Oh well, well,
either way it would be great. But I mean, see,
if you're Gary Oldman's Dracula, you look great when you're
young and vital, and you look great as an old
(50:58):
decrepit bun hair. Either way, you're awesome. But also you're
kind of saying as an old person, I want to
look like I have that distinct look of a young
actor that's been made up to look like an old man,
sort of like the Prometheus version of what's his face? Right? Oh? Oh, no,
guy Pierce. And that's the worst makeup job I've ever
(51:20):
seen in film. No, Gary Oldman in Coppolis Dracula is
much better. Are not your ways? Our ways are not
your ways. This is a good place to leave off
with this one. So hey, if you want to check
out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind again,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find blog post galleries,
top ten with us, all the podcast episodes we've ever
(51:42):
put together at various videos and links out to our
social media accounts, and if you want to get in
touch with us with your thoughts about the consumption of
human blood, you can email us at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Because House of Works dot
com h
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the Stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and dot Joe McCormick, and hey,
it's Halloween season. Today's episode is kind of HALLOWEENI we
also want to remind you to feature to check out
(00:23):
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is, uh,
the main site. That's where you find all of the podcast,
all the videos of various blog posts. And we have
a two interesting things going on this month. Monster Science,
the video series that I've been doing in the past
here is coming back these last two weeks of October
four new episodes with the sort of vhs leyden Um
(00:45):
horror cinema themed explorations of science. All right, so let's
get rolling with this. I want to kick off by
just asking you. It's just a very basic question here, Joe.
Do you see yourself as you eventually enter old age?
Do you see yourself drinking the blood of the young
in order to sustaining your unnatural life? M Now, are
(01:06):
we're talking about the blood of the young human or
the blood of any young animal? I mean, I assume
the young deman. I mean that's where the vitality is.
That's what human life force is. If I'm going to
keep my own human life force going, that's a good
place to go, right it could be. But then again,
if we follow our our magical intuitions and the history
of our practices, I think animal blood rituals have been
(01:26):
fairly common in human history, right, yeah, and certainly not
only animal blood rights, but even into early pseudo scientific
ideas of of taking elements from particularly virile seeming specimens
and and using those tissues in our own body. You know,
I think I would feel rude drinking the blood of
young humans. But what I might do is a kind
(01:48):
of mithraic ritual where I would get into some contraption
and have a bull on a grate above me and
then just bathe in its showering blood as it is butchered. Okay, well, yeah,
that that was that way. It's not like the direct
bathing or the direct consumption of the blood. There's a
there's a buffer, a mythic buffer zone there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
And then of course you get all of the all
(02:09):
of the wonderful attributes to the bull, right, the strength,
the power, the virility, it's good stuff. Yeah, Or potentially
just like a bull Testies young person blood smoothie, that
that might end up being my like vampiric morning ritual
when I'm an old person. Now, Robert, obviously you brought
this up for a reason. Are are you thinking about
(02:31):
drinking blood anytime soon? Well? I can't help but think
about it a little bit, just based on some of
our the research we've been doing here, uh, some some
mythic research and historical research, and most importantly some modern
scientific research into the advantages of taking another individual's blood
into your own body. That that sounds like you're hedging there,
(02:53):
you know, so, so not necessarily always just drinking blood,
but but at least some way taking blood, taking someone's blood, Yeah,
I mean, because certainly there are various ways of of
of taking another individual's blood and gaining some sort of
life essence from it. Right, Probably the most notable mythological,
(03:13):
folkloric example of this, if not actual historical fact, is
that of Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathing Right, the blood Countess. Right,
So she was one according to the historical record, I mean,
we can never really know. She was apparently one of
the most prolific serial killers in human history. Yes, I mean,
(03:34):
we're talking to like six fifty victims during her reign,
and the charges level against we're pretty out there, right,
I mean, and that's one of the problems looking back
at it. To what extent are these uh, these charges
in Bellish, To what extent are they outright slander? Right? Right?
But at least what she was charged with was the
murder of hundreds of I think it was mostly young girls. Yes, Yeah,
(03:55):
there were charges that that young virsion girls were favorite victim. Yeah.
And the story goes that Countess Bathie feared aging, that
she didn't want to become old and shriveled and and
see her youth to evaporate before her eyes, and she
got a pretty interesting idea in her head what if
(04:16):
she could maintain her youth with the blood of the young. Again,
we we don't know to what extending Any of this
is history. A lot of it's probably just made up
legend about her. It is pretty certain, I think, I
think most historians think that she did really or was
involved in the killing of lots of young girls. But
(04:36):
you know, her motivations for it, and whether she actually
bathed in their blood or consume their blood or anything
like that that. I think that's a lot shakier. Yeah,
you don't really see many of any historians say yeah,
I think she actually bathed in the blood of virgins.
More likely they tend to run the gannet between she
was just a victim of conspiracy, uh, but was also
(04:57):
a part of a bread and murderous, an awful family
who Yeah, she was a really awful ruler who probably
got what was coming to her. So you can sort
of pick and choose and decide where you're gonna fall
in there. But the the idea, the myth of the
thing that the folkloric idea of this evil, rich ruler
(05:17):
uh bathing in a young person's blood in order to
stay young, that continues to resonate, and and of course
it also has various um racist and sexist qualities to
it as well. And besides from this, you know sort
of out the outskirts of Europe, Yeah, Eastern European. She's exotic,
she's dangerous, uh, And of course all she wants to
(05:41):
do is is a peer young. She's so vain and
so hateful towards those who actually have beauty and youth
that she would murder them and bathe in their blood.
Now there's a tangent about Elizabeth Bathory that I cannot resist.
It's not really related, but I remember back when I
was in high school, coming across it was either a
seat or a tape of a metal band called Bathory
(06:03):
that I thought was the funniest CD cover I've ever
seen because the bad calligraphy on the name Bathory made
it look like it said bat Lord. Wouldn't that be
a great metal band? That Lord sounds good too? And
also you know, vampirick and also so I like it. Uh. Now,
when we get into mythology and folklore, of course, there
(06:24):
are way too many examples of blood drinkers and vampireic creatures.
They're far too many examples of blood rituals to even
go into right there. Just it's a common trope throughout
human history. Um, we even had and we have so
many examples even of our own culture. One that came
to mind when we were talking the other day was
(06:44):
the nineteen seventies TV show called The Immortal. I've never
seen this. I only saw it because there was a
brief time in the late nineties, I think maybe the
early two thousands where they were showing reruns on the
Sci Fi Channel, and it was one of these shows
where it was like it was an ABC it was
an ABC Movie of the Week and then a very
brief television show that didn't take off, And it was
(07:06):
kind of from The Incredible Hulk mold. So you have
this going from town to town. Yeah, somebody's chasing him.
There's something this overarching plot of these people who are
after him. But then from in each town that he
goes to, he has this ability to help people or
their new sub villains to deal with. Also, like The
Incredible Hulk, he's got a power that's both a blessing
and a curse. Yes, So his his whole deal in
(07:27):
this show is that his blood uh is essentially kind
of magic, right, It's this wonderful, wonderful blood. In a
transfusion of this blood will basically wipe out any of
your illnesses and it can allow you to live longer.
So it's a it's it's it's a longevity uh drug
in this man's veins. It's like a biological anti virus program. Yeah.
(07:49):
And so of course there's a particular rich old dude
who wants nothing more than to just keep him closed
up in his mansion to himself, so he can just
have as much of his blood as he needs to
keep going and make him the mad Max blood bag
on the front of his car. Yeah yeah, right there
in the front of his limo. Uh so, but of
course the hero doesn't doesn't dig that, so he escapes,
(08:10):
he's on the run, and uh you know, it's a
it's a very nineteen seventies kind of an incredible Hulk delivery,
but it's kind of a cool idea and it definitely
ties in with a lot of the actual science we're
going to discuss later in the episode. Well, there there
are multiple ways that I think people would imagine blood
could have a power to rejuvenate, to invigorate, to give
(08:32):
you the strength of the young, and I think they
sort of occur along a scale of magical thinking. Like
on one hand, there's a much more straightforward, I think
material kind of approach to it, where you'd think, well,
there's something about young people's blood that gives them their
body strength, and so it must be nutritious in a way.
You know, you can imagine people wanting to consume it
(08:54):
with a with a fairly secular mindset, as long as
they don't know much about modern medicine. Um. But then
there's also the magical end where you start getting into
magical associative thinking, where where properties of a thing can
be absorbed by coming into contact with its essence. And
then you get into some of these funeral cannibal rights
(09:18):
where an individual will partake of the flesh of a
loved one after they have died in order to absorb
part of them. And then there's the whole realm of
what James Frasier called homeopathic magic, where light cures likes
and the thinking here would go that the blood of
the young must cure the old and turned back the clock,
because that's just that's what it is. That's the the
(09:40):
inherent nature of how how different properties interact with each other. Yeah,
So throughout the history of using homeopathic magical medicine, the
idea might be that you take a thing associated with
another thing to cure that second thing. So, you know,
if you had problems with your hand, you might consume
(10:00):
the paw of an animal or the hand of a
person or something like that, you know, or a problem
if you had headaches, you might consume ground up skull
or something like that. So yeah, if your if your
problem is aging, you can consume youth. And what is
the essence of youth more than the juice of young people?
Young people's blood. And another influence I can also think
(10:23):
of that might have made people over the centuries want
to imbibe the blood of the young in order to
avoid aging or to restore vigor and vitality, is the
sort of bodily humor thinking. You know that you had
the four temperaments that went along with the bodily humors theory,
and in that traditional order of temperaments, the sanguine temperament,
(10:47):
the one that's associated with blood is the one that's
like positive and excitable and high energy and playful. It's
still there in our language, like to be sanguine about
something is to be optimistic or positive about it. So
I don't know if that association within the body Humor's
theory is a symptom of this underlying association we have
(11:08):
between blood and then youth and vigor and vitality, or
if the association between blood and youth and vigor comes
from the bodily humor's theory. Yeah, that's that's an interesting take.
I hadn't thought about that. You know, another thing that
comes to mind, at least for the modern era, is
that since we we talked before about how we can't
help but think of ourselves and think of reality in
(11:29):
terms of whatever our technology is. So uh, you know,
for a while, certainly in the industrial age, we've we've
looked at the body as biomechanical, and here we're having
to deal with all our automobiles, and what do you
have to do with your automobile? You have to take
out the old oil, right and get some new oil
in there. So maybe on a subliminal level, even a
subconscious level, rather we end up thinking of of ourselves
(11:54):
as an automobile and like, well, maybe I'm just filled
with all this old oil, and what if I could
get that old oil out and get a you know,
a a transfusion of new oil. Yeah, So I could
see where we might buy into the concept, um, Yeah,
at a subconscious level, just based on our technology. And
it's also of course easy to to think of it
just as pure metaphor, right, because we're we're surrounded by
(12:19):
you know, largely youth obsessed culture. You see plenty of
examples of of middle age and older individuals who is
grasping after that youth right made sometimes quite literally in
the form of rich old men with very young romantic partners. Now,
I can't remember where I read this. I think it
was in one of our sources, maybe let me know,
But there was a suggestion that the idea of grasping
(12:43):
back after youth might also be a fairly recent thing
in the history of humanity, because it's only recently that
humans have begun to regularly live to old age. In
some parts of the world, I mean, more often there
was high infant mortality, more people side in middle age
or younger. Uh, And now it's pretty common that if
(13:04):
you have access to good, high quality medical care, you
can usually live to a decently long age. Well, that's
that's an interesting take on it there too. Yeah. Yeah,
so maybe that is kind of something we should have
looped in with the biomechanical body as a more modern
view on on vampiod diets. Now, before we really get
(13:24):
into the topic, though, we probably just have to talk
about the consumption of blood as a food, like what
does that mean? What does that entail? And it's a
it's pretty interesting, uh, to stop and study that, particularly
when you look at animals that are obligate. Sango VORs
that that feed exclusively on blood, like the vampire bat
say that category again obligates, So that's great blood only.
(13:49):
They go to the they go to the restaurant. They
need to see the blood only menu. They're not gonna
eat the salad. They're not gonna eat the steak. It's
just the blood. That's the corner that they've they've painted
themselves into evolutionarily, well, from a lay person's point of view,
it would seem like blood would be a perfectly nutritious thing.
I mean, the conventional wisdom is that the blood is
the life, right, Yeah, I mean it's the life, it's
(14:11):
the life blood. This is the stuff itself. This is
like the pure essence. This is like humanity straight. Yeah,
you think that's kind of ore the magical mythic realm
to it. But when you actually look at something like
a vampire bat um and you look at its consumption
of blood, I mean it's basically consuming protein and water.
(14:31):
There's there's no fat for the bat to store away,
So unlike their insect and fruit eating kin, they can't hibernate,
they can't migrate because they lack the fat stores. Instead,
they have to feed every night, lapping up to their
body weight in order to survive, and um, it sounds
like a very difficult limited diet. Yeah. Yeah, And and
(14:55):
there are a lot of fascinating theories about how it
occurred that they may have started out feeding on parasite
that contain the blood, and then eventually that they decided
weren't decided. Eventually they evolve more in the direction of
feeding exclusively and directly on the blood, as opposed to
the creatures that feed on blood. Oh, interesting, how an
intermediary could come in there? What was that story I
(15:15):
was reading about a while back about there's a particular
species of African jumping spider that likes human blood but
not drinking it directly from humans, right, praise on mosquitoes
that contain it. Yeah, so it's the same, the same
sort of situation where yeah, eventually you just give up
the middleman and just going straight for this might come
straight to us. Yeah, And so that's one of the
(15:36):
reasons that it's hard to imagine a human feeding exclusively
on blood to get into or even even a humanoid
certainly a larger creature, just because the energy levels required.
But we know fully well that humans do sometimes consume blood,
don't they. I mean, I I have seen a blood sausage,
but I don't think I've ever eaten one. I don't
(15:56):
know that I have either, unless, I mean, after I
would reading about it, I thought, well, maybe I've had
it on an airplane. It didn't realize it because I've
like I've flown some some some particularly some Asian airlines
before where there's like some sort of a sausage meat
that I couldn't identify looking at pictures. Maybe that was
blood sausage. I don't know, but you see some version
(16:17):
of blood sausage in a lot of different cultures, and uh,
including I was. I found this interesting. The red tofu
found in some parts of China, the blood tofu blood tofuu. Yeah,
it's made from like pigs blood or something. Yeah, so
it's not not really tofu. So any any vegetarians out
there see that on the menu, you might, and you know,
ask a few questions about it before you order it. Uh.
(16:39):
And then of course there are various blood festivals. There's
a Nepalese Yak blood festival in which they drink blood.
They are various traditions throughout the world. Where blood is
consumed directly as sort of a culinary ritual. And certainly
in the American tradition, what everyone the whole thing is
to have a big rare steak, right, And certainly that
is blood leaking out of that meat. You know, I've
(17:02):
heard that all my life, but I think I've actually
read recently that that is not true. That the that
a the like the meat you would buy package the
grocery store, is mostly drained of blood. There's really not
going to be much blood in it. Uh. And that
when you cut into a bloody steak, you know, like
a nice rare steak, and all that red liquid comes out,
that's mostly just a mixture of water and then some
(17:24):
other protein. I think it might have been myoglobin. Okay, well,
you know, maybe I'm thrown off here by vampire movies
in which like a newly turned vampire starts sucking steaks
to stay alive. I feel like that trope has shown up,
I think inhabit and perhaps in Chronos as well. I
can't remember Chronos. That's a great one. So yeah, maybe
(17:45):
maybe this is an example of my my knowledge is
that has based more fiction than reality. But but either way,
humans have not been averse to consuming blood throughout history
as part of their diet, but not exclusively. Well, now
that leads us to just again the idea of medicinal
consumption of blood. Occasional consumption of blood is part of
(18:05):
some actual treatment of malady or illness, or just some
sort of a ritualistic practice, and there are a number
of cool examples of this. Drawing up most of these
examples from two different sources here, there's an excellent article
by Maria Dolan from Smithsonian Magazine titled The Gruesome History
of Eating corpses as Medicine, and of course that goes
(18:27):
into a lot more than just blood consumption, but also
flesh consumption. Is great article. I'll include a link to
it on the landing page for this episode. And there's
also another great article, Young Blood, by Jess Zimmerman writing
for Ian Magazine. I really liked both of these articles too,
that were great reads. But yeah, so some of the facts.
According to a description by Plenty the Elder, who is
(18:48):
a Roman historian, apparently Romans loved to drink the blood
of gladiators who were killed in the arena in ancient Rome,
so you'd have people down there. It out. I guess
one of them gets skewered with one of those little
pokey pokey Roman swords, the blood starts to come out,
and people just be like, give me some don't count
(19:09):
out the trident, dude. I always like to try it
ent and that guy, to whatever extent, that was actually
a thing and not just an artistic motif. But I
always I was always rooting for him because he had
more of the uphill battle. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah,
I would drink his blood because clearly he's he's he's smart, powerful,
but smart. Yeah, so that's what I want before I
go into podcasts. Again, I'm not sure exactly where this
(19:32):
falls on that scale I talked about earlier, like the
the sort of secular this is some kind of material
nutrition thinking to the magical I'm gaining the power and
essence of the gladiator thinking, I'd imagine this falls more
to the magical side, right, Yeah, I would think so. Um,
And it seems like it based on what I was reading.
(19:53):
It may have its roots in Truscan funeral rights, so
it may go beyond just you know, the near near
bloodthirsty aspect of the culture at the time. And I've
also read there's a two thousand three paper title between
Horror and Hope Gladiator's blood as a cure for UH
epileptics in Ancient Medicine, And this is published in the
(20:13):
Journal of Historical Neuroscience. And this article posited that spontaneous
recovery from some forms of epilepsy may be responsible for
the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness UH from drinking the blood
of a gladiator. So it's one of those things where
it seemed to work enough of the time, so why
(20:33):
not because it's also it's just it's just good fun.
It's just part of the part of going out on
the town and enjoying a gladiatorial contest. Well, yeah, the
false cure working by this method, I think was a
common feature of ancient medicine. You always read about these
types of medicines that that ancient people's thought would be
effective at curing X, Y or Z, when we now know,
(20:54):
you know, this has no effect at all. Why do
people think this? What might have happened really often is
that somebody took some of this in an unrelated way.
They just got better and it's like, look, it worked,
or they might have received a placebo effect boost from
from obtaining it. And then likewise, since uh, either they
(21:15):
had to pay a certain amount to obtain this gladiator
blood or it was such a big deal to get
it that you end up tweaking your memories enough to where,
of course it was a gladiator blood. I didn't drink
the blood of a dead slave and not benefit from
it and a monster, do you think, I am? No, no, no,
that that makes sense too, because we you know, we
(21:36):
go through all kinds of mental justification to justify things
that were difficult to get. So if you spend a
lot of money on appliance or a piece of furniture,
you end up coming up with ways of thinking this
was a good investment. The same could be true some
gladiator blood. I'm quite sure. So we we see this
trend throughout history, and we're gonna roll through some of
(21:56):
the examples, and some of these you're gonna get into
a very alleged territory because it's a popular motif as well,
to slander your enemy by saying they drink your people ahead. Yeah,
quite common in fact. Like so, one example would be
Pope Innocent the Eighth who died in fourtwo, and the
(22:17):
story is that he was one of the first people
to receive an attempted blood transfusion. But I think the
stories seemed to be all over the place. It's like
some say that he got blood from willing donors, or
that he drank the blood of Jewish children, or yeah, yeah,
sort of a reverse of the blood libel often leveled
(22:38):
against Jews in medieval times, saying that they're they're they're
drinking the blood of of of gentile children or processing
it into some sort of abait good. Yeah. So so
obviously that was not true with Pope Innocent the Eighth.
I'd say grain AsSalt there, yeah, yeah, and not just
as a flavor, the blood of the young boy. No, no,
(23:00):
no drinking. But but obviously the idea there was that
while you had an ailing, dying pope, maybe giving them
the blood of someone younger could help stave off death, right, yeah,
And of course you have various um minds that are
that are chiming in on this. Fifteenth century philosopher Marsilio
Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person,
(23:23):
might I give you a health boost? So so you
have that to to boost you or to encourage you
to try it. So I assume I still living young person. Um, well,
you know they're young people. So unless you're just you're
lucky and they're not, you're probably gaining it from a
young person. Also, you know they're young people. They don't
have a lot of money. Maybe they want to make
(23:45):
a few bucks on the side by draining a little
blood off into a into a little uh little glass
for a little goblet for elderly members of the society.
I find the arm specification here kind of funny, like
is that just an accident? End have said, well, the
easiest place to get it is from the arm or
did the arm matter? To him? Was like, now if
(24:05):
you drink it from there, from their butt cheek, you're
not going to get the same restorative power. Well, he
must be referring to to obtaining it from a young,
probably willing person here, and then they're not draining them
whole because yeah, the arm is far enough away from
your center of being. It's it's it's not close to anything.
Uh that's too important, so yeah. Yeah. And then of course,
(24:29):
up through the Renaissance, you you still had all these
beliefs that consuming the flesh or the blood of humans
in various ways could cure all kinds of diseases, right,
Oh yeah, yeah, sixteen and seventeenth century, you had many Europeans,
including royalty priests, even scientists of the day that are
that are trying remedies that are made from human bone,
(24:50):
from fat, or from blood. Uh, in order to treat
everything from headache to epilepsy. And despite some of the
science we're gonna get into later in this episode, I
think we can assume probably none of that actually worked. Um,
let's see some other points here. At sixteenth century Italian
alchemist recommended taking children under the age of thirteen, shutting
(25:11):
them in a well enclosed room, sizening out the air
which would be quote filled with the breath and expired
substance of these five young virgins there for curative powers.
But again this is an alchemist, so yeah again grain
of salt. And of course through all these different rituals
that come up, the blood needs to be fresh, you needs.
(25:31):
It's not just a matter of finding a dead body
and draining it like the body needs either needs to
be still alive or very very very quickly exterminated. So
there you can think of the gladiatorial arena. Of course,
you've got somebody killed right there in front of you,
so you know it's fresh. Or you could go to
the other route, of the less valorous route, and stand
(25:53):
around waiting for a prisoner to be executed. Ah. Yes,
and here we see this, this tradition of the of
the gladiators blood being carried on really into two fairly
recent times. UM. I was reading one of the sources
here of that article by Maria Dolan Smithsonian said that
in nineteen o eight we saw the last known attempt
(26:15):
made in Germany to swallow blood from a an executed
criminal at the scaffold. Because for for a long time,
apparently this was the thing. You would go to an
execution and you drop a few coins for a cup
of still warm blood from the executed Because the executioner
he's kind of a magical boundary walker right between life
(26:36):
and death, between accepted society and the outside. Often he's
wearing a hood, right, and so this is where where
you can go to him. He's a master of life
and death, so he can give you some of the
juice of life and death. Um. And again they're no
more gladiatorial contest. This is your best bet at getting
a young person's blood, because because that's the best kind.
(26:58):
You gotta get the young virgin nor the young man's
so the virile young blood, that's where the magic is. Yeah,
and along those lines, I think sometimes people recommended trying
to get blood from people who were still alive. I
guess like we were talking about was probably meant by
the arm and the young person earlier. But people like
paracelsis where we're suggesting that you should should drink fresh blood. Right, Yeah,
(27:19):
sixteenth century Germans with physician general Renaissance man, you know,
just hit his hands and everything, great Renaissance weirdo. And
he believed yet the blood was probably good for drinking.
And it was one of his followers that took this
even further by suggesting that you take blood from a
living body. And again there there there's a tradition here
of of learned men at least contemplating the prospect. Leonardo
(27:44):
da Vinci said, we preserve our life with the death
of others in a dead thing in since a life remains,
which when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living,
regains sensitive and intellectual life. That's an interesting take on digestion. Yeah,
so I'm the sources are there. You have some you have,
you have learned men who are talking about the potential
(28:06):
benefits of drinking blood. You have rituals and rights throughout history,
so it continues to seem to make a certain amount
of sense. Of course, if freshness isn't quite so necessary
to you, you could probably just work it into some
various recipes, right, you can make a marmalade out of it. Yeah,
apparently there was a Franciscan apothecary recipe from sixteen seventy
(28:26):
nine for a human blood based marmalade um. And as
this as wen we end up eventually sort of transferring
out of this. As as as medical science advances, suddenly
the the idea becomes more about tissue. I mean, we're
keeping the basic idea of absorbing the essence of some
other more vital person's body intact, but we're just switching
(28:50):
from blood to well, maybe we need to implant some testicles. Yeah, yeah,
you see this. In the eighteen nineties and paris Um,
Charles Edward Brown Sequad was with a champion of testes
implantation um, Sergei Voronoff, would physically remove healthy testicles from
young animals and implant the glands into patients. So you know,
(29:16):
the thing is like that they're they're off base here,
but it's it's forecasting like real science to come and
real usable principles of of tissue and oregan transplants sometimes
between species. And of course blood transfusions are an essential
part of modern medical science. And it's not so much
that you absorb the blood of the young to gain
(29:37):
the power of the gladiator. But if you are ailing,
if if you have a blood deficiency you need blood
for some reason, of course you can get a blood
donation from someone. Yeah, I mean to fall back on
the biomechanical automobile example, it's like it's not so much
that you know, say what you will about old oil
and new oil. The machine needs oil to run, and
if the oil leaking out, you've got to add some more. Obviously,
(30:00):
it's the difference between you wouldn't try to steal the
oil from a sports car to gain the vitality of
the sports car. You just need oil from somewhere. It
can come from wherever, and so in this we end
up working back up to our modern age, to our
very modern age, as in studies that have come out
this year the last few years where we again see
(30:22):
this motif re emerge that you could take young blood,
specifically young blood into your older body and benefit from
it both physically and mentally. So we've talked about the mythology,
the magical thinking of absorbing the powerful essence of a strong, young, vigorous,
(30:44):
vital person by claiming their blood and making it your own.
But there is some actual science that runs bizarrely close
to this magical tradition. And this science has been in
development for a long time. I think it's it's been
sort of brewing for more than a century based on
some old techniques, but it's only in the past decade
(31:07):
or maybe a little more than the people have really
started to catch on to exactly how potent this type
of therapy could be. Yeah, really to the point now
where it's it's very promising. Yeah. Uh, And we don't
know yet what all of the implications are going to be.
But let's get into the details of why you would
take the blood of the young and give it to
(31:29):
the old in a medical context. Yeah. And one of
the a couple of big studies here that that that
we're drawing from. One of them was the two thousand,
fourteen Stanford University Medical Center study. UH. And and these
these efforts, of course involved prior studies and continuing studies.
This is very much a it's a network of findings. Yeah,
it's not just like a one off by any means. Yeah.
(31:51):
So it had already been before this one particular study,
had already been established that, uh, there was some indication
that some reins of the brains of old mice, when
given the blood of young mice, would produce more nerve cells.
And so obviously that's a good thing. But unfortunately the
reverse also held true. So when you gave young mice
(32:13):
exposure to the blood of old mice, they suffered for
it that they had decreased health outcomes, we might say. Right. So,
this time the researchers checked both for changes within nerve
circuits and individual nerve cells, uh, in order to to
demonstrate improvements in learning and memory. So first they examined
(32:33):
the pairs of mice whose circulatory systems had been surgically conjoined.
And this is the process we've been we've been doing
for a while, UM, a process known as parabiosis. Yeah.
We actually talked about this process on an episode of
Forward thinking that I recorded with my co hosts on
that show last year. But parabiosis is a very interesting, creepy,
(32:59):
weird procedure that that really gives a lot of people
the willies, but it has led to some very interesting
and promising medical outcomes, so I think it's really worth
talking about. So in this case, parabiosys, it comes from
the words meaning sort of beside life, so side to
side life essentially, and it refers to taking a patch
(33:21):
of skin off of two mice and then sowing the
mice together. Okay, so basically like hooking up the plumbing,
the circulatory plumbing. Yeah, so you're creating a common circulatory
system and causing the two mice to share a blood
stream and the blood becomes one common pool. They're parabiotic.
(33:42):
And the process collaboration, Yeah, exactly, they were working together,
they're they're getting closer. So this was a process that
was described by a French physiologist named Paul Barrett. It
spelled like bert I believe in French, that'd be Barrett.
I apologize if I'm wrong about that. In the sixties,
I think it, and then later in the nineteen thirties,
(34:03):
the process was improved upon by a pair of people
named Bunster and Meer. But essentially it entails taking two
mice side by side and attaching them at parallel elbows
and knees, and then sewing together an exposed patch of
skin along the sides, and of course then the natural
mammalian healing process kicks in the sides attached together, they
(34:28):
fuse the skin joins and the capillaries connect, and then
the mice can share this blood system and then apparently
after some length of time, the pair can be separated
again if necessary for the experiment. So that's the parabiasis.
But what is hetero chronic parabiasis, because that's what they
were really practicing here. Hetero chronic would mean mixed time right,
(34:50):
mixed time scales. So when you're creating parabiotic mice that
are hetero chronic, that means one old mouse and one
young mouse. And this is where the fund comes in,
because apparently when you join one old mouse and one
young mouse, you get startling results. In the nineteen fifties,
there was a guy at Cornell named Clive mackay, and
(35:13):
McKay performed experiments on parabiasis, essentially trying to learn what
he could about how to prolong lifespan. Can can you
take mammals and make them live longer by sharing blood
in this way? And what they found was that the
old mice who got paired up, who got sewn together
with a young mouse, showed rejuvenated cartilage, meaning that the
(35:37):
cartilage andist tissue in their body actually appeared younger. Uh.
And more recently, this line of research was picked up
on by a researcher named Thomas A. Rando who continue
continued this and published a study in Nature in two
thousand five. And this showed that if you took two
of these mice and you sewed them together, one old
mouse and one young mouse, and you left him that
(35:58):
way for five weeks, eventually the older mice showed improved
rates of muscle healing and liver cell regeneration. So that's
very interesting and promising. I read a Nature News piece
about this line of research that had a very funny
part where it said quote after the team published its results,
Rando's phone started ringing incessantly. Some of the calls were
(36:21):
from men's health magazines looking for ways to build muscle.
Others were from people fascinated by the idea of forestalling death.
They wanted to know whether young blood extended lifespan. So
already the vultures who don't want to die and don't
want to grow old are starting to pounce, said, I
find a young person without any limbs and just kind
(36:43):
of sew them out of my back like a living,
rejuvenating back back. You'd become master Blaster from from Thunderdome,
except it it would be you. I guess you'd be Blaster,
and then you'd have a master on your back who
is actually your blood slavey stitch on a millennial and
and hit the clubs right. But anyway, that's all of
(37:04):
the heterochronic parabiases, and that sort of brings us back
up into the research of the more recent years, including
this study. Yeah, and this study the hippocampus was really
craz key. You. Now, this is a part of the
brain brain that's critical for forming certain types of memories,
notably used in recollection and recognition of spatial patterns. Experience
(37:25):
physically alters it, and and various quote detrimental, anatomical and
functional changes occur there as an individual ages. So as
you get older, you're this part of your brain. I
think the brain in general, but especially this part of
your brain sees decline. Right. And it's also like one
of the examples is often thrown out, and I think
this has come up on the podcast before. You have
(37:45):
London cabbies who have who actually have have larger hippocampuses
due to the uh, you know, all the their knowledge,
their physical knowledge of the city. They not yeah, the knowledge. Um,
it's like or an order of warlocks, the kind of
warlocks of their own kind. Um. But in old mice
(38:07):
with new blood, they quote found consistent differences in a
number of biochemical, anatomical, and electrophysiological measures known to be
important to nerve cell circuits encoding of new experiences for
retention in the cerebral cortex. So essentially what's happening here
is the hippocamp i of older mice resemble that of
(38:28):
younger mice. They made greater amounts of various substances that
hippocampal cells are known to produce when learning is taking place,
So we see not only a tissue boost here, but
in actual mental boost like it's it's recharging the hippocampus,
recharging the mind of the young mouse. They also found
that hippocampal nerve cells from older members members of these uh,
(38:52):
these old young parabiotic pairs words, also showed an enhanced
ability to strengthen the connection between one nerve cell and another,
which again is essential to learning and forming new memories,
forging those internal pathways in the mind. And older mice
and fused with young blood also did better on food
hunting tests, such as one in particular where they would
(39:14):
have a food platform that's submerged in a water filled container. Okay,
so in this study they're not just looking at the
anatomical information. They're not just saying, hey, you know, what
is the number of cells we can find in this
part of the brain, but they're actually testing behavior how
it works in the field. Yea. Indeed, they also found
they performed better and freeze tests. Now, this is where
(39:37):
mice are trained to freeze and fear when plucked into
a particular environment. And while old mile mice usually perform
worse than the young, freezing for shorter periods of time,
betraying a lack of recognition. So, in other words, you've
been training to fear this environment, and if you the faster,
you recognize it and freeze and fear the longer you're frozen.
That shows that you're you're recalling it. But older mice
(40:00):
get desensitized to this. They don't recognize their conditions as
quickly correct. But when they have that that rejuvenating influx
of young blood, they perform better on the freeze test. Yeah,
but this kind of thing makes you wonder what is
it about the blood, because surely it's not it's not
(40:21):
a magical essence. It's not the gladiator strength being carried
through the magical properties of the blood. But it must
be some kind of material that's in the blood that's
doing this work of rejuvenation in the older mouse's brain.
So it would be interesting to see if we could
narrow down what it is in the blood that's causing
this change. And one of the interesting things that you
(40:44):
mentioned in a note about this is that apparently it
didn't work if you heat it up the blood plasma, right, Yeah,
So what apparently happens when you heat up the blood
is that it be natures or breaks apart key proteins.
And so there could be some blood borne protein means
that we've yet to identify and exploit that are are
central to this, uh, this this taking place. Yeah, and
(41:06):
then of course another study has I think identified what
they think are at least one of the key proteins.
That's right. A series of recent Harvard studies and these
are also using the stitch together old young mouse pairs
and uh. This research headed by stem cell researcher Amy Wagers,
(41:26):
isolated a specific protein from mouse blood growth differentiation factor
at eleven or g DF eleven, and this seems to
regulate stem cell activity and it's abundant in young mice,
but it's level drops at the animals a right, So
if you look at blood from a young mouse that's
got plenty of g DF eleven, you look at blood
from an old mouse, it has a lot less. So
(41:47):
this would seem to be something that you could be
re supplying to older mice by giving them the blood
plasma of younger mice. Yeah, And indeed they found that
injections of d d F eleven can reduce the thickening
of the heart to take with quickly comes with aging
in mice. They've also found that GDF eleven works nearly
as well as parabiosis in helping aging mouth mice recover
(42:08):
from muscle injuries, and it boost their performance on running
and grip strength tests. Grip strength huh yeah, grip strength
little mouse squeezies, I guess. Yeah, so you wouldn't just
be like a mentally rejuvenated mouse in a in a
weak decrepit body like it can actually give you some
some juice back to So along with the Easter Island
(42:30):
fungal agent reppams and also known as rapamune by fiser uh.
Along with that and caloric restriction. Uh, this is one
of only three intervention shown to reverse aging and multiple tissues.
So it's pretty pretty big. Yeah, but we do also
want to show caution here and say that it hasn't
(42:53):
yet been successfully demonstrated in humans, and that most of
the researchers who are trying to explain this to the public,
they always want to emphasize that this isn't necessarily like
a way to cheat death. It hasn't been shown to
prolonged life unnaturally. I mean it might if if the
(43:13):
data turns up, but it hasn't been shown to do
that yet. Instead, it's talking about showing renewed capacity in
certain tissues in older organisms. Yeah. So the more likely
use of this technology, this, uh, this procedure would be
for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the treatment of heart disease,
as opposed to some sort of futuristic slightly morbid longevity
(43:39):
treatment for the rich and privileged. Uh And and some
of the other caveats that are thrown out there is
the old mice that are used in many of these
experiments are essentially middle aged mice, and we're not sure
what the effects would be if they would be less
pronounced with truly old mice, or indeed with truly old humans.
But the cool thing is that since uh since blood
(44:02):
blood transfusions are routinely given to patients, trials like this
would not be would not have to have um authorization
from the US Food and Drug Administration. Uh So researchers
can test this out in humans, sooner read it than later. Now.
Of course, if they're testing this on humans, we're not
talking about parabiasis, not at all. They wouldn't be uh
(44:22):
so well, I mean, who knows. I really don't think
they would ever be thinking about sewing too humans together,
sewing you together with your grandpa to see if it
if it makes him healthier and you less healthy. And
another way that this would not be used is drinking blood,
because that's not what we're talking about. In fact, there
was a funny way I mentioned this in the Forward
(44:44):
Thinking podcast, but there was a New Scientist article interviewed
a guy named Tony whis Corey who was one of
the people working on this subject, and they got a
quote from him where he's like, certainly you can't drink
the blood, although obviously we haven't tried that experiment, so
I don't know if he was trying to say maybe
you could drink the blood that I don't think. So.
(45:05):
I don't think drinking the blood will do it. It
seems like it it's uh involving the direct transfusion of
the plasma, specially that g DF eleven, the growth growth
differentiation factor eleven, and then maybe some other elements in
the blood or the plasma. Yeah, I mean it has
to be circle tory to circulatory, not circular tory to
gastroid testinal. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's like cooking
(45:28):
your electricity up here to your planning system. But speaking
of Tony whist Corey, there is apparently under this particular
researcher and ongoing project that's studying the effect on human
Alzheimer's patients, and I think this is very interesting. The
last public update I found about this was a Nature
(45:49):
News article from January, so earlier this year, saying that
the experiment had started in September and it was a randomized,
cebo controlled, double blind trial, UH testing the safety and
efficacy of using young plasma to treat Alzheimer's disease. That
that was what they said, And then that they said
(46:10):
that six out of eighteen people who had originally been
planned for the experiment, who were all older than fifty,
had already started receiving the treatment, So they had already
been getting plasma that came from people who were below
the age of thirty. And so we haven't seen the
results of this yet, but I think it's going to
be really really interesting to see how this experiment turns out. Yeah,
(46:35):
I mean, when you sort of cut away all of
the mythic ghastliness that is built up with the idea
of reusing human blood or consuming it, or or the
old growing strong and the blood of the young, there's
a lot of there are a lot of wonderful possibilities
here for the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer's and heart disease. Yes, certainly.
(46:56):
Though then again, on the other side, there have been
other researchers who have been quick to warn that there
would be limits to even this type of procedure. Like
let's say that the results on the study come back
and they say, WHOA, Giving older people younger people's blood
has amazing effects even in humans, and it's been shown
(47:16):
in this double blind, placebo controlled trial. Uh, so we've
got a real, very important phenomenon on our hands. Even then,
you might want to show some caution because there was
a quote given to that Nature News piece I was
talking about from from that that same researcher that I
talked about earlier, Thomas A. Rando, and he said that
(47:37):
this could result in too much cell division. He said,
my suspicion is that chronic treatments with anything plasma drugs
that rejuvenate cells in old animals is going to lead
to an increase in cancer. Even if we learn how
to make cells young, it's something we'll want to do judiciously.
And that makes a lot of sense to me. So,
if you've got a problem, which is that there's not
(47:58):
enough cell division and cell growth in the body because
you've gotten old, if you want to fix it by
spurring lots of cell division and cell growth. That is
what leads to cancer. It's it's the balance of life.
I guess, yeah, But then again, I can easily imagine
it's an area where, again this is just speculating, where
(48:20):
an older individual has to make that choice. And I'm like, well,
I could certainly, I can certainly afford to hook this
young person up to meet some of their blood and
I'm gonna be a little sharper, my tissue is gonna improve,
I'm gonna feel a little younger, but I'm also going
to be more prone to cancer. You know, we're humans.
We're really suck at weighing a short term versus long term, right,
(48:42):
So I can I can see them saying, you know what,
I'm gonna feel young this week, and I'll worry about
cancer next week. I guess you could always go back
and forth, right, you could get maybe say, in the future,
we get really really good at treating cancer. So people
are taking way too many stem cells or blood transfusions
from the young get think this rejuvenated effect, but then
also getting cancer. And then they're just using our strongest
(49:05):
cancer fighting methods to fight off the cancer. And in
time to get some more rejuvenating juice from the young.
I think that these scenarios, as fun as they are
to imagine, somehow I don't think it's quite gonna work
out that way, because I I don't want this to
be the case. But what I suspect is that we
will see some result from this, but it will be
(49:28):
kind of modest, you know. But again, you combine that
with magical thinking, you combine that with the cebo effect,
you combine that with kind of a desperate willingness to
try something. I'm pretty confident you're gonna have some older,
well off individuals. She is going to make this happen
for himself or himself. Uh. One last thing I think
(49:51):
we should say again before the end of this episode is, unfortunately,
if you are reading anything about this, research that up
to this point has said that lud or plasma from
the young will make you live forever unnaturally extend your lifespan.
So far that is not true. That has not been
shown in any experiment that we could find evidence of,
(50:12):
so for now that ain't the case. Unfortunately. All Right,
So there you have it a little of the history,
the science and mythology of old people drinking young people's blood,
old people taking young blood into themselves, essentially the curative
properties of young blood. My main takeaway from this is
I want to drink whatever substance it is that will
(50:37):
help me look like Gary Oldman does at the beginning
of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. You mean the old bun
hair or the bun hair the young flashback out of
version with the with the cool armor. Oh well, well,
either way it would be great. But I mean, see,
if you're Gary Oldman's Dracula, you look great when you're
young and vital, and you look great as an old
(50:58):
decrepit bun hair. Either way, you're awesome. But also you're
kind of saying as an old person, I want to
look like I have that distinct look of a young
actor that's been made up to look like an old man,
sort of like the Prometheus version of what's his face? Right? Oh? Oh, no,
guy Pierce. And that's the worst makeup job I've ever
(51:20):
seen in film. No, Gary Oldman in Coppolis Dracula is
much better. Are not your ways? Our ways are not
your ways. This is a good place to leave off
with this one. So hey, if you want to check
out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind again,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find blog post galleries,
top ten with us, all the podcast episodes we've ever
(51:42):
put together at various videos and links out to our
social media accounts, and if you want to get in
touch with us with your thoughts about the consumption of
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