Peter Thiel Is Interested In Harvesting The Blood Of The Young (gawker.com)

Presto Vivace writes: [Gawker reports:] "Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire-turned-Trump delegate who successfully bankrupted Gawker Media, has long been obsessed with anti-aging technologies. He believes people have been conned by 'the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,' and has funded startups dedicated to extending the human lifespan. According to Jeff Bercovici of Inc. magazine, Thiel is so afraid of dying that he has begun exploring a novel, and fairly unsettling, technique: Harvesting, and injecting himself with, the blood of younger people." Vampire capitalism is real. In an unpublished interview with Bercovici last year, Thiel said: "I'm looking into parabiosis stuff [...] where they [infected] the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect. [...] I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely under-explored." When asked if he meant parabiosis was "really interesting" as a business opportunity or a personal-health treatment, Thiel suggested the latter: "That would be one where it's more just, do we think the science works? Some of these it's not clear there's actually a great company to start around it. [...]"

Comments

Re:And here it comes...

[stealth_finger]

Perhaps this is why God created death..... he saw people like this and said "This can not be, let their be death so we can have renewal."

Read your bible son, God created death because he put the talking snake(which had legs) in the garden knowing full well what would happen, left the apples on a low hanging branch in the middle of the joint and waited for the snake to do its thing so he could make things die and stop piling up and making the place look untidy (this also introduced the benefit of meat eating and a nice juicy steak). Obviously, this was before he sent himself to sacrifice himself to himself to save us from himself. Which didn't work.

Re:Slashdot Smear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's both hilarious and disturbing?

That there are a number of rich people into junk science like this isn't too surprising to me, but this is particularly bizarre.

Then clearly you're reading into Gawker's attempt to sensationalize it to make Thiel seem like a creature of the night, and not looking at the article itself which discusses the science.

There is a study ongoing right now looking into the 2 year effects of transferring blood from a under 25 year old to an over 35 year old and see if there are any positive effects. Blood contains millions upon millions of biomarkers in it, and so instead of grabbing every single one and identifying it's properties (which can be years of research for just one), they're throwing in the whole bag to see what happens to those older folks.

Here is the site of the study: https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT02803554

However, this would not result in a treatment involving a "harvesting" of blood from young folk. Instead it would indicate that something in there is useful and that further analysis is needed to find the useful pieces, which can then be made synthetically and taken as a pill.

But the truth does not portray Thiel in a negative light as Gawker would hope, so the summary and Gawker article are jazzed up to make Thiel seem to be a modern day Elizabeth Bathory.