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

Posted by BeauHD on from the nature's-energy-drink dept.

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 In an unpublished interview with Bercovici last year, Thiel said: "I'm looking into parabiosis stuff [...]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. [...]"

37 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Dammit Cartman! by ZecretZquirrel · · Score: 2

    And when does the cleansing begin?

    1. Re:Dammit Cartman! by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      day after trump get's in.

    2. Re:Dammit Cartman! by plopez · · Score: 5, Funny

      After we build the wall to ensure no one can get out.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  2. Bathory by rfengr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Might as well go full on Elizabeth Bathory.

  3. Slashdot Smear? by Roger+Wilcox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, Slashdot, how low will you go? This is a straight smear and as much as I dislike how Thiel has chosen to wield his power, this paints you pretty desperate.

    1. Re:Slashdot Smear? by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Seriously, Slashdot, how low will you go? This is a straight smear and as much as I dislike how Thiel has chosen to wield his power, this paints you pretty desperate.

      Quoting a Gawker story on Thiel, no less! I mean, sure, it's interesting that Gawker is going out the way it lived, writing hit-pieces, learning nothing, but really, the content of those hit pieces isn't interesting.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Slashdot Smear? by Chalnoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Slashdot Smear? by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While it is written as a smear, I don't find it to be a very effective smear. It may be weird, but it's not like Gawker is saying "He SUCKS THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN FOR SEXUAL GRATIFICATION." It's not superstition or witchcraft or obviously morally wrong despite gawker's spin on it.

      "Peter Thiel wants to live longer? OH DEAR GOD, WHAT A MONSTER! He should be content with living as long as God intended, a ripe old 45!"

      I'm a biologist, and I think it's great that someone in silicone valley is funding something which could actually add years and health to my life rather than another app for sharing pictures people making duck faces. So maybe you're just not the right type of nerd, but I find it VERY germane here and interesting, and not a smear.

    4. Re:Slashdot Smear? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... it's not like Gawker is saying "He SUCKS THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN FOR SEXUAL GRATIFICATION."

      Of course not. Peter Thiel loves children. He had two for lunch.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    5. Re:Slashdot Smear? by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Seriously, Slashdot, how low will you go? This is a straight smear and as much as I dislike how Thiel has chosen to wield his power, this paints you pretty desperate.

      Look at the source. Gawker.

      Read any Gawker web site and they're all be posting the same drivel in an attempt to remain relevant and portray themselves as an "honest web site providing news with integrity".

      I'm serious - after the court case every Gawker site was running news articles that show all the "positive things" that Gawker has done, or heavily slanted versions of such. Likewise, every little piece of dirt, rumors, innuendo they can bring up about the court case, Hulk Hogan, Peter Thiel, they posted, true or not.

      And yes, they completely "forget" the fact that they actively defied a court order to take down the video that started it all - every other site took it down, but Gawker not only kept it up, but admitted to defying it on purpose "for the public interest".

    6. Re:Slashdot Smear? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Slashdot Smear? by Immerman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Come now - if they actually managed to show a significant rejuvenating effect for young blood transfusions, do you really think anyone with wealth, power, and a fear of death would wait several decades for researchers to isolate and synthesize the key components, when a simple well-understood blood transfusion procedure would start getting them the benefits tomorrow?

      Wouldn't even need to be anything particularly ghoulish - regularly selling reasonable-sized donations of your kid's blood to the wealthy could be a wonderful way to build up their college fund. People donate blood all the time to save lives, at the right price I'm sure plenty would be willing to sell it to some evil tyrant. (Okay, you don't necessarily have to be evil or powerful to accumulate lots of wealth in today's world, but that's the way to bet...)

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  4. Sounds like bullshit to me. by jcr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm sure Gawker has every intention of taking all the cheap shots they can at Thiel before they get locked out of their offices.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:Sounds like bullshit to me. by Kjella · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sounds like bullshit to me. I'm sure Gawker has every intention of taking all the cheap shots they can at Thiel before they get locked out of their offices.

      Possibly. But he wouldn't be the first guy to get obsessed with the fact that they're going to die like the rest of us. A bunch get religious but you also have cryonics, uploading your brain to a computer and so on which is way into sci-fantasy land for the time being. Heck you even have people who think a caveman diet will do it. With all due respect to the scientific progress we are making, all we can cure of disease and injury we haven't even scratched the surface on reversing aging.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:Sounds like bullshit to me. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      he wouldn't be the first guy to get obsessed with the fact that they're going to die like the rest of us.

      People getting obsessed with solving a problem is what drives science and technology forward. Would you rather that Peter spent his time playing golf?

      Disclaimer: I have "baby blood", meaning I am CMV negative, so instead of receiving blood from the young, I donate to babies. A pint every 8 weeks, totalling to 10 gallons so far, and I have a t-shirt from the Red Cross to prove it.

    3. Re:Sounds like bullshit to me. by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      With all due respect to the scientific progress we are making, all we can cure of disease and injury we haven't even scratched the surface on reversing aging.

      It's not at all a matter of reversing aging. Every cell in every organ eventually stops dividing at a fast enough rate to sustain itself. Your skin, which is an organ, tends to be the easiest to observe doing this. However there's no reason why they MUST slow down, they just do because of the way our telomeres work (which may be an evolutionary response to cancer. Plants, which also get cancer, never die from it, which may be why they live much longer than animals.)

      Likewise, if you can cause your cells to continue dividing at the rate they do when you've reached your peak growth, even when you're older you'll likely regain a youthful appearance. But you didn't reverse aging; that is, your body is still older, even though it doesn't look or behave like an older body normally would.

      You'll also need to be able to figure out a way to regrow damaged or lost tissue; for example being able to regrow an amputated limb. Some species of animals have an inherent ability to do this, in addition to humans having a similar trait at a very young age (sometimes kids as old as 10 can completely regrow the tip of their finger if at least some of the nail is intact. Mice can do this as well for their entire palm, even when they're old in some cases.)

  5. in retrospect... by steak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire-turned-Trump delegate who successfully bankrupted Gawker Media"

    outing him was probably a tactical error.

    --
    lose != loose
    1. Re:in retrospect... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Gawker Media was all about hate and hypocrisy. They were bound to end up like this eventually. They got their $140 million worth of entertainment out of harming people. What makes me angry is all the people defending Gawker claiming First Amendment or some other crap.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  6. And here it comes... by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...there will be a lot of money flowing into anti-aging malarky now that the super-rich tech executives are hitting their late 40s. They are getting scared because they know they are going to die just like everyone else, and all their money won't another minute buy.

    1. Re:And here it comes... by veriti · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Back in 80s only really rich could get cell phones. They started the trend. Now you and I can enjoy it too. Yes, it took some time, but they are cheap and everybody can afford them. The rich lead the way. Same with curing aging. It must be billionaires leading the way. You and I can not afford spending millions on biomedical research. Or can you? I say few dozen years from now, our kids will wonder why we all did not invest in our future and make our 80s and 90s to be healthy living time instead we died slowly in decrepitude and pain. Or think this way, ask your grandma if she loves to have Alzheimer or Parkinson. Go Thiel !!!

    2. Re:And here it comes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Rich and powerful people for millennia have tried to extend their lives. Quite a few even convinced themselves and their retinues that they were immortal, all-powerful gods.

      They were all wrong. Thiel will be the latest to learn this lesson.

      The best you can do is to keep yourself healthy, which might add a couple of (hopefully good) years to your life. "Keeping yourself healthy" involves the boring old advice to exercise, eat a balanced diet, keep a partner, and stay interested in the world. Apparently believers also get some benefit from praying (worship). It never, repeat never involves crap like ingesting the blood of the young, treating yourself with mercury/arsenic/herbals/whatever, zapping yourself with electricity, colonics, chelation, sleeping on a plank in a cold room, etc.

    3. Re:And here it comes... by stealth_finger · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
    4. Re:And here it comes... by ranton · · Score: 2

      The difference between cellphones and immortality, is that nobody was trying to create cellphones for the last 6000 years with no success.

      What kind of nonsense is this? Inventing new forms of communication and inventing new ways to combat death are both among the oldest forms of technology. We have been fixing problems which have been around for thousands of years quite often in the past couple centuries. Is your argument that since ancient men like Qin Shi Huang were unsuccessful making an elixir of immortality that modern science will be unsuccessful? That is a very weak argument.

      Immortality, if we ever have it, wont come from an app startup with a handful of new graduates pounding away at JSON and Web 3.0 paradimes.

      No, but it likely will come from a bio-tech startup with a handful of PhD's and postdocs pounding away at the problem. Kind of like the one Peter Thiel is working on.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
  7. Re: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wikipedia says Elizabeth Bathory did not actually bathe in the blood of virgins, so Peter Thiel may be able to take the lead on this one.

  8. Colleg fund by fermion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you were 18 and could fund college by selling blood, would you? The downside is that if people were allowed to sell blood on the open market, the price of blood bank blood would likely go up significantly. Right now they get it for free. OTOH if you had to be healthy to sell blood, that would be an incentive for kids to eat better, not abuse drugs, and stay VD free. This to me is more akin to pr0n than selling organs. Blood is simply a renewable resource that needs to be regulated.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    1. Re:Colleg fund by swillden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You are aware that blood getting a price tag means that a lot of people will die because they need that blood but will not get it, right?

      I think that's unlikely, and inconsistent with pretty much everything else we've learned from economics. Competitive markets and unregulated pricing are, in fact, the best way we've ever found to ensure that a commodity is available in abundance. Artificial restrictions are what produce scarcity. In addition, it's hard to see how, of all the emergency medical procedures a dying person needs to save their life, that the price of blood could ever be what causes someone to die. There are fairly few circumstances in which *all* a dying person needs is blood; usually there's also surgery and other vastly more expensive medical work involved.

      My guess is that if blood were bought and sold as a commodity, the price would be pretty low because the potential supply greatly exceeds demand. You might get some reduction in supply from people who don't need the money but donate because they feel it's a good cause, but I think that would be more than offset by the number of young people who do need money who would donate as often as they safely could (there would need to be restrictions on donation frequency; I'm not sure a market would impose those and if not then some artificial regulation would be necessary).

      Alternatively, it's entirely possible that if blood were bought and sold there would be sufficient motivation for the development of an artificial alternative that might be so inexpensive to manufacture that blood donation would be a thing of the past.

      All in all, I really wonder if we're best served by the current restriction on the selling of blood. Restricting transactions in organs that don't grow back makes sense, but a healthy body will make more blood indefinitely.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    2. Re:Colleg fund by non0score · · Score: 2

      As long as the logistics isn't an issue, it's rather easy to solve this problem -- require a tax of 10-20% of all donated blood to go into blood banks. Now you'll have more blood in blood banks than what you know to do with.

  9. Simpsons did it by smeg+for+brains · · Score: 4, Funny

    "I tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy" - C.M. Burns

    --
    Watch out, there are Llamas!!
  10. There was a scary sci-fi story by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    about this sort of thing. The slightest crime was punished by death to fill the organ banks. It's gonna get really ugly, really fast if we solve organ rejection before we can make organs. Already some horror stories coming out of China... Dick Cheney's got an artificial heart, and I can't think of anyone less deserving...

    And it's been pretty well proven that blood transfusions from young to old improve quality of life so long as nothing goes wrong with the transfusion.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  11. Bad idea even if it worked by gslj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have to say that I'm against life extension research. My one comfort, when some bad person gets the firmest of grips on a suffering country, is that the bad person will die, and someone else with different views will take over. Imagine Stalin remaining in power till 1978 (he'd be only a hundred) instead of dying in 1953. Or Mao Zedong in power till 2045. Does anyone think the world will be better off? I don't like what President Erdogan's doing to Turkey. I honestly take some comfort in the fact he was born in 1954, and he's unlikely to be on the scene in ten years' time.

    -Gareth

    1. Re:Bad idea even if it worked by ShooterNeo · · Score: 2

      You literally can't think of a better solution to dictatorship than condemning everyone you ever know and yourself to eternal oblivion of death?

      Has it ever occurred to you that in a world where most people expect to be around in a few centuries, and for the foreseeable future unless a big war or planetary scale disaster happens, might be a world where wiser, more long sighted decisions generally are made?

      How much of these poor decisions now are due to decaying brains in people who still have voting power? You do realize that aging related intelligence decline would have to be fixed, or life extension wouldn't extend your life...

  12. Blockbuster drug by Dorianny · · Score: 2

    Transfusions are inherently risky with possibilities for life threatening immune reactions or infection by pathogens that went undetected. It is unlikely that Thiel or anyone else is seriously considering using Transfusions as a rejuvenation treatment. There is a lot of promise thou in trying to figure out exactly what about young blood gives this rejuvenating effect. It is entirely possible that the rejuvinating effect could be induced with the use of a drug, one that would most certainly be a blockbuster drug for anyone that can develop it

  13. Re:Aging is a degenerative disease by Dorianny · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Research suggests that aging is actually a species survival strategy from the earliest days of life. Young bacteria fared much better when competing against aging, slowing parents. Without this advantage the young would have difficulty competing with their hardened parents and the species future would be jeopardized as the old continue accumulating genetic damage from environmental factors such as UV rays, which means higher chances of unhealthy offspring

  14. Re:What a nice story by jmac_the_man · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The reason Gawker went after Thiel in the first place is because Thiel was politically active in a way that Gawker disagreed with.

    The "Hillary's lesbian lover" stuff that GP referenced is examples of transparent, dopey right wing smears that Slashdot isn't (and shouldn't be) reporting on. This report on Thiel is the left wing version of that. It's a bullshit smear, from a transparently non-objective source. And Slashdot is covering it as real anyway. Hmm.

  15. This is an excellent way to get blood poisoning by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 2

    There is a risk of blood poisoning (septicemia) with each transfusion.

    It's how my mom died.

    It's very hard to cure and it can kill you quickly.

    http://www.transfusion.com.au/...

    http://www.bloodjournal.org/co...
    Transfusion-related sepsis: a silent epidemic

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  16. Re:Stephen King, Dead at 68 by mrbester · · Score: 2

    That's, what, the fourth time he's died? Guy just can't catch a break. Still, at least he gets better, though that can't last forever.

    Or maybe it can. A quart of baby blood on standby for Mr King, Nurse. The fresher the better, so you should draw the screens.

    --
    "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
  17. Re:Cristopher Reeve anyone ? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

    What's the opposite of Christopher Reeve?

    Christopher Walken

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.