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Anti-Aging Start-Up Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood (vanityfair.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A startup called Ambrosia is charging about $8,000 a pop for blood transfusions from people under 25, Jesse Karmazin said at Code Conference. Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Some are Silicon Valley technologists, like Thiel, though Karmazin stressed that tech types aren't Ambrosia's only clients, and that anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions. Karmazin was inspired to found Ambrosia after seeing studies researchers had done involving sewing mice together with their veins conjoined. Some aspects of aging, one 2013 study found, could be reversed when older mice get blood from younger ones, but other researchers haven't been able to replicate these results, and the benefits of parabiosis in humans remains unclear. "I think the animal and retrospective data is compelling, and I want this treatment to be available to people," Karmazin told the MIT Technology Review.
It's Bram Stoker spining is his grave.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
You plebs better hope your not in an accident and need a blood transfusion cause the rich will be cutting into the already short supply!
Are they going to start bathing in milk again too?
... Peter Thiel would be a real-life vampire would actually explain a lot.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Why isn't the FDA shutting this down.
Drinking blood is the next big thing to keep old people young.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/julia-caples-drinking-blood_n_3416983.html
Note that donated Blood has an expiration date. Living cells die. Red blood cells last for 42 days, platelets last only for 7 days.
That means in order to have enough blood for medical emergencies, we need t constantly have EXTRA blood available that will be wasted. Which means that every day we throw out a ton of 'expired' blood.
This new business can help manage this problem. Bigger market, means less gets wasted. Worst case scenario, we can say "sorry, you need to return that blood, that was a 12 car pile up on I95." Build it into their contracts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
More like 43 year old homeless drug addict blood. But how would you tell?
A little hepatitis never hurt anybody...
It's _possible_ there might be some effect from this process, but a business model based on the idea sounds like an attempt to milk as much money as they can before it all falls apart.
Either further tests by researchers will prove that the perceived effect was a mistake or due to something besides the blood itself, or they'll figure out what the mechanism is and they'll develop a means to synthesize whatever component of the blood causes it. Which means you'll be able to get the treatment without paying thousands of dollars to be a high-tech vampire.
Until then they're counting on the fact that it _sounds_ plausible to a layman, and also probably that some really rich people _like_ the idea of sucking the life out of poor people in a much more literal manner than they can usually get away with.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I say go for it. Millenials and whatever the younger generations are have been screwed over by boomers. If boomers want to throw peanuts to the younger generation in exchange for something they can easily regenerate, fine, it's better than the financial vampirism they've already done to education, social security etc.
Plus, as long as you match up the blood types and keep things clean, it doesn't hurt anyone. Unlike the stem cell superstition clinics currently targeting people with more money than ability to understand medical advice.
I wonder if the original donors know that their blood is being sold for this use? I know that if I donated my blood thinking it was going to save a life, and it was instead sold for profit, I'd be a little disturbed.
"All I needed was the blood of a young boy" - https://youtu.be/VRNwqVU70Q8
He's stayed alive this long, he must be onto something
Twinstiq, game news
And I thought the transfusion scene in Silicon Valley with Gavin Belson was so absurd as to be fantasy. The real Silicon Valley (place) is far scarier than the show makes it out to be.
And in other news, the number of teenage runaways appears to have quadrupled over the last year. Details at 11.
If you ever need an organ transplant, all those transfusions will lower your ability to find a good match. When my wife was on the list for a kidney transplant, she needed transfusions due to anemia, and MAN did they hold back as much as possible so as not to screw her out of a new kidney.
Blood transfusions carry risks. Virus screening isn't perfect. Transfusions are for emergencies, not for vanity.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Loren Pickart first discovered this effect in the 1970s and found the responsible isolate, GHK, which has been extensively studied.
It's probably available in kilogram quantities for the price this company is charging.
This company is either ignorant of basic science, or a deliberate scam.
Sounds like the dumbest and riskiest thing to do with blood. I'd bet that there are huge risks with blood transfusions.
Long-term things like immune-system fatigue,
big things like contamination, and
small things like whoops-wrong-blood-type.
When you're severely injured, and in a hospital, and doing it rarely, those risks are certainly and obviously worth undertaking.
But voluntarilly taking those risks, in the hopes of a very-long-term benefit, well, how many of those risks need to go wrong before you've made things worse instead of better?
I'm thinking the answer is only one.
They're doing it wrong
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
would you then be a stakeholder ?
People in hell do not rot, as it turns out. The structural integrity of their bodies is miraculously maintained so that they can be tortured in fire indefinitely. That is how beings of justice, love, and mercy behave towards their creations.
Once again, the Simpsons were ahead of their time:
“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.”
--Montgomery Burns
I like how the left out the follow-up study in mice where they only gave transfusions to the older mice and it had no effect.
It turns out the effect was from the young kidneys, liver, etc. that the older mice could use when their circulatory systems were joined.
I get my daily caffeine transfusion from coffee beans which are younger than me.
Works every time.
Probably much safer too... for me... not the bean.
I've always pictured hell as a lot like slashdot. You can imagine that the devil would be a grammar and spelling Nazi of the worst kind.
:p
It probably would have a lot of the same people there.