You’ve just been invited to the swankiest
party in the city. Lucky you! Sure, you may just be a poor college student
surviving pay-check-to-pay-check, but for reasons currently unknown to you, the local
movers and shakers at a mansion outside town really want you to attend. But when you arrive, you notice everyone seems
to be about sixty years older than you. Immediately your mind is racing, wondering
if you’ve been invited to some creepy Eyes Wide Shut sex party or if you’re about to
have your body donated to one of their rich old brains, like in Jordan Peele’s movie
Get Out. But hey, don’t worry about it! They don’t want your body (in either sense)
they just want your blood. That’s right – the sweet, red elixir of
life. And no, they’re not part of some deranged
blood cult. They’re actually customers to a new Silicon
Valley start up offering a process known as “young blood transfusion.” Which, by the way, is literally exactly what
it sounds like. Rich old people are buying young people’s
blood to maintain their youth and vitality. Let’s talk about the how, where, when, and
why. And yes, this really is happening. Sometimes also called Parabiosis, young blood
transfusions take a seat beside cryonics and head transplants as semi-scientific attempts
to pursue immortality. The fact is, very few people want to die,
and the rich even less so, seeing as they’ve got it pretty good as it is. Pandering to wealthy old people’s fear of
mortality is the entire business model of Ambrosia LLC, the creepily-named start-up
created by entrepreneur Jesse Karmazin. It’s worth noting that, while Karmazin claims
he’s a medical doctor, the exact nature of his supposed medical credentials has never
really been made clear. Ambrosia LLC offered a unique service: Living
beyond your years with regular paid blood transfusions. Karmazin wasn’t just promising smoothed
wrinkles or slight improvements to your quality of life, either. In one interview, he claimed that what the
company was offering was pretty close to immortality. Count Dracula would be inclined to agree. Before essentially being shut down by the
FDA for its shady business practices, more on that later, Ambrosia LLC claimed to be
up and running in five different clinics across the United States – with locations in Houston,
Omaha, Tampa, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The company offered their wealthy, sanguinarian
clientele a single litre of teenage blood – all purchased from medical blood banks
– for $8,000, and two litres for $12,000. That’s $4,000 off the second litre – what
a steal! They even took payments on PayPal, though
whether the kind of person in the market for $12,000 of human blood uses PayPal is an open
question. Ambrosia began holding its first independent
clinical trials in 2017, testing whether its business model really provided any kind of
meaningful health benefit. Tellingly, the results of this study were
never actually made public, but Karmazin went public to assure potential investors and customers
they had nothing to worry about. While this raised eyebrows among medical experts
already feeling dubious about the benefits of Karmazin’s business, rich, elderly weirdos
were extremely interested in what he had to say. According to the former Chief Executive Officer
of Ambrosia LLC, David Cavalier, the company received over one hundred inquiries about
the treatment from prospective customers as soon as their first website launched. As the months passed, Ambrosia truly opened
for business, and more details emerged about their round of clinical trials. There had been 81 participants in the trials,
and by the September of 2017, the company had served a further 69 paying customers. The ages of these customers ranged from as
young as thirty-five to as old as ninety-two. Even high-profile billionaires like PayPal’s
Peter Thiel have expressed interest in undergoing a Young Blood Transfusion, but the science
surrounding Ambrosia’s work is still extremely shaky. In public statements about the dealings of
the company, Jesse Karmazin has always been unsettlingly vague. Speaking about the results of the clinical
trials, he said “Some patients got young blood, and others got older blood, and I was
able to do some statistics on it, and the results looked really awesome, and I thought
this is the kind of therapy that I'd want to be available to me.” Assurances that the results looked “awesome”
didn’t do much to assuage the fears of Karmazin and Ambrosia’s critics. Researchers like Irina Conboy called the treatment
Ambrosia was offering dangerous, citing adverse side effects experienced by patients, and
saying that the company “quite likely could inflict bodily harm” on its clientele. Michael Conboy, a cell and molecular biologist
at the University of California, Berkeley, said of the whole idea of rejuvenating blood
transfusions “reeks of snake oil”, also saying “There’s no evidence in my mind
that it’s going to work.” Now, why it all came crashing down for Karmazin
and his vampiric start-up. In February of 2019, the FDA came out with
a devastating condemnation of Young Blood Transfusion, releasing the following statement:
“There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure,
mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use
of any plasma product. The reported uses of these products should
not be assumed to be safe or effective. We strongly discourage consumers from pursuing
this therapy outside of clinical trials under appropriate institutional review board and
regulatory oversight.” This was essentially the death knell for Ambrosia,
leaving its public credibility as anything more than predatory quack-science in tatters. On February 19th, Ambrosia released a press
statement, saying that they had ceased all operations. Like a vampire that’s been staked, Ambrosia
was no more. You may be hoping that Ambrosia is an outlier
here, offering a niche treatment to a selection of desperate old rich people. But the fact is, this may have wider appeal
across the US. In February of 2018, The Young Blood Symposium
hosted by the South Florida Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplant Institute made its case
for the widely discredited treatment. At this symposium, the elderly clientele who’d
come from as far as Scotland were reminded of their imminent deaths by speakers, before
being pitched Young Blood Transfusions as a potential escape from their impending demise. Critics have unsurprisingly accused companies
and events like this of taking advantage of elderly and uninformed people’s fears and
desperation for profit. Not that taking advantage of desperate people
has ever stopped con men before, from the classic snake oil salesmen of the Old West
to salesmen selling deadly, radioactive Radithor tonic to the unsuspecting public in the early
20th century. While this may seem like a brand-new health
fad invented by bizarre Silicon Valley hucksters, the seeds of this idea have been around for
a long time – and while what Ambrosia was offering was virtually useless, its core ideas
do have some basis in scientific fact. The term Parabiosis was coined by physiologist
Paul Bert all the way back in the Nineteenth Century as part of his work with animal circulatory
systems. The name means “Living Beside”, and refers
to the anatomical joining of two organisms. In this case, a young blood donor with an
older, richer recipient. One, in theory, helps the other. The groundwork for later research in this
extremely niche field was laid further in the 1930s by Cornell University biochemist
and gerontologist Clive McCay. Clive dedicated a lot of his time to researching
the study of ageing, and found that caloric restriction through shifting their diets helped
ageing rats live longer. McCay found this fascinating, and decided
to research whether rat ageing could be halted or at least slowed by any other means. That’s when he started sewing rats together. In an experiment that would make Dr. Frankenstein
or that weird dude from The Human Centipede proud, McCay and his assistants sewed two
rats – one older, one younger – together by the skin on their sides. When left to heal in this condition, the two
rats grew blood vessels that connected their circulatory systems into one, big circuit. When the two rats died, McCay and his team
performed an autopsy, and came up with some truly incredible results. The cartilage of the older rat looked far
more youthful than it had any right to be. However, while these results are interesting,
they couldn’t prove any kind of meaningful causal relationship. But this was more than enough to inspire future
unconventional blood transfusion experiments. A lot of these experiments were, admittedly,
less than impressive. Back when McCay was still making his caloric
restriction discoveries, Soviet physician Alexander Bogdanov was using himself as a
guinea pig for transfusion experiments. He injected the blood of a student with malaria
and tuberculosis into his own body in what was likely an attempt at trying to achieve
eternal life. Sadly, this instead killed him. A lot of blood transfusion experiments end
in tragedy or just nothing rather than truly spectacular results. While neither Bogdanov and McCay were equipped
to know this at the time, the secret behind the success of some of the experiments – and
the supposed science behind modern young blood transfusions – laid in stem cells. These are the undifferentiated cells that
exist most prominently in developing foetuses, and can then convert into any cell in the
body for development and growth. A study performed in the early 2000s by Dr.
Thomas A. Rando and his associates used McCay’s experimental design to test the relationship
between Parabiosis experiments and stem cell activity. Much like McCay, they sewed together old and
young mice for five weeks before euthanizing and examining them. They found that the older mice experienced
muscle regeneration consistent with that of the younger mice, as well as growing more
liver cells at a far more youthful rate. Dr. Rando’s theory was that the young blood
“awakened” dormant stem cells and stimulated a youthful rate of cell division. Interestingly, the process actually goes both
ways. The younger mice in this equation seemed to
have grown prematurely old after receiving old blood from their elderly mouse counterparts. Their tissue regeneration slowed down, and
their stem cell multiplication rate also saw a huge reduction. Harvard researcher Dr. Amy J. Wagers later
also found that young blood helped rejuvenate the hearts of old mice. And over at Stanford in 2011, Dr. Saul Villeda
found that the same was also true for the brains of old mice. When young blood was introduced into the system,
the hippocampuses of the old mice's brains started sprouting new neural connections at
an unprecedented rate. The conclusion? It’s possible that compounds present in
blood can stimulate or dampen stem cell activity depending on whether the blood is young or
old. You can see why a wealthy old pseudo-vampire
might see this research and immediately start reaching for their check book. But the fact is, like all science, it’s
actually a whole lot more complicated than the catchy headlines and business pitches
about “miracle cures” makes it seem. Who would have guessed, right? In 2016, Irina and Michael Conboy released
a study that undermined the appeal of a lot of this previous research. Their study found that Parabiosis is often
only beneficial when the two organisms are sharing organs and forming a complete circulatory
circuit, rather than just having small quantities of blood injected into them. Also, the fact that all of these studies have
purely been conducted on mice also throws in serious barriers for the research’s applicability
to humans. And even when these methods are applied to
humans, if they theoretically were successful, there would still be huge risks to the health
of patients. Not only are infection, inflammation, and
rejection always a risk in blood transfusions – especially in transfusions without professional
medical oversight – causing unchecked stem cell multiplication and growth can come with
its own dangers. Irina Conboy pointed out the fact that this
could cause incidences of cancer to rise massively in patients of Young Blood Transfusion, that
would truly defeat the point of a process meant to score its customers longer-to-eternal
life. After explaining all this to the rich people
who’ve summoned you here for blood, you’ve seriously ruined this party. It’s a real shame, because you didn’t
even have a chance to try the hors d'oeuvres before you’re being escorted out and sent
home. Shame, real shame. In the end, there really are no easy ways
to buy yourself into eternal life. Maybe having a good diet, reducing stress,
and exercising is your best bet. Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics
Show! Interested in more bloody good fun? Why not check out “What Is The Blood Rain?”
and “Japanese Horrific Serial Killer – Tsutomo Miyazak (The Human Dracula).” After all, making interesting videos is in
our blood.
