I Drink Your Blood

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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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,

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 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

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 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.

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