Science And Society, Technology and Society

Young Blood

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…the fountain of youth?

Tissue from the hippocampus of old mice given young blood showed changes in the expression of 200 to 300 genes, particularly in those involved in synaptic plasticity, which underpins learning and memory. They also found changes in some proteins involved in nerve growth.

The infusion of young blood also boosted the number and strength of neuronal connections in an area of the brain where new cells do not grow. This didn’t happen when old mice received old blood.

To find out whether these changes improved cognition, the team gave 12 old mice eight intravenous shots of blood plasma either from a young or an old mouse, over the course of one month. They used plasma rather than whole blood to exclude any effect produced by blood cells.

The mice then took part in a standard memory task to locate a hidden platform in water. The old mice that had received young blood plasma remembered where to find the platform much quicker than the mice on the old plasma.

Of course, this is the theme of many a science fiction story in which a rich evil codger kidnaps youth to drain their blood and preserve his own vitality. But I hope it turns out to be right, and they can figure out how to extract and manufacture whatever it is.

13 thoughts on “Young Blood”

    1. Assuming they don’t hate us later, my wife and I are statistically better off than many–we have more than the 2.1/1.9 average number of children. They are good kids. Very good. I’m so proud of them and want to help them be happy and successful. They love their parents very much.

  3. So we need to get the birth rate up in those third world countries and instigate a variant of Swift’s Modest Proposal?

  6. This technique was the basis for the rejuvenation therapy that was discovered after the Howard Families fled Earth in Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”. One of the Howard family researchers mentioned that they had considered it, but rejected it since you would need to take blood from the young and there wouldn’t be enough to go around. However, the researchers on Earth found a way to grow blood outside the body. (I guess via growing marrow in vitro, which has been discussed as a way to alleviate shortages at blood banks.)

  7. Although it’s been 25+ years since I read “Methuselah’s Children” (not among my favorite RAH novels), I immediately recalled the same plot points that ech mentions. Another thing that really stuck in my head: the Howard families were long-lived due to a genetic breeding program (some rich dude who died young of old age set up a foundation to encourage and incentivize naturally long-lived people marrying each other). However, an important reason they fled earth was because the normal-lived people hated them for their long lives and believed they were keeping some great secret about longevity. After the Howard families left, the people on earth discovered the rejuvenation therapy (blood replacement) largely because they didn’t believe in the genetic longevity of the Howards and thought there must be a secret–which they went on to discover. Reminded me how of how some initial antiseptic work was based on the idea of “the smell of death,” with perfume (high in alcohol content) used “successfully” to ward off the smell. Sort of a wrong thinking, wrong motivation, but successful result situation. Win for experimental science. Or something.

  8. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story in which a group of scientists were shown a film of a crackpot scientist flying around in an antigravity device he had invented, the crackpot crashed and the resulting fire destroyed the device and his notes, the scientists were supposed to recreate the device. They did, although it ended up looking nothing like the device in the film clip. After which it was revealed that the film was a fake, but the gvmt felt it needed to overcome the preconceptions of the scientists that such a device was impossible.

    1. Reminds me of an old story out of Myrtle Beach AFB in the early to mid 1980s. The local wing would play war several times a year, flying A-10s out over the Atlantic simulating the sort of sortie generation they would fly in a war. Of course, the Soviet trawlers would come close to shore and record everything said on every radio possible. So this flight lead gets it in his mind to play Klingon Cloaking Device with the trawlers. For 3-4 days every time this pair flew (3 times a day), they would go thru some sort of intraflight checkout of goggles and the “device” on the common radio frequency. Occasionally they would screw something up and one couldn’t see the other and they would have to start over. They hammed it up pretty well. At the end of the surge, they had a good laugh about what the Soviets were doing with the tapes, wondering how to make an A-10 invisible on 28V DC. As the story is told, the good news is that there were a bunch of Soviet physicists working deep underground somewhere in the Urals figuring it out wasting time on the foolishness. The bad news is that they are making progress. Cheers –

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