Birthdays become a little hectic once you go over the age of 25. There’s always this underlying anxiety about the years passing by faster and faster. It also sucks that the Fountain of Youth is nothing more than a fairy tale, though let’s face it, if the fountain did exist, some annoying kid would’ve probably peed in it by now.
Anyway, in the quest to conquer that most incessant of foes – age – one private clinic in Monterey, California is offering to pump the veins of the aged with blood plasma from teenagers and young adults for $8000, according to Business Insider.
It sounds like something out of the Resident Evil movies or some other dystopian franchise, but it’s really happening, and it all came about due to an entrepreneur named Jesse Karmazin. His startup, named Ambrosia (after the food of the immortal Greek gods) launched a clinical trial to test the effects of this ‘young blood’. He claims that most participants see a variety of improvements from a one-time infusion of a two-litre bag of plasma, which is blood with the blood cells removed.
Specifically, it’s said to help increase muscle strength, alleviate the neurological deficits induced by acute strokes, and combat Alzheimer’s.
However, the evidence of these beneficial effects is highly inconclusive, as suggested by a large number of scientists and clinicians.
According to them, the entire trial is designed poorly, and some even say the whole model reeks of a scam. Considering the pay-to-participate study has the potential to collect up to $4.8 million from up to 600 participants, you can see why there’s a lot of doubt. The idea behind this blood plasma transfusion also stems from tests done on mice, where researchers had sewn the mice together, with their veins conjoined, in a procedure called parabiosis, which is only vaguely similar to what Karmazin is doing. Irina Conboy, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley said, “There is no evidence to suggest that an infusion of plasma from young to old animals reverses aging.”
Basically, we just need to wait and see what happens, but I’m sure we can all agree, this shit sounds pretty damn futuristic!