Young Blood

Fountain of Youth

Of course, this is still just something that’s been seen in a lab, with mice, and there are physiological differences between mice and humans, but still…Wow!  This is fountain of youth  stuff.

Basically, they’ve noticed that  if you give old mice transfusions of young mouse blood, they act a lot perkier and even, in some ways, seem to get younger.  One cool thing about  doing this research with mice is their relatively short life span.  If a mouse lives to the age of 3, they send them to the Old Mouse’s Home and their great-grandmouslings never come to visit.  So, if any of these mice live to be 5 or 6, we’ll know that they’ve had a second life.  My suspicion is that this is not quite the fountain of youth  and more like a mouse version of Red Bull, but I’d love to be proven wrong.  I think.

Where is all that blood going to come from?  I doubt very much that young mouse blood would work on humans, and in any event, you’d need a lot of it.  A young mouse probably doesn’t have more than a teaspoonful of blood in  its whole body.

If human blood is required, and old people need massive transfusions of blood from young people, that’s going to lead to all sorts of horrors.  The people who kidnap people to steal a kidney will not have any moral objection to kidnapping someone and keeping them strapped to a gurney for months, or even years, while they drain their blood.  Or killing them outright, a la Elizabeth Bathory, and taking all their blood at once, although I doubt if that would be the most cost-effective method.  Or it could  just perpetuate the inequalities of our current society, with rich elderly people paying unemployed youth for their blood.

In the best case scenario, scientists could figure out what it is in the juvenile mouse blood that is creating this effect and synthesize it, like the Vampire scientists in True Blood.  Then we could all live forever and the world would become incredibly overpopulated, but that’s the way it works.

As technology advances, we trade one set of problems for another, and I’m all for that – just as long as we keep trading up.