“Salem’s Lot,” a new adaptation of the eponymous 1975 Stephen King book, is a spooky vampire thriller rife with all the tropes beloved by King fans—a small New England town, a self-inserted writer character, and lots of undead kids. In it, a mysterious antique store owner moves to town, ensnaring residents in the trap of a bloodthirsty vampire.
In real life, some billionaires and longevity enthusiasts have experimented with a similarly vampiric idea: using blood drawn from the young to rejuvenate their own aging bodies. While there is some research showing that young blood could have anti-aging effects, the procedure isn’t as simple as sucking blood up through a straw, or from a neck. Here’s the eerie truth.
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The day we are born, the aging clock starts ticking. It may tick faster or slower depending on our genes, the good and bad habits we pick up in life, or just plain luck—but it always moves inexorably forward until the day we die.
The aging process is not fully outside of human control, however. And over the past few decades, researchers have uncovered some intriguing mechanisms that could one day be exploited to slow or potentially even reset the clock for key determinants of the aging process.
In 2014, for example, researchers led by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray performed experiments in which they infused old mice with blood from young animals—a technique known as parabiosis. The effects were striking, with the treated mice showing increased growth and connectivity among brain cells, and clear improvements in memory and cognition. Between 2017 and 2022, the Switzerland-based NOMIS Foundation would fund efforts by Wyss-Coray’s group to identify specific blood-borne molecules that can facilitate similar “rejuvenation” of the brain in humans.
This notion is still not universally embraced. “I think the general concept that age is malleable is something that has only recently sort of become acknowledged by most scientists,” says Wyss-Coray. “I think there’s still many who have not heard about it or are surprised about it.” But the implications could be tremendous and far-reaching.
https://www.science.org/content/article/infusing-new-energy-field-aging-research
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