Peter Thiel’s blood harvesting was tried by the Soviets a century ago
It did not go well the first time
Donald Trump isn’t the only one taking cues from Russia lately. Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder whose unabashed support for Trump has unsettled some Silicon Valley leaders, also seems to be looking to the former Soviet Union for ideas.
Inc. magazine has reported that Thiel’s latest pet project is an anti-aging technology called parabiosis, a form of blood transfusion that involves injecting a young person’s blood into an older person’s body in order to reverse signs of aging.
“There are widespread rumors in Silicon Valley, where life-extension science is a popular obsession, that various wealthy individuals from the tech world have already begun practicing parabiosis, spending tens of thousands of dollars for the procedures and young-person-blood, and repeating the exercise several times a year,” Inc’s Jeff Bercovici reports. “In our April 2015 interview, Thiel was seemingly explicit that parabiosis was something he hadn’t ‘quite, quite, quite started yet.’ A Thiel Capital spokesman said nothing had changed since then.” A Monterey company called Ambrosia has been trialling the procedure.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, because it is. The Russian novelist and scientist Alexander Bogdanov wrote about parabiosis in his 1908 novel Red Star, in which a socialist hero travels to Mars and discovers that the collectivized Martian population is using blood transfusion to cheat death.
“Are you able to rejuvenate old people by introducing young blood into their veins?” Bogdanov’s hero asks upon arriving on Mars. “To an extent, yes, but not altogether,” a Martian doctor responds.
But Bogdanov didn’t confine his ideas to the realm of fiction.
In 1926, he set about realizing his futuristic vision as the new head of a Soviet institute for blood transfusion research. “Blood transfusions have enormous scientific and social import,” he wrote in a newspaper article announcing the new center. According to Nikolai Krementsov’s detailed biography, Bogdanov hoped to bring about a society defined by “physiological collectivism,” and began experimenting with transfusion as early as 1923.
After performing 11 transfusions on himself, he remarked upon “the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms.” His 12th transfusion, however, proved fatal, after he used the blood of a student sick with malaria. Bogdanov was still in his early 50s.
