Studies published over the last 15 years have found that young blood can reinvigorate aging mice. Now, scientists are trying to crack the code—or codes—swimming through our veins.
snuffles around a tiny tower of Legos, turns away, then comes back to snuffle again. He’s 18 months old—a senior citizen, in rodent terms. And it’s getting tough to keep it all straight. Do these blocks seem familiar to him? Has he seen this thing before?
But in this lab, headed up by neurobiologist Saul Villeda, nobody is sighing and moping over graybeard mice. Here, aging is not a sad fate to bemoan; it’s a problem to be solved. And for mice, at least, this team has already figured out how to reverse the damage time brings. Benjamin Button-ing, of course, isn’t natural. But Villeda counters that getting old isn’t either: “It is the most artificial construct.” Previously, only a very few rare individuals reached 90 or 100. Now, in wealthy nations, it’s becoming downright common.
Months later, a Frenchman died following a transfusion, taking the wind out of these blood-spattered sails. The pope himself put an end to the practice in 1679.A new round of transfusion science emerged in the early 19th century, this one with much more scientific rigor. These experiments helped establish the first real knowledge about how to keep injured soldiers from bleeding out or mothers from dying in labor.
But what is it that coordinates this systemic ruin? Fellow Stanford neurologist Thomas Rando reasoned that it made sense to look in the blood, that witch’s brew of biochemical whatnot that bathes the body, pinkie toe to pointer finger. Mostly water, nutrients, and red blood cells, what runs through our veins also transports a huge variety of signaling molecules that coordinate metabolism, immune responses, fight-or-flight reactions, and myriad other activities.
Soon after the Rando paper’s publication, Villeda, then just 25, was returning to his graduate studies in Wyss-Coray’s lab, one floor away in the same building at Stanford. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Villeda had been educated in public schools in Los Angeles with little exposure to science until college, when he walked into a lab and saw a mouse embryo growing in a dish. It blew his mind. He loved science, the challenge, the craziness of it, the fun of it.
As Villeda drew blood, he also collected plasma—blood with the cells removed—from young mice, drop by teeny-tiny drop, and transfused it into older ones. The effect was the same, strongly suggesting that whatever the magic was, it was something dissolved in the fluid itself, some code or key that signaled a fresh start.
Meanwhile, a cottage industry began selling young plasma. Around 2016, Ambrosia, a California company, offered to infuse customers as part of a clinical trial that charged participants $8,000 to join. Other entities and individuals launched similar efforts, such as a proposed study that would charge large sums to frail elderly people for doses of young plasma.
It’s also possible that the rejuvenating effects seen in experiments don’t arise from one magic ingredient, or even from some combination of a dozen or a hundred compounds, but happen simply because the procedure dilutes some unknown harmful substances that accumulate in old blood. From this perspective, there’s no particular need for young stuff: Any form of plasma replacement will do. It’s sort of like changing the oil in your car.
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