--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The search for the fountain of youth. It's an idea that's captivated human beings for centuries. Over the past several decades, science has dramatically advanced our ability to extend life. But as we get older, our bodies start to break down. Medicine can keep us alive longer, but what quality of life are we getting in return? Do you want to be 100 years old with the body of a 100-year-old?
--:-- Kat McGowan: I think people talk a lot about longevity, but what they don't really think about enough is the quality of life, not just the quantity of life. Like, we all want to live into our 80s, but we want to live that way, feeling like we do in middle age or younger.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She wrote an article for Popular Science about an old idea that's getting a fresh look. Could the fountain of youth be somewhere in your veins? Some scientists suspect there may be something in blood that undoes the effect of aging. And that suspicion is actually grounded in research.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Scientists have been experimenting with mice, and they've seen promising results. But as I explain, there's still many unanswered questions. We know it works, and we don't know why.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some scientists are trying to crack the code. They want to unlock blood's biomedical secrets to develop treatments that might one day actually reverse the aging process.
--:-- Kat McGowan: It's funny. There have always been old people, you know. Like some people always reached a really advanced age. But as a social phenomenon, it's fairly recent, right? So the whole issue of, quote-unquote, aging, as we think of it today, is kind of new.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Like some folks grew old because they were lucky in childhood. They didn't get sick. They didn't go through accidents or they had really good immune systems. But in terms of a large percentage of the population reaching an advanced age and having to cope with all these chronic diseases, that's new.
--:-- Kat McGowan: We all tend to live a lot longer than we did 50 or 100 years ago. And because of that, we're all dealing with all these problems like diabetes and Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and chronic lung problems that just weren't so common 100 years ago.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The research, Kat, that you write about, it isn't actually about extending life, right? It's about the aging process. Can you explain the research that scientists are doing right now with blood and aging?
--:-- Kat McGowan: What was so cool about this line of research is that it's not just about stopping the process of aging and the onset of all these serious chronic diseases. It's about reversing them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: [pauses for emphasis] So I'll just tell you basically what the sort of big, amazing finding was, which is that if you take the blood from a young mouse and you route it through an older mouse, just connect them right up so that the living body of the young mouse is actually physically connected to the body of the older mouse.
--:-- Kat McGowan: After a few like a month or so of this treatment the older mouse has all of these signs of rejuvenation. Their fur becomes silkier and softer and looks richer and fuller after these treatments. Their heart beat stronger. The signs of heart failure can be reversed. Signs of muscle weakness can be reversed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All of these biochemical factors that they measure actually trend in the opposite way. And the most amazing organ of the body that I haven't even mentioned yet is the brain.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Now, everybody knows when you have a problem in the brain, if you have brain damage or if you have of various illnesses like Alzheimer's disease, dementia, memory loss, it doesn't come back or it's very, very hard to bring it back. In this research, they actually saw that older mice were able to do memory tests better after being treated with the blood of younger mice.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know, stuff that is really like kind of pushing the edge of what anybody thought possible. So wait a minute. If what you're saying is true, then the blood is not only the fountain of youth, But it is the key to aging. It actually makes you age. Do I understand that right?
--:-- Kat McGowan: The researchers got into blood initially because they realized, well, researchers started looking at aging as really something that biology and medicine could tackle and actually investigate. And they thought, well, you know, aging is a whole body phenomenon, right? Your eyes get kind of cloudy as you get older and your hair changes color and you get wrinkles.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then internally, there's all these other things changing. Your muscles don't bounce back the way they did when you were young, and your heart gets stiffer, and your lungs don't have the same capacity. So something clearly is coordinating all of this in the body, right?
--:-- Kat McGowan: What is it that runs through the whole body? Like, where do messages in the body, how do they get transported from every single type of tissue and cell through the blood?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So they thought, well, let's look in the blood, and that's how these experiments got going. But just for a quick clarification, it's not blood itself. It's something in the blood, right?
--:-- Kat McGowan: So when researchers started finding that there was something in blood that was causing or was related to aging, the thing they really wanted to know is, well, what's that thing? Like what of the zillions and zillions of compounds in the blood is making this happen?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So what is that something that you think promotes aging?
--:-- Kat McGowan: We don't know. Is that the X factor? We don't know, man. And that's—so the amazing thing, and again, this is so different from a lot of medical research and biological research. We know it works, and we don't know why.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know, if we knew why, I mean, if we knew what that group of compounds was that was coordinating this change that affects the whole body, a lot of things would be different.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Now, I should say that none of this research suggests that these compounds in the blood could actually make life longer. They might, but we just don't know.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: No one looked at it. What they have found is that they can rejuvenate all of these different tissues and organs in older animals. That's why everyone's looking for like figure out what that compound is that actually you know stops the aging process reverses the aging process.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Because if you could turn it into a pill, man, like everybody would take it right. And that's the hope. That we would get a pill, a pill born from this research into blood and aging.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's the hope.
--:-- Kat McGowan: When I think about cutting-edge biology, I'm thinking about DNA manipulation, targeted treatments on a genetic level. But blood, it seems almost like a throwback to some macabre rituals.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now you write about the idea that blood can pass on vitality and that it's been around for centuries. When did humans first start thinking that blood might be used as a tool?
--:-- Kat McGowan: So probably always, but in the historical record going way back when, there's this idea that the blood of the young can confer vigor and vitality. I mean, there was always this kind of intuition that blood carried something special.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And, you know, it's the same thing with like vampire stories, right? It's like there's some essence there. There's something like really fundamental that can be transferred from one being to another through the blood, this vital fluid.
--:-- Kat McGowan: I mean, it's so rich in folklore. You know, back in the day of the Romans, people with various illnesses used to try to, like, guzzle the blood of injured or slain gladiators in the hopes that they would be able to somehow take over that effect.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: McGowan also told us about an infamous case from the 17th century. There was a surgeon in London who convinced a man to be linked to a living sheep for a short period of time.
--:-- Kat McGowan: The man in question likely suffered from mental illness. And the idea at the time was that this animal blood could be used to treat his condition. He was often agitated and upset. He was a well-educated man, but he would lose himself to what they called back in the day, these fits.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And so they said, well, lambs have a gentle nature. So if he could be dosed with the blood of a living lamb, maybe that would change, it would help him and it would make it possible for him to overcome his fits.
--:-- Kat McGowan: So he got up there on stage, and I think they used some kind of steel quill or something to attach his veins to the veins of the lamb.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's horrifying. It's really gruesome. And just to put further detail onto it, the man was paid to do this. So, and afterwards, he said that, you know, he felt just quite well, actually, after the experience.
--:-- Kat McGowan: I'm thinking he said that to stop.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Eventually, governments and even the Pope stepped in. The French Parliament, London's Royal Society, and the Catholic Church, they all passed bans on blood transfusions.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Research into blood transfusions didn't pick back up until the mid-19th century after blood types were discovered.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But even though major strides have been made in this field, So many mysteries remain. Our collective fascination with blood's promise keeps taking us down some misleading paths.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Just look at Elizabeth Holmes and her now defunct company Theranos. Holmes claimed she'd devised blood tests that could quickly yield results for a wide variety of diseases with only a tiny amount of blood, but her claims were later shown to be false.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So when it comes to the new experiments in mice that McGowan told us about, is it just more pseudoscience? How close are we to turning this research into something you can have access to? Something like that pill McGowan was talking about earlier?
--:-- Kat McGowan: That's the million-dollar question, right? I mean, I think the answer to what you're saying in terms of you know if it's not mainstream and it's not pseudoscience, what is it? It's really early. It's really, really early.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know, so what they're doing is super exciting because it's so, you know, it's not that often in biomedical science where you see something really, really new.
--:-- Kat McGowan: And this is really new. And so they've been really trying to figure it out and tinkering with it for 10, 15 years now. But that sounds like a long time. But in the world of biomedical research, it's really not a long time at all.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's still really new. I mean, the thing is, what's amazing to me is that even though there's things about this that sound a little like on the margins of respectable science, like turning back the aging clock, isn't that the kind of thing that, you know, you see in infomercials or like bad ads that get served up on your social media feeds?
--:-- Kat McGowan: But these researchers are all really top-notch. I mean, these are people at Stanford, at Harvard, at UCSF, like, and they're really just the way they're thinking about this stuff in really amazing ways.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So when is this going to be real? I mean, if these researchers really move forward the way that they are hoping to, it could be decades in my lifetime, might be longer.
--:-- Kat McGowan: We don't know if this technology is going to come to fruition in our lifetimes, but let's say it does. Can't you just see a future where only a few people have access to it?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In an episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, there's a scene where the main character of the series is giving a presentation to this venture capitalist named Gavin Belson, who's kind of a tech supervillain.
--:-- Kat McGowan: All of a sudden, in walks a young guy who attaches himself to Gavin with this IV machine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When asked what's going on, Gavin replies, "Regular transfusions of the blood of a younger, physically fit donor can significantly retard the aging process."
--:-- Kat McGowan: Now, medically, we shouldn't read too much into this scene. The way they portray the science, well, it just doesn't work that way.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's not going to happen because if you did that, both you and the person you are connected to would immediately get really sick because your immune systems would just totally attack each other.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Somebody might die, you know, but in any case, you're both going to get really sick and your blood would clot and it just it wouldn't work.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But she says keep this scene in mind. That's the thing about some of these kind of technologies. It's both amazing and daunting, right?
--:-- Kat McGowan: Because you think, wouldn't it be incredible if we had that kind of, if we, meaning the human race, right, had that kind of tool at our disposal?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then you think, and then what would we do with it? What would a pharmaceutical company charge for a medicine that could actually do that?
--:-- Kat McGowan: You know, who would get access to it first? I've definitely thought about all these things as I was working on the story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Would we then have a world in which certain people had a longer lifespan just because they had access to this amazing new medicine?
--:-- Kat McGowan: But isn't that kind of the world we already live in? It would just be more like that?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So I guess that's the dystopia side of the utopia of longer life and longer health.
--:-- Kat McGowan: Kat McGowan's article about research on blood and the aging process is available now on Apple News. You can find the link on our show notes page.
