Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to try and prolong their life span. There never goes a month by without there being some food or drink fad that improves your health and allegedly adds a few years to your life expectancy. Tablets and extracts from various sources claim to be wonder panaceas that delay the inevitable. But it seems a tech millionaire has taken a step further and received a blood transfusion from his teenage son! Not only that – the millionaire is also giving some of his son’s blood to his father too.

Bryan Johnson, who is 45 years old, took his 17 year old son and 70 year old father to a clinic in Dallas for an intergenerational blood swap. And this wasn’t the first time. Bryan Johnson had received young people’s blood on previous visits to the clinic from anonymous donors. The profile of the donor was carefully filtered according to blood type, diet, body mass index as well as general health. Has it helped make him younger or prolonged his life span – no one can truly know yet.

This is not the first time Mr Johnson has been on a quest for eternal youth. He has spent $2million each year employing a team of doctors to advise him how to turn back the clock to a time when his body was in peak physical condition. Johnson’s specific aim is to return his “brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum” to the state they were in when he was 18 years old.

“We start from evidence first,” Johnson explained. “We do nothing based on feeling.”

Other millionaires have followed the same path and transfused young people’s blood into their bodies in the hope of defying age and degeneration. Some researchers are suggesting there might be science to back up this unusual trend. When two mice were joined together in a laboratory so that they shared one circulation system, the older of the two mice showed some improvements in their body, but could this also apply to humans?

The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning as far back as 2019 against the use of blood transfusions from young people into the bodies of older people because it was untested and unknown what the possible outcomes could be for either party. They stated that “There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product.”

Charles Brenner, a biochemist in Los Angeles, has these thoughts on the matter. “To me, it’s gross, evidence-free and relatively dangerous. The people going into these clinics who want anti-aging infusions basically have an anxiety problem. They have an anxiety problem about their mortality.” With that in mind, maybe the millionaires should be paying for counseling for their anxiety issues, rather than draining the blood of the young.