Category: Humans

Blood-Sucking Parents

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.

Protective Mutations

The human race is constantly evolving, however most changes are subtle and unnoticeable unless looking back across large chunks of time and making comparisons. Some might consider that we are longer changing and that we have reached an ‘optimum’ point in our evolution and the next logical step is a symbiosis between man and machine, but nature, and humans, might still have some surprises to reveal.

You might be surprised that a man with an unusual mutation has been discovered who exhibits potential resistance to Alzheimer’s disease. A Colombian man who possessed a genetic marker which virtually guaranteed he would develop early onset Alzheimer’s had a brain scan which showed atrophy of the brain as well as amyloid plaques and tae proteins, which together indicated with certainty that he would develop Alzheimer’s in his early 40s.

However, despite the genetic and biological indications, the man did not develop the condition. Only when he reached the age of 67 did he begin to experience the effects.

“The male remained cognitively intact until 67 years of age despite carrying the PSENI-E280A mutation,” explained one of the scientists in the study.

PSEN1-E280A is a genetic mutation seen in the population of the Colombian state of Antioquia. Other studies have shown that every carrier of the mutation shows impairment in verbal fluency by 45 and dementia by 50 and death at an average age of 59.

So why was this man, a carrier of the PSEN1-E280A genetic mutation different?

Scientists found that the man also had a second gene mutation that prevented the disease from affecting him for much longer. This second mutation, called COLBOS by the researchers, blocked the disease from entering the part of the brain responsible for memory and produced a protective protein which prevented the Alzheimer’s own tau proteins from forming into large strands, thereby slowing down the damage to the brain.

What researchers hope to do is to replicate this protective protein to create an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s.

“This really holds the secret to the next generation of therapeutics,” explained cell biologist and study coauthor Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez, who has already founded a biotech company with the purpose of using this research to create pharmaceuticals.

Innerspace

It seems that science fiction movies have yet again been able to accurately predict the future. Back in 1987 Dennis Quaid starred in a film called Innerspace, where a man and his machine were shrunk down so much that they could then be injected into the blood stream of Martin Short. From there he could interact with the cells, nerves etc.

Whilst the movie may be just been a work of fiction at the time, just 35 years later a team of scientists in Israel have created a micro robot that is so small it can inspect individual cells to assess their health, as well as move cells to a different location by electro magnetic means. The scope for these micro robots is huge and this progress could be a game changer in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

“Developing the micro-robot’s ability to move autonomously was inspired by biological micro-swimmers like bacteria and sperm cells,” said Gilad Yossifon, biomedical engineering professor at Tel Aviv University. “This is an innovative area of research that is developing rapidly, with a wide variety of uses in fields such as medicine and the environment and as a research tool.”

“Our new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects — hybrid propulsion and navigation by electric and magnetic mechanisms that are very different. In addition, the micro-robot has an improved ability to identify and capture a single cell for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument.”

As well as being able to identify healthy and dying cells, the team is now looking to develop the micro robot so that it can also be used as an effective drug carrier that can precisely target specific areas of the body.

The merging of robot and animals has been experimented with in many ways over the years. Early in 2023 scientists managed to make a robot move using muscle cells taken from a mouse, laying the path for potential complex cyborg technology in the future.

Like a scene from Frankenstein, the experimental cyborg was created from a 3D printed skeleton, wireless LED control chip and lab grown mouse muscle cells, and maneuvered through a maze. The power to move the cells came from the use of light and heat on the LED controllers. “You can basically beam energy into the chip,” explained Mattia Gazzola, mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois, “so that means that you don’t need power onboard.”

Combine this with the recent explosion in AI development and biohybrid robots with their own intelligent neural network and internal self healing micro robots could possibly overtake the human race as the dominant species on planet Earth.

Population Contraction

There’s no denying that the world’s population has grown at such a rapid rate over the last fifty years that it has literally put the future existence of our planet in danger. Overcrowding, animal displacement, global warming, plastic pollution – they can all be linked to the disproportionate volume of human beings living on a world that surpassed the level of a sustainable population back in the 1970’s. Some scientists predict the human population will continue to increase at an even fast rate leading to a sixth mass extinction event, but a new report suggests the opposite.

Researchers have found that population growth rates, which although they have continued to rise, have done so at a slower rate than was actually expected. Although the rate is still growing, it also looks possible that the global population will peak this century before starting to fall. Currently we have around eight billion people on the planet, a number that has quadrupled since just 1968. At that rate of growth the population could be estimated to increase to sixteen billion by 2100, but new research considers we might hit nine billion before it then starts to decrease.

“The global population could peak at a much lower level — around nine billion — by mid-century,” the Earth4All nonprofit collective research predicts. “And if the world invests more in economic development, education, and health, the global population could fall to levels at which everyone on Earth can have sustainable access to clean energy, shelter, food, and water.”

While the research may have retrospectively looked at population growth and found it hadn’t increased as rapidly as was initially predicted (even though it’s still at an alarming level) it seems to rely on life changes to make a difference for the future. And change, particularly when asking humans to alter their habits, is a very difficult thing to achieve.

“This research gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”

If we don’t address social and environmental problems, and individually and collectively make a choice to change, it will be that which destroys the planet, not overpopulation.

Humanity Time Bomb

With global warming and violent conflict around the world, it’s not surprising that the question of humanity’s future longevity on planet Earth is being asked. But, while we speculate in response to news headlines, Stanford Scientists are taking a more clinic approach and have come to the conclusion that civilization will end in the “next few decades.”

This comes following a recent appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes program where scientists discussed global mass extinction. Stanford Biologist Tony Barnosky, suggested that, through his work examining fossil records and ecosystem changes, current extinction rates are roughly 100 times higher than typically seen at any other point in Earth’s four billion year history.

Earth is currently experiencing the worst mass extinction event since the dinosaurs. Although the Earth may continue to turn after extinctions, life on the planet does not. But will that include humans?

Paul Ehrlich published a book in 1968 called ‘The Population Bomb’ where he addressed overpopulation and mass extinction. Today, over 50 years later, his predictions are becoming more and more real.

Even if the human race survives its society will crumble because of changes in habitat destruction, soil infertility and changes in our food chain. It’s all down to too many people and too much consumption. “Humanity is not sustainable,” explained Paul Ehrlich. “To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths.”

“It is too much to say that we’re killing the planet, because the planet’s gonna be fine,” added Tony Barnosky. “What we’re doing is we’re killing our way of life. There are five times in Earth’s history where we had mass extinctions, at least 75% of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth. Now we’re witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch.”

And this warning is only repeated by other experts. In fact, it’s more unlikely that you find an expert who doesn’t think we’re in an extinction crisis, than does.

The World Wildlife Fund’s research found that life on Earth was sustainable in the year 1970 when there were 3.5 billion people on the planet. Today there are 8 billion people – a number which is growing at an alarming rate and forcing animals to different parts of the planet in an attempt to survive. The research also added that since 1970, 69% of global wildlife has collapsed. Humans have taken over 70% of the planet as well as 70% of the freshwater, pushing other animals, and plants, into extinction.

Could things change? Mexican ecologist Gerardo Ceballos believes the only solution would be to save the one third of Earth that is currently wild and is involved in a scheme to pay farmers to stop cutting the forests in Guatemala. But these small scale schemes need to be scaled up 10,000 times to have any chance of making a difference.

Paul Ehrlich’s thoughts for the future: “there’s no political will to do any of the things that I’m concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Frozen Embryos

In 2022 a couple in Portland welcomed twins into the world. Whilst the chance of giving birth to twins is much smaller than a single child, what makes these twins even more extraordinary is that these children were born from embryos that had been frozen 30 years previously.

The babies were reported to be normal in every aspect, despite already being over 30 years old when they were born, after being perfectly preserved in liquid nitrogen at negative 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The embryos were frozen in 1992 with the intention of being used for IVF (In-vitro fertilization) for a different couple. However, in 2007 that couple donated the embryos to the National Embryo Donation Center.

A viable embryo frozen in time which could then go one to become a child 30 years later, is a modern miracle, it’s not the first time embryos have successfully been transplanted in the future. Prior to 2022, the longest embryo to child gap had been 28 years. It just goes to show that the freezing process results in a stasis of the biological process which might theoretically mean that time doesn’t matter – could an embryo from 1992 be used successfully in 2092 to produce a child from the past?

Could this also help with the prospect of being cryogenically frozen to be reanimated at some time in the future?

The prospect of helping many childless couples in the future seems a lot brighter and promising, especially as mankind’s survival is becoming more and more precarious. Not only from climate change and global wars, but on the basic level of human reproduction.

Earlier in 2022 a team of scientists looked at over 250 studies from around the world to get a general idea of the global sperm count over the last 50 years. Incredibly, from 1973 to 2018 sperm count dropped by 1.2 percent per year until 2000, but then began dropping at a faster rate of 2.6 percent per year.

“We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival,” explained Professor Hagai Levine. “We urgently call for global action to promoted healthier environments for all species and reduce exposures and behaviors that threaten our reproductive health.”

With this alarming global decreases in sperm count, the use of frozen embryo’s in the future could be mankind’s best hope for survival.