In the grand scheme of ‘things scientists are doing that they should not be doing’, this one ranks quite highly. According to New Scientist, an unholy experiment in which the blood plasma of human teenagers was injected into old mice found that the procedure rejuvenated the mice, improving “their memory, cognition, and physical activity”.
Despite the fact that the very concept of injecting blood plasma extracted from teens into ageing mice seems like it against God and reason, researchers at Alkahest did exactly that.
“Young human plasma improves cognition,” said researcher Sakura Minami, who presented her findings at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, California this week. “Their memory was preserved.”
“It’s more or less what we would expect,” said Victoria Bolotina, at Boston University in Massachusetts. “The blood of young people must have something in it that’s important for keeping them young,” she says.
This is not the first experiment conducted which explore the relationship between blood and ageing, and research has been done into whether treatments involving young blood could be used to treat dementia patients. Also, insane billionaire venture capitalist and Trump backer Peter Thiel is particularly keen on the possible benefits of such a procedure.
Our take? Don’t inject the blood of human teens into mice, because it’s gross.
Source: New Scientist.
Photo: Nosferatu.
