Author Topic: If Western civilization does not die soon.....  (Read 7093 times)

90sRetroFan

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 11039
  • WESTERN CIVILIZATION MUST DIE!
    • View Profile
The most evil vampires in fantasy fiction are nowhere near as frightening as real-life Western scientists:

Quote
Saul Villeda now runs a lab at UCSF on a hill that Over-looks San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury. Winding stairs lead to a fluorescent-lit basement hallway and a cramped suite of rooms stacked wall-to-wall with mouse cages. There is something unusual about many of the mice in the room. They are ambulating through their cages, with two heads, two sets of legs and double-wide bodies.

The doublewide mice are products of a macabre procedure known as "parabiosis," a technique Villeda mastered as a graduate student in the lab of Wyss-Coray for the improbable experiment that led to the founding of Alkahest and the clinical blood trials aimed at treating aging. The procedure, pioneered in the 19th century by the French scientist Paul Bert, merges the circulatory systems of two rodents by cutting open their bodies and sewing their wounds together, so that their bodies fuse as they heal.

To learn it, Villeda had an expert teacher: Thomas Rando, a neurologist who studies longevity and occupies the office next door to Wyss-Coray. Rando first got the idea to revive the obscure technique back in the early 2000s. He had come to believe that one of the reasons our bodies lose their regenerative powers as we grow older is because our stem cells stop receiving the molecular-level signals needed to activate them. Rando did not know what those signals might be. But he knew where to find them—the blood of younger mice. Enter parabiosis.

To test out his hypothesis, Rando conjoined elderly mice with younger rodents so that they shared the same circulatory system, then tested their ability to heal small wounds. The results were dramatic. Elderly mice were able to repair small tears in their muscles far faster than their peers not conjoined to younger mice. The younger mice, on the other hand, healed far slower than they normally would.
...
After conjoining elderly and young mice, Villeda sacrificed the elderly mice, cut their brains into tiny slices, and stained them with a special dye that bound to baby neurons. Then he counted up the number of new neurons and compared them to normal levels of neuronal growth in similarly aged mice.
The results, when he published them in 2014, shocked the scientific world. The infusion of new blood led to a threefold increase in the number of new nerve cells generated in the brains of the elderly mice.