For what it's worth, my experience is that almost all ketamine use I know of personally erased that person's depression for a week or so. I think it's less uncommon more and more.
While I'm certainly not implying you are referring to yourself, this reminded me of "swim", a delightful euphemism used by drug users online, for obvious reasons.
Considering it's once weekly, tolerance would decrease significantly back towards baseline - ketamine is 99% eliminated in 21 hours (7 half-lives). iirc the mechanism is BDNF expression and reverting neuron energy metabolism conditions - one could potentially speak of the antidepressant effect of exercise also increasing in tolerance via that mechanism, but what I know about what we know so far makes it seem like it is worth the decrease in anhedonic/depressive symptoms.
The other options are pretty much worse, although more common:
- a daily SSRI (thus increases tolerance much faster), and has a larger range of significant side effects, such as anorgasmia, increased depression or emergence of suicidal tendencies, weight gain, "electric zaps"/spontaneous muscle spasm/discontinuation syndrome for months after cessation, dulled affect, increased proclivity towards serotonin syndrome
I would strongly suggest that anyone reading this with depression disregard personal anecdotes like these. The placebo effect is powerful, and it's dangerous to self-medicate when suicide is a possible side effect or consequence.
“In a nutshell, I feel confident telling patients who have had little help from previous treatments that ketamine provides meaningful relief from some of their worst symptoms for at least a few days or even weeks,’’ said Dr. Gerard Sanacora, professor of psychiatry and director of the Yale Depression Research Program and primary author of the JAMA report. “But I can’t tell them with any degree of certainty how long the benefit can be sustained or how safe it is to repeatedly administer the medication over periods of months or years.”
The method of action of ketamine is thought to be via hydroxynorketamine, not placebo which I don't really see as being pertinent - maybe confirmation bias, but not placebo. I also contend that suicidality is not long-term stable- supposing a typical antidepressants regimen is ineffective and only frustrates a patient, then to not pursue a treatment with a pretty strong effect strength would lead to more suicides as the outcome, imo.
There's all sorts of lore about constructive drug use in Silicon Valley start up culture but it's not as prevalent as people say it is
I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.
It's just that weird drug use makes headlines and headlines makes money
> I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.
Or maybe he just doesn't have much exposure to the drug-using classes in this world, because anecdotally over 30 years of involvement in the computer world, I've met far, far more people who think they are enhancing their performance through drug use than those who don't.
Its extremely common in the hackrrspace scene to encounter developers who are using 'smart drugs' to stay up for 3 or 4 days at a time, or who think that a bump of speed at the right moment can make all the difference in the world to the codebase. Of course, I'm yet to see a case where this so-called boost in productivity is actively achieved, but it seems this isn't as important a fact to the guys in the lab coats ..
A friend in collage used say a little alcohol would help him calm down and code. A few decades later he accepted that he was just an alcoholic. Another friend refers to nicotine as his work drug...
20 years ago I met a guy who said he was using LSD to avoid wasting time sleeping and to boost his creativity. IMO, it's the same deal where people self justify whatever drug they want to use.
FWIW Silicon Valley != San Francisco. When I worked in SF I'd say about half of my coworkers (the ones just out of college) all smoked weed frequently, took pyschedelics infrequently, and used stimulants on occasion.
How can you speak so authoritatively about the private habits of your coworkers? Unless they are subjected to random unannounced drug tests (uncommon outside of the military and safety critical industries) or come into work obviously high you wouldn't have any idea what they do in their private time. You might as well be commenting on their sex lives too.
I'd guess that side effects from the immunosuppressants that they have to take cancel out any positive effect. Also, typically you don't give organs to geriatric patients, they're too valuable, so any age difference won't be very large.
>... older animals may also benefit from having their blood scrubbed by young kidneys and livers, which mere blood transfusion would not offer.
so in near future the use of a blood boy wouldn't be just transfusion, instead it will be more like dialysis where the blood boy plays the role of dialysis machine.
I don't see why they can't go forward with blood scrubbing in a few years. Oh wait, isn't this dialysis? There must have been some study of dialysis patients.
Perhaps UberEats can pivot to UberBlood? Fresh young blood of the right type on demand via app. Blood boys can be regular Uber drivers when blood demand is low. You're welcome Uber.
Side note: Speaking as a male blood donor, donating blood has benefits for the donor as well. Particularly because we're not regularly performing blood regeneration, there's a number of benefits related to it. And that pint is fresh, new stuff. :)
Is there any research that confirms this. I ask because I hear it everywhere. But it feels too convineant an excuse to make people give blood :) (voluntarity in most cases)
I've always wondered if it's a viable wight loss technique. There must be a certain amount of energy that goes into blood production. And losing wight by sitting still for a while is the holy grail.
Market it right and the billionaires might even be able to charge us to give them blood.
I wonder if we also age faster while doing this. Assuming cells go dormant after dividing a number of times, won't this repeated regeneration have a deliterious effect on them.
Speaking of sobriety, another benefit for donors is the option to get very drunk very cheaply immediately after donating. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
Someone quoted a calorie figure. It isn't large enough for it to be a viable technique, the body takes some time to restore the lost cells so there needs to be a decent period between blood lettings.
Even if the figure were low by 10x it would be a pretty bad way to lose weight.
Ah, I had larger than average/sudden blood loss in mind. My bad.
I'm not a biochemist, but my understanding was that the natural, far slower rate at which blood is broken down / discarded is much less conducive to having a good supply of healthy Erythrocytes than what you get when half a litre of blood must be replenished. Upon doing a donation that's a solid supply of fresh red blood cells into your system.
I was referring to it specifically being beneficial to men because they/we do not have menstrual cycle - where blood is refreshed at a higher than average rate as such.
Also. In case of a trauma, it would stand to certain reason that someone who is a regular donor would be better equipped to recover from this than someone who's never experienced blood loss before.
You've picked up some interesting ideas from somewhere but my education is that they are false. Of course, as any good scientist I stand ready to change my position should I be presented with evidence. The idea of training for blood regeneration is wholly unsubstantiated by the scientific evidence.
Assuming functional spleen and liver, the human body is also exceptionally good at removing damaged red blood cells. Average life span given no RBC abnormalities is 120 days; there is no 'degradation' of oxygen carrying capacity that happens between a cell freshly minted and one nearing the end of its lifespan.
The human body has significant spare resources in the marrow waiting to spring into action and training is not necessary. Upon significant blood loss, (i.e. Secondary to trauma) regardless of the blood loss naive or the regular donor, reticulocytes (not completely differentiated red blood cells) are liberated from the marrow, 'early' as it were.
A blood donor gives less than an amount of blood that causes physiological changes, BY DESIGN.
Increased red cell production is governed by oxygen demand/oxygen thirst in a complex sensing mechanism by the body and regular donation barely tickles red cell production
Yes, it's the altruistic component that has the long lasting value, however you are excising around 200mg of cells and proteins every time you donate - albumin, other blood proteins and of course cells. So in the long run I think about it as losing weight as well ;) not to mention the energetic anabolic endeavours your body must go through to rebuild all those macromolecules !
This is not going to end well. Human trafficking is already a seriously bad condition in most societies - with this kind of science, I doubt that the black/grey markets are going to ignore the fact that there are very, very wealthy people out there, willing to pay for a little youth or two.
This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix, I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world, though.
that is until the market is opened up and regulated. with so many young people around realizing that a thing they constantly produce for free is worth something - there will be no incentive to go through the criminal path. also worth mentioning that this could positively impact young population health as there is now clear monetary incentive to keep your blood healthy.
it's a win all around, regulators just have to be careful and not screw it up.
Blood is worth a lot, people know that already, and illegal blood farming exists in some countries.
But paying for blood increases the risk of people lying about the quality of their blood, which is why the administration doesn't incentivize blood donations.
Your argument about criminality is very wrong. Maybe I speak for myself, but I'd much rather be a criminal than a professional blood donor. People are not criminals because they have no other way...
> risk of people lying about the quality of their blood
this is where middlemen companies come into play, testing the blood and ensuring level of quality
> People are not criminals because they have no other way
sorry, i was not clear enough in my comment. what i meant is that opening up the legal way to sell blood reduces the incentive for criminals to do blood farming or human trafficking for the same purpose. much like legalizing marijuana will push drug traffickers out of the market.
In the US it's already legal to sell plasma, semen, eggs, bone marrow , breast milk, and rent wombs as a surrogate [0]. The legality of selling blood would not eliminate donations much like the ability to sell clothing does not eliminate clothing donation. Considering that there are negatives to selling blood (e.g. time, marginal risk, inconvenience, etc) I think some form of compensation is fair and would only increase the supply
Back in college I donated sperm for money. It's not like I was forced into it; it was just nice to have an extra source of income besides my student job.
This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.
Western world is already struggling to find enough blood donor, and one of their main source are the students.
You would not want to force those students to have to choose between morality and 1 order of magnitude more money than what they can do in the official public blood donation center.
The moral bit is choosing between 2 competing blood donations service - one that is run publicly to save life, the other to extend the life of healthy individual. I make the assumption that the remuneration of the second one will be most likely way bigger than in the first case. The only reason people would chose to donate to the first one is morality which is unfair.
The morality of the remuneration is orthogonal. I assumed we were talking about countries where it is moral and legal to remunerate blood donation. I don't think that countries that today do not allow remuneration (for any reason) would allow it for this new use case.
i don't buy it. my gut feeling is that loss in number of donors due to incentive to sell will be completely offset by lowering the barrier to giving your blood. companies fighting for customers and public image will start charity programs where some % of sold blood will be donated. there are just many more ways in which blood would be donated into the system with open market than with the closed one.
I wouldn't be quite so worried. If the effects truly do end up being due to soluble signalling factors in the younger blood (and not immune cell implantation or some other physiologic quirk of the cross-wired parabiosis experimental setup that won't transfer to non-inbred humans) then those factors will be synthesized in bioreactors and made into a synthetic plasma product - that's also the only likely way to make money on this for a therapeutic company.
That's the only likely way to make money for a legit therapeutic company, but before we have the technology to manufacture young blood cheaply and massively, I think kidnapping people and forcing them to give their blood can be done cheaply and be cost effective for a mafia.
I mean, that's already what they do with sex workers
Blood banks stopped paying for blood because it attracted the wrong customers, those strapped for cash rather than the idealistic types. As a result quality suffered.
Between hospitals blood is bought and sold at the price you mention.
One doubts that kidnapping will yield a higher "quality". The people who may be kidnapped on a regular basis without inviting unwanted attention are a subset of those who would sell their blood.
pay for health check tests before drawing the blood, and if tests results are good pay the person for the blood market price. Otherwise they get nothing. It can really work if you put the incentives in the right place.
Sperm banks manage to get very high quality, sanitary sperm despite many people doing it for the cash. The trick is to have recurrent donors you can test regularly, and to quarantine samples until they can be cleared in bulk.
And if we are really thinking about catering to the uber rich just raise both prices by an order of magnitude and you'll have plenty of donors and probably a ton of buyers.
I'm going with the sex worker analogy again because I think it works quite well : for a long time in France there were a lot of French prostitutes in the sex market voluntarily, and living decently of it.
But for some years, a lot of prostitutes from Eastern Europe got brought by the mafia and drove the prices way down for everyone. As a result, the market is now filled with exploited girls, working conditions are awful(ler ?), and the libertarian El Dorado of 'young women voluntarily selling a service' is dead, replaced by a dystopia of what has basically become selling drugged meat until the meat is dead or not fresh enough to be sold. The meat comparison is unfortunately not that much of an hyperbole, just go for a jogging in Bois de Boulogne and you'll see true human misery.
I'm afraid the same kind of scenario is not that much of a stretch for blood. It could even be worse, as a prostitute have to at least be presentable so bad treatment has to be a bit restrained.
Rich people may think twice about injecting "shady" blood into their veins though. I mean, many seem fine to do it with intravenous drugs but at least you won't find AIDS-laced heroin.
I think it might make more sense for super rich people to pay people directly to give them their blood, which is morally questionable but maybe not particularly worse than, say, paying for a surrogate mother? It sounds a lot less traumatizing at least, both physically and psychologically. After all many people do donate their blood for free several times a year.
I'm pretty sure you could convince many young people to give up some of their blood for a pretty cheap price actually. No need to resort to kidnapping and slave farms.
I don't think there's any reason one could not lace heroin with AIDS, it just would not reflect well on a dealer. That said, it would likely require intent (or really bizarre circumstances). With blood, it could much more easily happen, you're right.
Many young people already do give up their blood for a pretty cheap price, so I don't think there's any reason for this to become a black market thing.
> Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
-- Martin Luther King
Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, too.
But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.
Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.
If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.
Doesn't contribute? Who are you kidding? At least answer which technological stagnation you were referring to. You make the claim, follow it up, but don't blame me for paying the attention you so sorely lack.
"Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point?"
This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]
Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.
> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.
In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?
Sure, lets just start with the positive vibes, overlook the potential ramifications for the creation of a real vampire-class of humanity, and just enjoy the fact that the old can exploit the young and become strong again.
I mean, whats wrong with that, really?
Here's the thing .. we live in a dangerous world precisely because technologists decided to ignore the social ramifications of their work and only focus on 'the positive' that comes from it.
I mean, the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese did a lot of positive things for human sciences .. can't we just enjoy the fact that their research into the limits of human endurance has made it possible to be a better military pilot? C'mon people ..
Meh. Elizabeth Bathory used to bathe in the blood of her servant girls, and Vlad Tepes impaled his enemies and used their viscera as a dipping sauce. Now that is decadence.
I think older civilizations may have discovered something like this and put it into practice, giving rise to the myth of Vampires.
The Vampires of lore are described as very old people who suck the blood of youngsters to stay alive. The parts about them fearing sunlight, or garlic, or whatever, might just be based on side-effects of this cure for ageing. The inaccuracy of "sucking" instead of transfusion, might be because nobody survived to recount the exact way in which vampires took their blood and what they did with it. All they knew was that bodies of young people would sometimes be found, drained of blood and with tiny syringe-like marks on their necks.
In fact, they might still be among us, ruling our world from the shadows :-)
I tend to think the stories are cover for warnings about people that did have power. The prince sucking the very blood of the villagers is a nice metaphor for the prince taking the resources they need to thrive.
Hum, no. If you you drink someone's blood it goes trough your digestive system and it's processed that way, it doesn't become your blood, just provides you some nutrients.
Besides you do that almost everyday, i.e. eat animals younger than you and in certain cuisines part of their blood.
This here is something very different, allowing the blood to be used as is from an young individual in an older one.
I thought that vampires were an allegory for people with an economic or social advantage extracting rent and interest from the younger or more ignorant.
What if the major blood donation organizations like Red Cross and United Blood Services are actually run by vampires that secretly use the youngest donated blood for themselves, while giving the older blood to hospitals??
Yes. Maybe the blood of old mouse stimulate the generation of repair molecules in young mouse. Without the bidirectional exchange of blood, nothing would happen.
Is it really so different than blood transfusions, which are not even blinked at by most people anymore?
Some might be squeamish about it at first, but they'd probably get used to if they saw a pressing medical need for the procedure, just like they got used to so many other medical procedures that were controversial when they were first introduced.
Probably it's not necessary. Just exchange blood through tubes, and if you ever need to leave you can just disconnect it. Sewing people together seems a bit extreme.
without getting more than a touch political, the last 24 months have expanded my definition of what people will accept enough that I don't know if anyone can credibly speculate about it anymore.
This submarine story has been in the news for awhile. From what I can gather this transfusion has only worked in animals. Also, there is a company that is performing these transfusions for a fee. This article and other is designed to make you feel the narrative "rich people are like vampires ". When you think about what you are reading it really "rich people are having transfusions that may have no medical benefit. Also, none of these articles state that blood has a shelf life. If it isn't used then it is thrown away. For example there is usually a large amount of blood donations that occur when there is a terrorist attack . Most of the blood is discarded because they don't have enough time to distribute it correctly. In effect they are buying garbage.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] thread"The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death" https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel-young-...
For now, it seems to be most useful as a rapid-onset suicide prevention treatment.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swim
The other options are pretty much worse, although more common:
- a daily SSRI (thus increases tolerance much faster), and has a larger range of significant side effects, such as anorgasmia, increased depression or emergence of suicidal tendencies, weight gain, "electric zaps"/spontaneous muscle spasm/discontinuation syndrome for months after cessation, dulled affect, increased proclivity towards serotonin syndrome
- leaving depression untreated
http://news.yale.edu/2017/03/01/ketamine-eases-severe-depres...
The method of action of ketamine is thought to be via hydroxynorketamine, not placebo which I don't really see as being pertinent - maybe confirmation bias, but not placebo. I also contend that suicidality is not long-term stable- supposing a typical antidepressants regimen is ineffective and only frustrates a patient, then to not pursue a treatment with a pretty strong effect strength would lead to more suicides as the outcome, imo.
I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.
It's just that weird drug use makes headlines and headlines makes money
Or maybe they don't tell you.
Its extremely common in the hackrrspace scene to encounter developers who are using 'smart drugs' to stay up for 3 or 4 days at a time, or who think that a bump of speed at the right moment can make all the difference in the world to the codebase. Of course, I'm yet to see a case where this so-called boost in productivity is actively achieved, but it seems this isn't as important a fact to the guys in the lab coats ..
A friend in collage used say a little alcohol would help him calm down and code. A few decades later he accepted that he was just an alcoholic. Another friend refers to nicotine as his work drug...
20 years ago I met a guy who said he was using LSD to avoid wasting time sleeping and to boost his creativity. IMO, it's the same deal where people self justify whatever drug they want to use.
http://www.ketamineadvocacynetwork.org/
What of transplant patients that receive a kidney or liver transplant from a younger donor?
so in near future the use of a blood boy wouldn't be just transfusion, instead it will be more like dialysis where the blood boy plays the role of dialysis machine.
I see what you did there :)
http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-selling-h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
Market it right and the billionaires might even be able to charge us to give them blood.
Some sites claim it comes from the Mayo Clinic, others list the source as the University of California San Diego, and so on
wight
Even if the figure were low by 10x it would be a pretty bad way to lose weight.
I'm not a biochemist, but my understanding was that the natural, far slower rate at which blood is broken down / discarded is much less conducive to having a good supply of healthy Erythrocytes than what you get when half a litre of blood must be replenished. Upon doing a donation that's a solid supply of fresh red blood cells into your system.
I was referring to it specifically being beneficial to men because they/we do not have menstrual cycle - where blood is refreshed at a higher than average rate as such.
Also. In case of a trauma, it would stand to certain reason that someone who is a regular donor would be better equipped to recover from this than someone who's never experienced blood loss before.
Assuming functional spleen and liver, the human body is also exceptionally good at removing damaged red blood cells. Average life span given no RBC abnormalities is 120 days; there is no 'degradation' of oxygen carrying capacity that happens between a cell freshly minted and one nearing the end of its lifespan.
The human body has significant spare resources in the marrow waiting to spring into action and training is not necessary. Upon significant blood loss, (i.e. Secondary to trauma) regardless of the blood loss naive or the regular donor, reticulocytes (not completely differentiated red blood cells) are liberated from the marrow, 'early' as it were.
A blood donor gives less than an amount of blood that causes physiological changes, BY DESIGN.
Increased red cell production is governed by oxygen demand/oxygen thirst in a complex sensing mechanism by the body and regular donation barely tickles red cell production
So basically the main benefit of donating would be for others; I'm still keeping my upcoming O- donation in my schedule. ;)
This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix, I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world, though.
it's a win all around, regulators just have to be careful and not screw it up.
But paying for blood increases the risk of people lying about the quality of their blood, which is why the administration doesn't incentivize blood donations.
Your argument about criminality is very wrong. Maybe I speak for myself, but I'd much rather be a criminal than a professional blood donor. People are not criminals because they have no other way...
this is where middlemen companies come into play, testing the blood and ensuring level of quality
> People are not criminals because they have no other way
sorry, i was not clear enough in my comment. what i meant is that opening up the legal way to sell blood reduces the incentive for criminals to do blood farming or human trafficking for the same purpose. much like legalizing marijuana will push drug traffickers out of the market.
[0] http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/10-body-parts-you-can-le...
If the tenant stops paying does the baby get delivered prematurely?
This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.
You would not want to force those students to have to choose between morality and 1 order of magnitude more money than what they can do in the official public blood donation center.
The morality of the remuneration is orthogonal. I assumed we were talking about countries where it is moral and legal to remunerate blood donation. I don't think that countries that today do not allow remuneration (for any reason) would allow it for this new use case.
If it is sold as a "rejuvenating cosmetics" with scientific evidence backing it up, it will get bad.
I mean, that's already what they do with sex workers
Between hospitals blood is bought and sold at the price you mention.
Radiolab had an episode about this some time ago.
I feel like the market can find a solution for this that's unworkable for blood banks because of regulations, hospital requirements, scale, etc.
i.e., force applicants to prescreen their blood and permaban them for lying or if their blood fails drug/illness/etc. checks.
[1] - http://www.radiolab.org/story/308403-blood/
And if we are really thinking about catering to the uber rich just raise both prices by an order of magnitude and you'll have plenty of donors and probably a ton of buyers.
But for some years, a lot of prostitutes from Eastern Europe got brought by the mafia and drove the prices way down for everyone. As a result, the market is now filled with exploited girls, working conditions are awful(ler ?), and the libertarian El Dorado of 'young women voluntarily selling a service' is dead, replaced by a dystopia of what has basically become selling drugged meat until the meat is dead or not fresh enough to be sold. The meat comparison is unfortunately not that much of an hyperbole, just go for a jogging in Bois de Boulogne and you'll see true human misery.
I'm afraid the same kind of scenario is not that much of a stretch for blood. It could even be worse, as a prostitute have to at least be presentable so bad treatment has to be a bit restrained.
I think it might make more sense for super rich people to pay people directly to give them their blood, which is morally questionable but maybe not particularly worse than, say, paying for a surrogate mother? It sounds a lot less traumatizing at least, both physically and psychologically. After all many people do donate their blood for free several times a year.
I'm pretty sure you could convince many young people to give up some of their blood for a pretty cheap price actually. No need to resort to kidnapping and slave farms.
Many young people already do give up their blood for a pretty cheap price, so I don't think there's any reason for this to become a black market thing.
Major advances? Blood transfusions and the whole idea sound quite basic to me.
(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)
> Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
-- Martin Luther King
Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, too.
But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.
Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.
If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.
This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]
Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death
[2] - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-ni...
> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.
In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?
I mean, whats wrong with that, really?
Here's the thing .. we live in a dangerous world precisely because technologists decided to ignore the social ramifications of their work and only focus on 'the positive' that comes from it.
I mean, the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese did a lot of positive things for human sciences .. can't we just enjoy the fact that their research into the limits of human endurance has made it possible to be a better military pilot? C'mon people ..
/s
The Vampires of lore are described as very old people who suck the blood of youngsters to stay alive. The parts about them fearing sunlight, or garlic, or whatever, might just be based on side-effects of this cure for ageing. The inaccuracy of "sucking" instead of transfusion, might be because nobody survived to recount the exact way in which vampires took their blood and what they did with it. All they knew was that bodies of young people would sometimes be found, drained of blood and with tiny syringe-like marks on their necks.
In fact, they might still be among us, ruling our world from the shadows :-)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_sausage
I tend to think the stories are cover for warnings about people that did have power. The prince sucking the very blood of the villagers is a nice metaphor for the prince taking the resources they need to thrive.
Besides you do that almost everyday, i.e. eat animals younger than you and in certain cuisines part of their blood.
This here is something very different, allowing the blood to be used as is from an young individual in an older one.
a new study must be done where only blood is transmitted periodically without those other factors in the picture.
Some might be squeamish about it at first, but they'd probably get used to if they saw a pressing medical need for the procedure, just like they got used to so many other medical procedures that were controversial when they were first introduced.
PS OMG, I googled and discovered that bloodcoin already exists.