Heinlein Comes True

When science fiction loses the fiction. Papa Heinlein has predicted many things that came true, but this one... 

Well, there are serious ethical questions that arise from this idea. But it's the route that Heinlein postulated in Methuselah's Children: replacement of old blood with young blood. It's almost poetic in an abstract sense. Given the ramifications of it... in light of what we know about organ farming? It's more than a little shuddery. 

From Derek Lowe's blog... the effects of the plasma preparation on both the methylation signatures and on more traditional readouts of physiological function seem to be pretty dramatic, after two rounds of treatment in elderly rats. By the DNA methylation clock, the ages of the blood, heart, and liver tissue were basically halved (there was much less effect on the hypothalamus, interestingly). Markers of inflammation and oxidative stress went down significantly in the treated animals, and many other blood parameters changed for the better as well (HDL, creatinine, and more). The animals performed better in physical and cognitive tests (grip strength, maze test) with numbers approaching that of the young animals themselves.

This is something I've written about before, when I first saw the papers and a quack promoting it a few years back. But now it seems we are getting much more data, and possibly going to be testing it on humans very soon. Lowe notes in this article that plasma exchange is already an FDA approved therapy, so going to clinical trials won't be a big hurdle. 

Sometimes writing science fiction is challenging to stay ahead of the science. Sometimes I look at the science and am impressed with the SF greats and their ability to forecast the future.