The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In Silicon Valley, not far from Stanford’s hospital where children with leukemia await transplants to generate new blood, a start-up called Ambrosia is offering transfusions of matched young blood plasma “harvested from youths between sixteen and twenty-five years old” to supposedly rejuvenate the creaking, but very wealthy, shriveling bodies of aging billionaires. Rather than draining old blood from the dead, you infuse young blood into the aged—embalmment in reverse (I am tempted to draw an analogy to vampirism, but perhaps we will find a new euphemism for this chilling kind of attempted cellular rejuvenation—“rebalming,” or “demummification”). One liter of “young blood” costs $8,000; two liters is a bargain at $12,000. In 2019, the FDA issued a stern cautionary note against the program, citing lack of benefit, although Ambrosia argues that the therapy works.