People have always dreaded getting older.
Long before the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson tried infusing his son’s blood in an attempt to halt his own senescence or the entrepreneur Peter Diamandis started undergoing regular blood plasma exchange as part of an expensive healthcare regimen that he hopes will extend his own longevity, Louis XIII of France, Pope Innocent VIII and the French physician Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard were busy trying to “rejuvenate” themselves.
What history can teach us is that finding a miracle cure for ageing has long been one of humankind’s most cherished dreams. And wealthy, white men have often been at the forefront of this quest – despite the dubiousness of the effectiveness or safety of anti-ageing treatments.
In 1642, the health of Louis XIII, 41, was flagging. Louis was suffering from tuberculosis; his physicians were hopeful that the right set of treatments could prevent him from dying but also rejuvenate the “old” king and return him to some semblance of his vigorous youth. To that end, his doctors gave him the best available treatments. In the last 10 months of his life, Louis was bled 47 times, took 215 purgatives (or laxatives), and was given an enema 210 times. Then, when all else failed, his doctors tried something cutting-edge – they gave him one of the first blood transfusions ever recorded.
Humans have always attached an almost mystical power to blood. In ancient Rome, the blood of fallen gladiators was prized as a medical elixir capable of restoring strength and health. Ancient Chinese medicine also created treatments from human blood and organs that were thought to restore health. By the 17th century, Louis’s physicians rationalized that replacing the king’s “old” blood with fresh, youthful blood would probably return part of his “youth”.
As the German physician Christoph Hufeland wrote of Louis XIII’s case in his 1797 book The Art of Prolonging Life, the blood transfusion was intended not only to reinvigorate Louis, but to prolong his life and remove the otherwise incurable disorders from which he was suffering. First, the physicians opened two veins in Louis: one to allow “new” blood in and one to let the “old” blood drain out. Then a small pipe was inserted into a young lamb’s artery, and through it, the lamb’s blood was pumped directly into Louis’s vein. Unsurprisingly, Louis died a few days after the procedure.
Louis XIII was not the first powerful man said to have experimented with turning back time. In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII, who was 60, was dying of complications from a stroke. According to some accounts, Innocent called on one of his physicians, who hired three young boys and promptly drained them of all their blood for the pontiff’s benefit. It’s unclear if the blood was transfused or ingested – and there is debate among scholars whether this story is true at all. But as the story goes, all measures failed and the pope died – as did all three boys.
By the late 1800s, doctors had worked out that blood was special not because it contained the “vital force” or youth and strength of the creatures it came from, but because it contained particular unknown substances that affected ageing. Those substances were thought to be produced by “ductless glands” in the body like the thyroid, testicles or ovaries. Physicians began experimenting with testes in particular, since it had been observed that castrated animals grew old faster. It was common sense at the time that a loss of semen led to a loss of strength, and since older men were weaker, it stood to reason that if semen could be retained or injected back into the body, it would return older men to a state of virility and vigor.
Enter the French doctor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard. In 1889, when he was 72, Brown-Sequard tested out his theory that testicular extract (made from distilled water and the blood, semen and tissue of testes from guinea pigs and dogs) injected under the skin would alleviate his symptoms of age – fatigue, constipation, brain fog and general weakness – and essentially allow him to feel “younger” than his years. (Thyroid extracts had already been successful in the treatment of some diseases, so this idea was less bizarre than it seems now.)
After injections, Brown-Séquard reported that his concentration improved, as did his bowel movements and the strength of his urinary stream, and he could lift heavier weights. He urged other physicians to test his method on themselves and report their results.
Brown-Séquard’s research led to sensationalized news reports and a bevy of doctors trying out his method. And although Brown-Séquard warned against the treatment being used on normal patients, some physicians – especially those in the US – ignored him. Doctors and quacks began injecting testicular extract and grafting testes into their patients by the dozens, leading to many deaths and complications.
We now know that the amount of testosterone in Brown-Séquard’s extract was minimal and would have had no effect. But patients – including Brown-Séquard himself – experienced a considerable placebo effect from the treatments, reporting that they felt stronger and healthier. Or at least, the ones that didn’t become infected, reject the tissues or die from the treatments said they did. In attempting to turn back the biological clock and delay their deaths, many patients found that these early “anti-ageing” treatments sped up the process considerably – some of them died within weeks or days of the procedure.
The “future” of ageing research often looks surprisingly like its past. By now, you’ve probably seen countless media stories about ultra-rich and powerful men like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson investing hundreds of millions of dollars in longevity startups, scientific laboratories or treatments, all in the hopes of outwitting their (and our) internal biological clocks. Wealthy people are spending a lot of time, effort and money on the latest so-called anti-ageing treatments, like using an immunosuppressant to “biohack” the process of cellular ageing. And those of us without billion-dollar bank accounts want to know the secrets, too: one current estimate of the global market for anti-ageing products is $54bn and growing.
Longevity enthusiasts’ oft-stated goals are not only to help themselves and others live to the ripe old age of 120 in perfect health, but also to strip away what has, until very recently, been considered the natural biological limit on the human lifespan. Why not, people in longevity circles ask, live until the biblical age of 1,000 or longer? Some scientists and physicians who take money from such hopefuls are happy to bolster the belief that living a happy and healthy millennium is not only possible, but on the horizon.
But are we really just a few scientific breakthroughs away from extending our lifespan? According to some of the more circumspect scientists working in this field, not really. Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and the author of the book Why We Die, counsels that extending the lifespan would be much more difficult than proselytizers would have us believe. “It is more complicated than people think to engineer away the causes of ageing,” he told the Wall Street Journal in July.
But even if we did and we could come up with miracle anti-ageing treatments, who exactly would benefit?
If history is any indication, it’s not regular folks like you or me. It’s mostly going to be rich, white men like Louis XIII was. And although our current obsession with living for ever is generating some fascinating scientific research and driving a surge in funding, none of this is new. We’ve been here before – and our obsession shows no sign of abating.
Theresa MacPhail is a science writer, medical anthropologist and associate professor of science, technology and society at Stevens Institute of Technology
