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The Conversation
The Conversation
Dan Stratton, Lecturer Biomedical Health Science, The Open University

From monkey glands to ‘young blood’: the long, strange history of chasing immortality through transplants

Chizhevskaya Ekaterina/Shutterstock

When Russian president Vladimir Putin visited Beijing in September 2025, he told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that repeated organ transplants might make a person “get younger” and even live to 150. The remark was widely dismissed as science fiction.

Yet it coincided with genuine scientific progress. Just days earlier, researchers had identified a molecular “switch” that could reduce one of the most common complications in liver transplants, helping donated organs survive longer.

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