FDA: Stealing Young People's Blood Won't Make You Immortal

Rich people have a lot in common with vampires. Both in live in giant manses, host creepy masquerade orgies (we presume), and even wear the same dumb outfit every single day. Also, every once in a while, the insanely rich start thinking that they too can achieve immortality by draining the blood of the young and vigorous. But now, virgin thralls everywhere have a new champion: the FDA, which has put on its bandolier of stakes and declared "Get thee behind me, foul spawn of the night!"

This week, the Food And Drug Administration (let that sink in for a moment) has issued a strong warning against people trying to cheat death by harvesting the blood of the young. According to the FDA, a "growing number of clinics" are offering trials wherein they pump you full of plasma from donors as young as 16, with the promise it will extend your life and even cure many age-related afflictions. And with treatments going for up to $8,000 a liter and being completely unregulated, it's exactly the kind of scheme popular with weird tech billionaires who think they're too smart and disruptive to just buy healing candles and ginseng extract.

But despite the sound logic of treating blood like car oil that needs changing every 3,000 miles, the FDA is warning the new generation of Transfusylvanians that there's not only "no proven clinical benefit" to prepubescent plasma, but also that it should not be considered safe. And when the FDA tells you that, you better listen, because it takes a lot (and we mean a lot) before they try to put a stop to any kind of shady practice. So there's still a chance that the immortality industry can find a loophole that makes it so that eating the souls of your vanquished enemies falls within the acceptable parameters of the GRAS protocols.

That is not to say that blood-related drugs can't theoretically have beneficial effects. There are currently several proper, supervised trials going on to study exactly that. But that has almost nothing to do with just paying some shady guy in a lab coat 12 Gs to strap yourself to a pint of virgin juice. The truth is that there's no kind of ghoulish sci-fi shortcuts that will let you live a long and healthy life. If you want that, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: diet, exercise, and going to a crossroads so you can make a pact with the Devil.

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