In popular conception, blood is the life force. We say that “young blood” can rejuvenate an aging culture or company; Dracula refreshes himself with the blood of young victims. But it turns out, this idea might have more scientific basis than we thought: a new study has found that an infusion of young blood can reverse some of the effects of aging in the brains of mice. These results could mean a new paradigm for recharging our aging brains, including techniques to treat Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford University and his team began by performing a bizarre-sounding experiment: They stitched together pairs of live laboratory mice, making sure that each pair’s circulatory systems were connected, so both mice would share the same blood. The conjoined pairs of mice, known as parabionts, fell into two groups: A group in which both the mice in each ...
