Silicon Valley's Vampire Startup

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A mysterious startup has emerged with some unsettling parallels to the dark creatures of ancient folklore.

There is something rather strange about modern day scientific progress: the more that society advances its grasp of the world, the more it seems to simply validate concepts that were inherently understood thousands of years ago.

…Ancient Egyptians defined the universe as a field of vibrating energy, but this view was arrogantly dismissed – until it was profoundly substantiated by electromagnetism.

…The Mayans created a masterful astronomical calendar, which precisely correlated with lunar cycles and cosmological events – eons before a telescope was ever invented.

…The Vedas intimately understood consciousness and beautifully articulated it in age-old Hindu scripture – millennia before the birth of quantum mechanics.

And now, a new Silicon Valley frontier is pioneering a form of life extension that is eerily comparable to the legend of the Vampire. Is this coincidence, or another revelation into what our distant ancestors readily accepted?

The startup is called Ambrosia, and was founded in 2016 with a name that literally references the food of immortal gods in Greek mythology.

And what does this edgy enterprise actually do?

According to its own website, Ambrosia “studies the effects of transfusions of young blood plasma.” In other words, it takes viable blood from youthful individuals, and charges $8,000 to transfuse into wealthy elites who desire permanent vitality. Or at a minimum, those with a vested interest in delaying death.

The organization sucks ‘young blood’ and pumps it into the elderly with the ultimate goal of achieving immortality. Sound familiar?

All that’s missing is the black cape and a pair of fangs.

It all started when the founder, Jesse Karmazin, was inspired by an intriguing study with mice several years ago. Karmazin is a Princeton graduate with a medical degree, and became fascinated with the effects of mice who underwent parabiosis - the surgical joining of veins from animals of different ages to create a shared circulation. According to the 2013 study, when older mice received blood from younger mice, critical effects of aging began to reverse. This included a critical component in blood called GDF11, which was found to reverse age-related cardiac hypertrophy.

Karmazin was so compelled by the findings that he decided to launch a venture to make this treatment available to humans.

Ambrosia boasts over 80 paying customers, all of whom are required to be over the age of 35. The average client age, according to Karmazin, is about 50-60, with two patients who are currently 92. The donors can be no older than 25, but are mainly comprised of teenagers.

Today, Silicon Valley’s vampire startup operates primarily under the radar and with little fanfare. In fact, the company’s own website is an enigmatic exercise in minimalism. It includes a one-sentence description of its mission, a list of related studies and a contact link. That’s it.

Few people may realize that the folklore of Dracula was originally inspired by Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was the ruler of Wallachia in the 1400′s, and one of the cruelest men to ever walk the Earth. He had a psychopathic affinity for inviting guests to his mansion, providing them with a feast and then impaling them afterwards. With the bodies still draped over the stakes, he would then dip his bread into the victim’s blood. 

Some readers may find it somewhat disturbing to learn that that Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth and even George Bush are among Dracula’s descendants. But perhaps what’s even more mysterious is that the ruler’s body is reported to have disappeared. 

…So the question remains – is Ambrosia truly a leading-edge scientific expedition into groundbreaking life extension, or simply a public admission of dark truths that have been known and written about for centuries?