Wyss-Coray is not the first person to wonder whether the
answer to the problem of ageing might lie in human blood. One of the first
physicians to propose blood transfusions to rejuvenate older people was Andreas
Libavius, a German doctor and alchemist. In 1615 he proposed connecting the
arteries of an old man to those of a young man. He had high hopes for the
procedure. “The hot and spirituous blood of the young man will pour into the
old one as if it were from a fountain of youth, and all of his weakness will be
dispelled,” he claimed, in an account told in the Textbook of Bloodbanking and
Transfusion Medicine by Sally Rudmann. It is unclear how it turned out; there
is no record of the transfusion happening.
The fledgling years of the Royal Society, founded in London
in 1660, witnessed some of the earliest experiments in blood transfusion. When
Robert Boyle, one of the society’s founders, compiled a wishlist of scientific
projects, the top entry was “The prolongation of life”. That might be achieved,
he hoped, by replacing old blood with new.
But there are many more examples.
