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"In my mind I have gone all over the universe, which may make it less important for me to make piddling little trips... I did enjoy seeing Stonehenge. It looked exactly the way I thought it would look."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Young Blood - New Blood For Old | ||
| Replacing the blood plasma of older people with material from younger people. |
| "Yes, yes," agreed Hardy. "Naturally-but what is the basic process?" "It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn't take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?' "That's an odd way of putting it, but-" "I told you I was no biotechnician." "-essentially correct. It's a matter of diffusion pressure deficit-the d.p.d. on the blood side of a cell wall must be such as to maintain a fairly sharp gradient or there will occur progressive autointoxication of the individual cells. But I must say that I feel somewhat disappointed, Miles Rodney. The basic idea of holding off death by insuring proper scavenging of waste products is not new-I have a bit of chicken heart which has been alive for two and one half centuries through equivalent techniques. As to the use of young blood-yes, that will work. I've kept experimental animals alive by such blood donations to about twice their normal span-" He stopped and looked troubled. "Yes, Doctor Hardy?" Hardy chewed his lip. "I gave up that line of research. I found it necessary to have several young donors in order to keep one beneficiary from growing any older. There was a small, but measurable, unfavorable effect on each of the donors. Racially it was self-defeating; there would never be enough donors to go around. Am I to understand, sir that this method is thereby limited to a small, select part of the population?" "Oh, no! I did not make myself clear, Master Hardy. There are no donors." "Huh?' "New blood, enough for everybody, grown outside the body-the Public Health and Longevity Service can provide any amount of it, any type." |
| Technovelgy from Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Sprung-Samser treatment from This Immortal (1966) by Roger Zelazny, conscious retarded animation from A Race Through Time (1933) by Donald Wandrei, the anti-Tri-D shot from The Morning of the Day They Did It (1950) by E.B. White and the anti-agathic drugs from Cities in Flight (1957) by James Blish.
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'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
'... he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot.'
