by Rose George
* * *
Puncture much of history and vampires will emerge. I recommend puncturing the historian Richard Sugg’s vampirology work because what seeps from it is not Dracula’s slithering fog, but a human fear of bloodsuckers that is ancient and enduring.3 How terrifying the vampire, and how everywhere. In the mid-nineteenth century, two British army officers stayed for months in a Bulgarian village. In the neighboring village, a newborn baby seemed dead and was buried, but its mother later heard it crying and disinterred it. The child was seen, the council assembled, and the baby was declared a vampire and condemned to death by staking. This was done. This is horrific. But, as Sugg says, the question was not just how people could be so barbaric, but how people could be so terrified. People in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere across Europe: for centuries, they were so petrified that “they staked and beheaded and burned and reburied the living and the dead, from friendless strangers to sons and mothers. They were so terrified that they had nervous breakdowns, became paralyzed, and in some cases, actually died of fear.”4
What were they scared of? A vampire in the seventeenth century was not, despite the imagination of Bram Stoker, an elegant aristocrat dressed in a black cape. Open the door to one, and you would probably find, according to the historian Paul Barber, “a plump Slavic fellow with long fingernails and a stubbly beard, his mouth and left eye open, his face ruddy and swollen. He would wear informal attire—a linen shroud—and he would look for all the world like a disheveled peasant.”5 He may want to kill you or do some evil deed. But for most of vampire history, he would not in fact have been interested in drinking your blood.
For these old Europeans, death could be sudden but it wasn’t immediate. Some people thought it took forty days for a dead person to properly die. For all that time, they were dead, but not quite. Slightly dead, as Sugg puts it. Others made holes in their walls, then bricked them up, to fool only slightly dead people wanting to make their way back in. The corpse had power after death, which is why mummy—powdered or preserved flesh—and skull moss were popular cures for centuries.
One of the first blood-sucking vampires was Arnold Paole, a Slavic peasant who died (for the first time) by falling off a hay cart. Paole’s vampirism was documented by Johann Flückinger, an officer in the Austrian imperial army stationed in Serbia. His Visum et Repertum (usually translated as “Seen and Discovered,” though I prefer “Been There, Seen That”) was a bestseller. Before his death, Paole had reportedly told villagers that he had been visited by vampires. After it, villagers and cattle had their blood drunk, and four peasants died mysteriously. Paole’s body was dug up. Oh dear. There was blood. His body was undecayed, and fresh blood flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. His shroud was blood-soaked. His nails seemed new and his skin was flaky, both effects of decomposition that were understood by the ancient Egyptians, who sometimes attached thimbles to a corpse’s nails to get them to stay put (Paole’s “new” nails were probably nail beds), and both now better understood.6 He was staked and burned, and he troubled neither man nor cow again.
Flückinger’s account launched the era of the bloodsucking vampire as we now understand it, and a belief that has endured into modern times and in strange places. The ethnographer Luise White found convincing evidence in the 1950s that people in several African countries firmly believed that firefighters are vampires. Others thought it was police who were the secret blood drinkers. In 1952, as a villager interviewed by White recounts, a man returned to his home, much to the surprise of his neighbors. “He had been missing since 1927. We thought he had been slaughtered by the Nairobi Fire Brigade between 1930 and 1940 for his blood, which we believed was taken for use by the Medical Department for the treatment of Europeans with anemic diseases.” The villager, a local politician named Anyango Mahondo, knew this was nonsense. People just thought firefighters were vampires because of the color of their equipment. He knew, instead, that it was the police who did the bloodsucking, capturing their victims and keeping them in pits under the police station.7 Death, colonialism, the fear of turbulent change: vampires could be useful to account for a lot of anxieties. They were the most powerful, because what they stole was the most powerful substance and the most mysterious.
There were drinkers of blood in history, but they were at public executions, not police or fire stations. Two thousand years ago, the physician Celsus wrote of Romans who rushed to the side of dying gladiators to drink their hot blood from the men’s cut throats.8 Fresh warm blood was then, and for two thousand years since, considered a cure for the mystifying and terrifying “falling sickness” of epilepsy. (Before this, wrote two medical historians from the Institute of Medicine and Medical Ethics in Cologne, “there is no evidence that the sanguineous humor of a slain swordsman was regarded as a special drug for epileptics.”9)
All Romans writing about Romans drinking blood made sure to condemn it as barbarous and inhuman. But epileptics were desperate, and the understanding that their appalling affliction was electrical, not magical, was nineteen hundred years in the future. If falling down was because of weakness, then someone else’s blood could provide the force to pull them up again. Blood-drinking epileptics were written about in Germany, Sweden, and Austria. Epileptics brought their own cups and beakers to scaffolds, or sometimes made do with white handkerchiefs. In 1851 in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, known to modern readers as the home of fictional detective Kurt Wallander, a rare judicial beheading caused a frenzy. Before dawn, the plain where the scaffold had been built was crowded with people who had brought “bowls, glasses, cups and saucepans.” Saucepans! When the man was beheaded, a mob rushed the scaffold, but they were beaten off by soldiers; the corpse was swiftly removed by horseback, “and the ground was dug up so as to destroy the trace of blood.”10
Consumption of fresh blood was thought to have more general benefits, the most powerful of which was to extend life. This concept should seem ordinary to millions of Christians, who symbolically drink blood every Sunday. It is also why the tale of Pope Innocent VIII has endured: that when he was dying, he was brought three young men, and they were opened for him and he drank all their blood. He wanted their youth and life. Throughout time, humans have sought to extend their own. If we are so clever, why can’t we make life longer and stop death? There have been potions galore to achieve this, and theories and experiments. The notorious countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary was supposed to have bathed in the blood of young girls, although this was never mentioned in depositions at the time. The Ming emperor Jiajing, an unpleasant character who ruled in the sixteenth century, was persuaded that drinking secret potions containing lead, cinnabar, and the menstrual blood of young women would lengthen his life. He was almost wrong: this habit, and his awful cruelty, led to a concubine plot to kill him. Sadly it failed, and the concubines were executed by “slicing” or death by a thousand cuts.11 Other rejuvenating substances were experimented with. The Psychrolousia, or The History of Cold Bathing, published in 1715 by Sir John Floyer, describes a man in the north of England, a cowherd “of an extreme age” (over sixty), who laid himself down at night next to his cows so he could drink in their breath. “The Breath of a Cow is a Cordial,” he reported, “and much refreshes me when I am faint.” Cowherds and shepherds who knew what was best breathed in the “salubrious Volatile Salts” in the breaths of their beasts, “early in a Morning before the Beams of Light and Heat exhale them, and rob them of the best Nose-gay in the World.”12 This cow halitosis cure didn’t last. But that a dose of blood can give life and youth has never gone out of fashion.
* * *
It’s 1905 in Moscow, but Leonid, a Russian mathematician, is on Mars. He has been politely kidnapped by Martians and taken on a ten-week journey on a nuclear photonic rocket to reach the red planet. There, he encounters a utopian society that is egalitarian, socialist, polyamorous, and long-living. He develops unsettling romantic feelings for Netti, a doctor he believes to be mal
e (Martian genders cannot be told apart, making the polyamory even more interesting), who tells him that a fifty-year life span is very young for a Martian. Most live to twice that. Leonid is astonished. What is the secret?
We renew life, says Netti. “It is actually very simple.” Just as simple cells feed and renew each other, fusing to extend their life spans, so can Martians, by performing mutual blood transfusions. This is not done to cure illness but to counter aging. The circulatory systems of two Martians are joined—it is not explained how, though Martians are very good at engineering and have impressive canals—and blood flows from one to the other and back again. “If all precautions are taken,” says Netti, “it is a perfectly safe procedure. The blood of one person continues to live in the organism of the other, where it mixes with his own blood and thoroughly regenerates all his tissues.” Leonid wonders why humans don’t do the same. If Martians could shrug, Netti would have. “Perhaps it is due to your predominantly individualistic psychology, which isolates people from each other so completely that the thought of fusing them is almost incomprehensible to your scientists.” We poor selfish humans, confined to our seventy or so years of life because we refuse these “regular comradely exchanges of life.”13
Red Star, the tale of Leonid’s trip to Mars and back, was written by Alexander Bogdanov, a doctor and revolutionary. He was close to Lenin and Stalin, a force in the select genre of Bolshevik science fiction and also someone who attempted to make his science fiction more scientific than fictional. Bogdanov was convinced that Martian “blood exchanges” could have rejuvenating properties for humans. This was not an implausible thought in the context of the 1920s in Russia and Europe, when rejuvenation and the conquering of the new concept of “senescence” was flourishing and fashionable. Most rejuvenation theorists focused on the sex hormones, as Nikolai Krementsov explores in his wonderful book on Bogdanov and Soviet science, A Martian Stranded on Earth. The use of animal gland extract became so popular that a newspaper cartoon showed monkeys delivering “an endocrine breakfast” to a patient at a noted Moscow hospital.14
In 1926, Stalin gave Bogdanov funds to set up a blood transfusion institute in Moscow. It was the first in the world, and an extraordinary achievement in a country whose health care system was otherwise not particularly impressive. There were other experiments in transfusion, but the most notorious was the “physiological collectivism,” a comradely exchange of blood. Bogdanov, by now over fifty, took the blood of younger students but also gave his own. He swore it halted his balding and improved his eyesight.15 A fellow revolutionary wrote that “forgetting [his age and health], he sometimes runs up four to five flights of stairs.” His wife, Natalia Bogdanova, “also feels great: gout symptoms in her feet are gone; before she had to wear shoes made to order, now she wears regular ones.”16 Bogdanov looked seven, no, ten years younger.17 Over two years, he took eleven liters of blood from the students, but the last was fatal. By then, blood groups were broadly understood, but not antigens and antibodies. Each dose of blood from a foreign body would have stimulated Bogdanov’s immune system to prepare antibodies for the next dose. The eleventh liter of blood came from a student who had tuberculosis and malaria: in proper Martian style, Bogdanov hoped mixing their blood would cure the young man. Although he was the right blood group, Bogdanov’s body reacted badly. The student survived. Despite another blood transfusion, Bogdanov died. But his belief that blood could rejuvenate did not.
* * *
The website is almost insultingly minimalist. Ambrosia, it reads. Young Blood Treatment. There is a list of locations: San Francisco and Tampa, and a contact form. That is all the written information available. The rest must be read from the imagery: a moving image of water, rippling harmoniously. A young man who is pictured sitting on a bench next to a vintage road racing bike. His hair is black and glossy, his skin is smooth. He has forgotten to wear socks. His moody beauty, his pale skin, his rosy lips: He looks like a vampire.
“Really?” says Jesse Karmazin. A vampire? He never intended such a thing. “I think we just thought athleticism, because of the bike. Maybe I’ll look at it again.” Karmazin and I talked late one night over Skype, transatlantically. It was past my bedtime, in the hours of witching and vampires. Karmazin was the name my “young blood” Google alert produced now and then and consistently for the past year or so. I researched him before we spoke and found images of a fit Paralympian rower (he was born missing half a leg). He doesn’t look, in these pictures, far removed from his picturesque male model vampire. He followed the Paralympics with a medical degree at Stanford, then practiced psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, before he signed a voluntary agreement not to practice with the state of Massachusetts, a disciplinary step that is just short of a withdrawal of a license, and which is usually reserved for physicians whom the state believes to be “an immediate, serious threat to the public.” This is important, because Karmazin’s second career involves transfusing “young blood” to willing patients. He got the idea from Bogdanov, having read Krementsov’s book about the comradely exchanges. He called his company Ambrosia, after the food of gods—who must be eating something right as they are immortal—but, he says, he could just as easily have called it after Bogdanov.
It was at Stanford that Karmazin starting wondering about blood. Clinicians were giving so many transfusions all the time, to all sorts of people. “It just sort of clicked.” If blood could be given to heal sick people, why would its powerful effects not work on healthy people? A kind of superboost, but not involving wheatgrass or horrible green sludge. He considered red blood cells first, which he called little bags of hemoglobin, an essential protein. That would probably work. “But it turns out if you give someone excess red blood cells, the body gets overloaded with iron and there’s no good way for the body to get rid of it.” Plasma had proteins too: that was a better and safer option. Also, there was science to back him up.
In 1933, two anatomists named Eduardo Bunster and Roland K. Meyer published a paper called “An Improved Method of Parabiosis.”18 The name is as beautiful as the procedure is hideous, as it comes from the Greek for “beside” and “life.” It is the splicing of two creatures, an artificial version of Siamese twins (conjoined humans) or freemartins (cattle). Parabiosis, the messing with the bodily integrity of creatures, had been tried before: I find an intriguing paper from 1912, concerned with the “Parabiosis in Brazilian Ants.”19 It was also tried on frogs and hydra, jellyfish-like sea creatures. But rats and mice were the most popular victims.
Bunster and Meyer’s report is thorough, even providing the recipe for the depilatory used to remove the rats’ fur (it’s 35 grams of barium sulfide, 33 grams of talcum powder, 35 grams of flour, and 5 grams of soap chips, a formula I’m not sure will threaten Veet or Gillette anytime soon). They treated their stitched-together animals well, they wrote, despite shattering bones with needles and drilling holes to make the sutures stick better. They were wise to do this: when the biochemist Clive McCay at Cornell stitched together sixty-nine pairs of rats in 1956 (two by two), he learned two important things. The older and younger rats reacted differently to the same dose of barbiturate. And patience was essential. “If two rats are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the head of the other until it is destroyed.”20
In Bunster and Meyer’s illustrations, one parabiont rat stretches a foot to stroke his littermate’s, as if they are intimate by choice not grotesqueness. The rats are cut, then sutured with No.1 black silk, and their systems, theoretically, are joined. Blended blood runs through two rats, two hearts, two circulations. That was surely wonder enough. But over the next twenty years other scientists explored a more specific question. What if young blood could transmit youth to old blood? In 1972, another study found that elderly rats transfused with young rat blood lived four to five months longer than normal.21 But parabiosis for some reason was stopped. Too grotesque? A waste of soap chips?
Whatever the reason, parabiosis has bee
n rejuvenated, along with many mice, rats, and Silicon Valley millionaires (probably). That the age of blood matters is known to anyone specialized in trauma or transfusion: younger, fresher blood is better, but most blood donations are a mixture of ages, of the blood cells themselves, and of the donation’s shelf life. “Today we’re in a weird situation,” says Karmazin. “Most people who donate blood in the US are elderly. Sixty-five or older. So if you’re young or get in an accident, you’re likely to get blood from someone who is older and that probably has a detrimental effect even if it’s lifesaving in the moment.” He is wrong about the average blood donor: in the United States, it is a white college-educated man aged between thirty and fifty who is married and has an above-average income.22 But his general point makes sense. Time does something to blood, so why can’t blood do something to time?
In 2013, a team led by Amy Wagers of Harvard University reported on their experiments with stitching two mice together, one older than the other. (Science called this “Help the Aged.”)23 They found that stem cells in the older mouse began acting like younger ones, healing injuries better. They already thought a protein called GDF11 may be responsible. Later studies found that the older mice developed a stronger heart, better cells, shinier fur. The results were persuasive enough for human trials to be set up, including that of Ambrosia and its ilk (because by now it has ilk). A small trial explored the effects of giving young plasma to eighteen Alzheimer’s patients. Its major finding was that the procedure was safe (no one died), though there were “hints,” said the lead researcher, that recipients got better at remembering to take medication and being able to pay bills.24
