🩸'I'm not a vampire!' The bizarre blood-transfusion saga around Palantir's Thiel & Ambrosia

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel reportedly poured money into harvesting young blood.

Sounds like a vampire tale? The real-world implications are just as dark.

Ambrosia

🔴 Stanford-trained physician Jesse Karmazin claimed he found a way to stop aging using the blood of youths. He insisted that the blood of young organisms doesn’t just carry proteins that boost cell functions — it somehow tricks the recipient’s body into producing more of them

🔴 The start-up, named Ambrosia — eerily, after the food and drink of the gods in Greek mythology — focused on parabiosis

🔴 In 2016, Ambrosia launched a study titled “Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers”

According to its protocol:

Healthy participants aged 35–80 received plasma transfusions from donors under 25 for $8,000 per liter (and $12,000 per 2 liters)

Thiel's anti-aging dream

🔴 Jason Camm, chief medical officer at Thiel Capital and “personal health director” to Thiel, reached out to Ambrosia — hardly surprising given Thiel’s obsession with life-extension science

🔴 A year before that, in 2015, Thiel told Inc.: “I’m looking into parabiosis stuff. This is where they did young blood into older mice, and they found that it had a massive rejuvenating effect"

🔴 Gawker reported in 2016 that Thiel spent "$40,000 per quarter to get an infusion of blood from an 18-year-old". It doesn't sound outlandish: at the time, another tech tycoon, Gavin Belson, maintained a “blood boy” to receive regular transfusions from him

🔴 However, in 2017, when the story gained traction, both Thiel and Karmazin denied any cooperation. Karmazin even denied that Thiel Capital or Camm had ever contacted him — contradicting his own 2016 interviews, according to Tech Crunch

🔴 In 2018, Thiel vocally denied he used blood transfusions from youthful donors: "On the record, I am not a vampire," he declared at the New York Times Dealbook conference. Well, who expected a different answer from him?

🔴 Ambrosia was shut down in 2019 after receiving a warning from the US Food and Drug Administration. End of the story? Nope. Karmazin’s other company, Ivy Plasma, reportedly continued the work…

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