Like all wise men, Smut Clyde is slowly getting older. And as so many ageing men, he ponders, contemplates, reflects and meditates on which commercially available rejuvenation cure to try. Stem cells? Gene therapy? Curcumin infusions? Augustinus Bader facial cream? Or something more classic, like dog testicles or blood of a virgin?

Here, Smut Clyde deliberates about mitochondria injections. After all, one can’t argue with science. Or can one?

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Little Creatures

By Smut Clyde

In the early years of the 20th Century you couldn’t throw a hemostat across Harley Street without hitting some doctor promising a better life through injections or implants with cells or organs from other species.

Lowenstein’s Black-faced-Langur serum endowed its recipients with renewed vitality but at the cost of gait impediments and a slight flaw in the character. Lowenstein was robbed of the credit he deserved, merely on account of being an off-stage character in a Sherlock Holmes case. Instead Dr Sergei Voronoff is who we regard as the epitome of Edwardian grifters, rejuvenating and immortalising his customers with implanted monkey gonads to supplement their own failing hormone production.

The market of aging roués, missing the virility and tight bodies of their youth, obliged Voronoff to create a whole new industry out of shipping chimpanzees and Sooty Mangabeys from Africa for the sake of their testes and ovaries. Then in the 1920s the transplants suddenly stopped working because the concept of xeno-graft tissue rejection had been invented: the immune system swiftly destroys any alien tissue. The media turned hostile and Voronoff went overnight from “purveyor of pert youthful buttocks to the wealthy” (he left no stern untoned) to “butt of jokes”. But he was not the only nor even the first fraudster in that racket!

The basic notion was undefeated: that you can absorb the Vital Force of a donor, the Essence of Youth present in non-old animals. It merely migrated to other medical manifestations. Which is how we get mitochondrial transplants.

According to Bertero et al (2018), the instigator of this whole genre of mitobollocks is James D. McCully (Shin et al 2017), who was rewarded with credulous reportage in the New York Times.

“He recovered between 10 billion and 30 billion mitochondria, and injected one billion directly into the injured heart cells. To his surprise, the mitochondria moved like magnets to the proper places in the cells and began supplying energy. The pig hearts recovered.“

That in turn inspired a host of imitators and increasingly hyperbolic claims… mere “recovery from cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury” is not enough when people demand anti-aging and brain regeneration. So the papermills added the subject to their paper-faking repertoire, as seen in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, in the Special Issue on “Nature-inspired Computing for Web Intelligence”.

The existence of elliptical trainers implies the existence of hyperbolic exercise machines, to build up one’s capacity for unbridled exaggeration.

“Somehow the organelles will gravitate almost magically to the injured cells that need them and take up residence.”

NYT (2018)

We drink elixirs that we refine From the juices of the birthing

I’ll come back to mitochondria (which are even better when transfused). But first: Clinics still tout animal-cell implants as a sovereign remedy for cancer, autism, old age, and all the ills to which flesh is heir. The advocates of Live Cell Therapy will tell you about its long proud history of intellectual precursors. These clinics draw customers from the same demographic who home-school their children and have them exempted from immunisation for fear of UNNATURAL TRANSGRESSIVE ABOMINATION animal cells that vaccines might contain.

This is how we got the Villa Medica in Germany, where Dr Huertgen offers fetal lamb stem cells, harvested from specific organs. When injected into your body they will migrate through it in the manner of slime mould to find the corresponding organ, proliferate, and take over its functions. No extra charge for scrapie prions. The potential side-effects from lamb-cell tissue substitution have not been adequately considered.

[Note by LS – This fetal lam cell therapy aka Frischzellentherapie is indeed a German invention from 1931, immensely popular into 1980ies, see this Wikipedia page. Among its celebrity users were Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and publishing magnate Axel Springer. It was never banned despite being both dangerous and outright quackery, in order to support the pillar of German national middle class economy, of private quack clinics]

And placenta face-cream. Does it really make sense to take an invasive chimeric organ and concentrate its tissue-eroding properties to smear all over your face? THIS ENDS BADLY.

‘Vegetal placenta’ extracts promise fewer undesirable side-effects, but my concerns are unassuaged.

Hence the pineal-gland concentrate sold exclusively at the Mentius Clinic. Again, Dr Herbert Proteus was robbed of credit and acknowledgement simply for being a fictional character, like so many of us.

Thymus-gland implants were also popular. In most mammal species, the thymus atrophies and then the animal starts ageing; clearly this denotes Cause-&-Effect. No idea is too dumb or too discredited to be rejected from the Alt-Med scammacopoeia. Having temporarily abandoned the original goal of regenerated scaffold-&-stem-cell tracheata, the Regenerative Medicine crowd retrenched to pick more plausible targets, with the regenerated autologous-stem-cell thymus gland as one. Low-intensity laser beams can be involved, and Michael Hamblin, bringing this under the rubric of Photobiomodulation as well as the ‘Essence of Youth’ brainfart.

In another manifestation, Leonid’s readers are familiar with the vogue for Young Blood. Journalists continue to cite Karmazin as a genuine researcher / therapist. It’s not as if he bothered to conceal his prior form of unabashed fraud.

Just saying, @guardiannews, that if you write about Life Extension without adding the context that Karmazin is a shameless scammer and that all the billionaires who threw fucktonnes of $$$ at him are gullible fuckwits, perhaps you're part of the problem.

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) September 6, 2023

I choose to interpret the popularity of bogus stem-cell therapists as another outlet for this magical-thinking tradition. If the therapy doesn’t work, the stem-cells weren’t stemmy enough, insufficiently pluripotent, and should have been extracted from a younger source: umbilical cords, or circumcised infant prepuces.* It makes perfect sense in the twilight logic of magical thinking that cells from a young-enough donor will contain more Quintessence of Youngness, and will confer that quality upon the recipient.

Any apparent benefit from homologous stem-cell injection is the feverish arousal of an innate immune response launching a campaign against the intruders. Inflammation can feel like invigoration, I suppose, like being spanked soundly with a hairbrush at Madame Whiplash’s House of Negotiable Discipline, or so I hear from a friend.

After that brief tour of the tradition, we can return to Mitochondrial Transplants. But what can be more alien and ‘not-I’ (from the immune system’s perspective) than mitos? They are the unshielded nuclear reactors that power our cells, burning sugars to pump protons across their membranes in a thick miasma of reactive oxygen species, and then using the charge gradient to power their ATP watermills. Ultimately they are proteobacteria that went into coalitions with our archeobacterial ancestors.

In the course of the billion years or so since the rise of the Eucaryocracy, much of the original bacterial DNA has migrated to our chromosomes where mito proteins can be manufactured off-site, but there is still a mito genome that assembles some of those proteins under direct mitochondrial control. This only matters here because the mitos in your cells – all descended from your mother’s, in a matrilineal geneology – need to work in optimum harmony with the mito genes in your nuclei. The point is that mito membrane proteins and phospholipids are weird and unfamiliar, enough to arouse immune-system xenophobia.

A swift lesson at the University of Google informs me that this weirdness plays a part in the coagulation cascade. Any need for blood to clot triggers platelets to eject their mitochondria into the blood plasma, where their presence triggers everything else. Feel free to use Coagulation Cascade as the name of your death-metal band. “Cascade” is presumably what you make when life gives you casks.

Anyway, the central assumption of the Mito Transplant narrative is that mitochondrial DNA has an age, and a use-by date, wearing out as the cells divide in the course of our lifetime, in the manner of nuclear DNA and the Hayflick Limit. Nuclear DNA gets reset after meiosis, wiped clean of epigenetic metadata before the haploid ovum and sperm fuse, allowing the merged zygote to begin with full-length telomeres and a clean genetic slate. But none of that agitation affects the mitochondria… they are not reset, they carry on fissioning according to their own rhythms and schedules. All mitochondria on Earth are the same age, all more-or-less mutated copies of that first bacterium that scandalised its relatives by shacking up with an archeobacterium.

Apart from the failure of the key premise, the transplant literature expects us to believe the following narrative:

1. The clinic extracts mitochondria from young-cell donor tissues by dissolving the cell walls, and concentrates them by centrifuging the cytoplasmic mush.
2. Mitochondria survive the abrupt transition from a cozy Ca²⁺-free cytosol environment to saline / glucose solution, and stay functional. This is about as plausible as a nuclear reactor continuing to operate properly after you drain out the heavy-water moderator and replace it with Jubileum Akvavit [don’t try this at home]. It was my understanding that if the fussy wee beasties could be so easily persuaded to function outside of a cell interior, researching their biochemistry would be much easier.
3. The concentrated mitochondrial fraction is injected into the organ-failing brain or heart or bloodstream of the lucky recipient, where
4. The cells recognise the shiny new mitochondria in their neighbourhood as superior to their aging complement, and swap out their old reactors while somehow assimilating the new ones. “Mitochondrial Fraction” was in fact the first album from “Coagulation Cascade” after they went prog and reinvented themselves as a Durutti Column covers band.
5. The mitochondrial genes resynchronise and reharmonise themselves with the different genome of their new host cells.

The entire proposition is crazier than a barrel-full of rabid wolverines that have spent a week self-medicating with bath-salts and angel dust. Yet there is this burgeoning literature on mitochondrial transplants! Mostly involving authors from elite universities, which is possibly why their claims were not immediately buried under derision, in the manner of Draco the Law-Giver who suffocated beneath his followers’ hurled knickers. Also a reluctance among sensible people to take the claims seriously enough to refute them properly.

New discoveries found that mitochondria are constantly circulating in the bloodstream, in their billions, like migrant workers, manufactured in bone marrow and then trafficked to whichever cells need new ones, but they are protected in transit from the inimical electrolytes of blood plasma by special “mitlet” vesicles. Which is to say, McCully’s transplant trials with unvesicled mitos could not possibly have worked and his reported successes were delusive. This did not stop Benedict C. Albensi from praising McCully in a September 2023 advertorial in Molecular Neurobiology.

We also learn about Chris Boilard‘s importance in this research tradition for discovering Mitlets and mastering their potential; and about Mitrix Bio, who introduced mass-production mitochondrial bioreactors (because those worked so well for stem-cell fiddle-faddle). In the editorial, Albensi disclosed his commercial closeness to Mitrix without mentioning that Boilard is in that same enviable position.

Another paper in the same journal addresses this new healing modality of Mitochondrial Transfusion:

A. Adlimoghaddam, T. Benson , B. C. Albensi Mitochondrial Transfusion Improves Mitochondrial Function Through Up-regulation of Mitochondrial Complex II Protein Subunit SDHB in the Hippocampus of Aged Mice Molecular Neurobiology (2022) doi: 10.1007/s12035-022-02937-w 

Dr Albensi has promised to extend the Conflict-of-Interest statement to cover all the authors, not just himself. Readers may already be familiar with his name.

[Note by LS: Benedict Albensi, Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Neurobiology, also condoned the massive fraud published by Domenico Pratico in his journal, and instead publicly complained of being harassed by Pratico’s critics.]

This is a whole growth field for grifters who can convince hypomitochondriacs that whatever malaise ails them is at root a mitochondrial deficiency, and it can’t be long until the stem-cell sector of the med-fraud industry reinvent themselves as mitochondrial transplant clinics. Mitrix Bio. have a head-start.

We hear a lot about the Fountain of Youth. Oglaf brought attention to the Fountains of Death, Doubt and Girl. The image at right shows a foolhardy explorer who drank from the Fountain of Fountain.

Must credit P.S. Brookes for references.

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* The last extant Foreskin of Christ disappeared from a small Italian village in 1983 – the work of black-clad Vatican Ninjas, sequestering the prepucial relic to stop it falling into the hands of secular stem-cell agents. Thus we are deprived of the Haploid Stem-Cells semi-differentiated keratinocytes of Jesus, and the prospect of vat-grown godmeat. I have not yet succeeded in selling this theory to Tim Powers to use as a plot-line in his next “secret history” novel.

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