When Vladimir Putin told Xi Jinping that organ transplants might let a person live to 150, scientists everywhere winced.
The comment made headlines for its absurdity, but the timing was almost poetic. That same week, researchers reported a molecular “switch” that helps donor livers survive longer inside new bodies. One claim belonged to fantasy. The other was actual progress.
The notion of surgical immortality has haunted medicine for over a century. In the 1920s, wealthy men paid doctors to implant monkey glands in the hope of regaining strength and libido. The fad faded, thank god, but the impulse didn’t. The idea that aging can be reversed through replacement keeps resurfacing whenever science makes a teeny bit of progress.
Today, that obsession lives on through modern self-experimenters like Bryan Johnson, who advocates for blood plasma transfusions from younger donors. The practice stems from animal research where young and old mice were stitched together.
Their blood mingled long enough for the older mice to show small bursts of energy and healing. Those benefits never appeared in humans. In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration publicly warned that such treatments were “unproven and potentially harmful.”
Can Organ Transplants Really Give You Eternal Youth?
Transplant medicine operates in a different universe from the immortality pitch. It keeps people alive when the body runs out of options. Each surgery is a gamble that requires control and endurance.
The immune system fights to reject what it doesn’t recognize, so patients rely on drugs that suppress the body’s defense long enough to keep the organ working. Even when it works, the victory is measured in time bought, not youth restored.
Age makes everything harder. Older patients face slower recovery, weaker immunity, and higher chances of rejection. Studies show that multi-organ transplants rarely succeed in people past midlife because the body simply can’t keep up. Science can buy time, but it never refunds it.
Ethics remains the wall science can’t climb. Every viable organ means another person left waiting, and the shortage has fueled a global trade built on exploitation. Desperation keeps that market alive. Offering transplants as an anti-aging fix would drain what little trust still exists, rewriting medicine’s purpose from saving lives to serving vanity.
Then there’s the mind itself. You can trade out a heart, a kidney, even a pair of lungs, but the brain stays off-limits. No science has found a way around that truth, and that seems to be where the idea of immortality starts to falter.
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