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More than anything, Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter, wants to find a way to escape death. He's channeled millions of dollars into startups working on anti-aging medicine, spends considerable time and money researching therapies for his personal use, and believes society ought to open its mind to life-extension methods that sound weird or unsavory.

Speaking of weird and unsavory, if there's one thing that really excites Thiel, it's the prospect of having younger people's blood transfused into his own veins.

That practice is known as parabiosis, and, according to Thiel, it's a potential biological Fountain of Youth--the closest thing science has discovered to an anti-aging panacea. Research into parabiosis began in the 1950s with crude experiments that involved cutting rats open and stitching their circulatory systems together. After decades languishing on the fringes, it's recently started getting attention from mainstream researchers, with multiple clinical trials underway in humans in the U.S. and even more advanced studies in China and Korea.

Considering the science-fiction promise of parabiosis, the studies have received notably little fanfare. But...