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Putin and Xi Caught Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality 128

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic discussing organ transplants and immortality at the military parade in Beijing on Wednesday. The two leaders were captured on the stream as they walked with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Tiananmen Square, with the Russian translator saying: "Biotechnology is continuously developing," according to Reuters. "Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality," the translator added.

Xi responded by saying that some predict that humans could live up to "150 years old." The Kremlin head later confirmed that the two leaders discussed immortality. "Modern means of healing, and medical means, all kinds of surgical means related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue not as it does today. The average age in different countries is different, but nevertheless, life expectancy will increase significantly," Putin told reporters, according to CNN.
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Putin and Xi Caught Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality

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  • by zendarva ( 8340223 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @11:32PM (#65637800)

    Guess he was right. Here we go.

    • I think any Nivenesque mass-executions-for-petty-crimes-to-fill-the-organ-banks thing will be a limited problem. Only Putin and Xi and, well, Trump, and their immediate circles have the power and position to benefit from such an arrangement at the moment, and I suspect that xenografts from hypoallergenic pigs might be the better solution by the time they're ready for their second round--somewhat like the "heart beasts" and "liver beasts" that destabilized the regime in _A Gift from Earth_, (not that it'll
    • Wouldn't even work unless they could do brain transplants. And if they could, chronic stupidity is a great medical basis for why Putin and Xi should be on the short list, though I'm not sure anybody would want to go walking around in those sleeves.

    • by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @03:28AM (#65638068)
      Nah, everyone knows that the path to immortality is massive doses of heroin and cocaine. Just ask Keith Richards.
      • Nah, everyone knows that the path to immortality is massive doses of heroin and cocaine. Just ask Keith Richards.

        Yep...God Bless Keith....gives us ALL hope.

        Me?

        I'm hoping to opt for the more "old fashioned" method of immortality...hoping a vampire will bite me and turn me into a vampire....

        But whew...I need to lose a bit more weight first...I don't want to go through eternity with the current beer gut I'm still sporting....

        But I live in New Orleans, so, guessing I stand a good chance on the vampire thin

        • I'm hoping to opt for the more "old fashioned" method of immortality...hoping a vampire will bite me

          That's not a good thing. Friend of mine was hoping for that as well and then some curly-haired weirdo took a big bite out of his jugular vein, and he was yelling and screaming and bleeding all over, and this guy just said "Hey, come on, don'tcha get it?", but he just kept rolling around on the sidewalk, bleeding, and screaming.

  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @11:44PM (#65637814) Homepage

    Neither Putin nor Xi are medial experts. They are uneducated fools discussing something they know very little about. They think they are knowledgeable but are not.

    As a transplant survivor I can tell you it is not that easy. Organ rejection sucks. Worse, sometimes the transplant an reject the body, rather than the other way around. The medication we currently use to delay organ rejection has horrible side effects beyond merely making you immunosuppressed (as in you can die from covid). Prednisone does a tone of stuff to you, including a high risk for Diabetes.

    The kind of thing they want to be true would require solid human cloning. You need to grow the organ with your own DNA if you want to actually do this kind of transplant based immortality.

    Could mankind get to 150 year life span? Quite likely - but we are just beginning the long road on that process.

    Most of human life extension has NOT been extending human life to live longer, but instead stopping people from dying young. That is, cave men could easily live to 90 years old, just like modern man, but most of them died before the age of 20. In civilized countries that are not at war, we generally do not die as children any more.

    That said, I strongly suspect that a baby born 200 years from now will most likely have a life expectancy of over 120 years. But we are no where near that yet.

    • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @11:58PM (#65637834)

      They're also totally disregarding another reality: The more transplants you receive, the more your immune system will reject the next one. Shit, even dialysis makes your immune system more picky about what organs it will accept the longer you do it.

      • The more transplants you receive, the more your immune system will reject the next one.

        An obvious solution is to split a blastocyst into twins, grow one to maturity, and grow the other for spare organs.

        • by skam240 ( 789197 )

          Or just grow a bunch of clones later in life and use whichever ones work out. As long as it reaches maturity before you need any of it it would be fine. I don't think Putin or Xi would care much about the ethical concerns here either.

          • See the old movie: "Parts, the Clonus horror"
          • I expect as one approaches the 8th decade of life, all the torture, all the political intrigue, all the stealing and distribution the loot probably gets a bit old with no over the top heirs to hand it off to. Even a dozen supermodel girlfriends on trampolines or watching people or the girlfriends being fed to the sharks in the pool is only entertaining for a while. It takes more and more to get ones "good leader" dick hard, one almost wants the life of Saddam, playing tough guy freedom fighter from the
        • Too expensive. Each patient needs one unique to themselves, and won't ever be ready in time for an emergency. I think we'll have better luck breeding rh-null pigs. The best part is they'll eat anything, including soylent green.

      • by wwphx ( 225607 )
        Even with the first organ transplant, you're on immune suppressants from that point forward, though they're trying to improve the tech. This is not a viable path to life extension. China recently did a lung transplant from a pig to a brain-dead person, it didn't go well.
    • This isn't Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger is making an assertion of fact that is confidentially incorrect. It's more likely to people doing random chitchat.

      If you haven't had these kinds of conversations, chances are you need to leave the basement.

      • by Sique ( 173459 )
        That's not Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger simply means you overestimate your abilities in fields you don't know much about, while you underestimate your abilities in fields you are an expert in. Dunning and Kruger (1999) still postulate that your selfconfidence increases with competence. Only this curve is way flatter than your objective competence. It does not mean at all that you overestimate yourself in fields you don't know much about so far that you think you are better than the experts. That's a total
      • Not random at all. Putin has lately been funding both this kind of research and also research into brain uploading.

        • by vivian ( 156520 )

          Wouldn't brain uploading suffer the same philosophical problem as the teleportation quandary?
          The uploaded copy of you might have a seamless existence that feels like everything worked perfectly, but the original you is still going to be facing death either naturally if the scanning is not intrusive, or more likely turned into a million salami slices so each slice can be scanned and digitised during the scanning and uploading process.
          Is it still you in the end?

          • I don't get the philosophical problem, to be honest, because by that logic the me an hour ago would not be me either.

            • It's a question of continuity. Is it the same continuous consciousness or a new one with the same memories? Since your body isn't replaced on an hourly basis, your analogy doesn't really work. A better one might be taking the system drive from an old PC and putting it in a completely new computer. The result will be a computer with the same name as the old one and all of the same data, but is it the same computer? No.
              • Then take 10 years if you think one hour is not enough. Or being in coma or under general anaesthesia. And a computer is a bad comparison since it lacks identity narrative. As long as it is intact, it is the same person.

                • I think you're begging the question here. The question being: is that "identity narrative" valid after the brain/body have ceased to be intact? It will always appear to be valid, even if it is a different consciousness with the same memories. That's the problem. Have you moved your consciousness to a new body, or have you saddled a stranger with all your problems.
          • by Xarius ( 691264 )

            The scanning would most certainly be destructive!

            The best sci-fi versions I've heard of this where you don't die is where small parts of the brain are gradually replaced by electrical/mechanical equivalents, so eventually your whole brain is artificial and then you're functionally immortal; and your mind can just be removed and popped in a server rack or new body.

        • I'm imagining the real Putin and the Brain upload robot Putin have a fight, ala the spiderman pointing meme, about who the real Putin is.
        • And that is even less Dunning-Kruger since he's literally paying money to fund people to research something rather than proclaiming something himself.

      • This isn't Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger is making an assertion of fact that is confidentially incorrect. It's more likely to people doing random chitchat.

        Dunning Kruger is discredited nonsense. The meme is based on an expressed mismatch between personal perception of knowledge vs. actual knowledge. People misuse Dunning Kruger to imply a connection between confidence and lack of knowledge when in fact people in the study were just as likely to overshoot as undershoot.

        https://digitalcommons.usf.edu... [usf.edu]

    • 3D bioprinting organs from your own cells is a thing now. Just saying.
      • Only good enough for researching, such as testing drugs against a 3D printed version of organ cells. But a functional organ that can be transplanted, with all teh proper veins, arteries, nerve cells, and organ function is nowhere even remotely close to something we can do today. Some bioprinting is being tested in clinical trials for organ tissue grafts, but a fully functional organ? We're decades away if that.
    • ern man, but most of them died before the age of 20

      That's a statistical artefact. If they survived their infant years, the next station was the 1st heart attack, typically in their 60s, like us.

      Of course there were wounds from war and accidents, but they weren't that common. Many wounds heal well by themselves, not every injury leaves you with your guts hanging out.

    • by YuppieScum ( 1096 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:03AM (#65637980) Journal

      Neither Putin nor Xi are medi[c]al experts. They are uneducated fools discussing something they know very little about. They think they are knowledgeable but are not.

      Well, it's a good job that they're not both megalomaniacal dictators with the entire resources of their respective nations at their beck and call, and a brutal security apparatus to enforce their whims and desires irrespective of their grounding in objective reality.

      Oh, wait...

      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @08:37AM (#65638402)

        Neither Putin nor Xi are medi[c]al experts. They are uneducated fools discussing something they know very little about. They think they are knowledgeable but are not.

        Well, it's a good job that they're not both megalomaniacal dictators with the entire resources of their respective nations at their beck and call, and a brutal security apparatus to enforce their whims and desires irrespective of their grounding in objective reality.

        Oh, wait...

        Nor are either of them clearly suffering from an excess of Hubris.

        When it comes to a megalomaniacal dictator, hubris tends to be their downfall. They get too comfortable and forget that it's not just their enemies, but also their friends and subordinates that want to take a crack at it as well.

        There's a reason that every time you see a Taliban big wig they're carrying an AK or PK over their shoulder. It's not that they want to look tough, its the fact the guy standing right behind them is already measuring the crown to see how well it fits.

        With Xi and Putin, I think everyone is just waiting for them to shuffle off naturally although I wouldn't be surprised if they had an unfortunate accident.

        • That they both are into metaphysics and organ transplants instead of marring their second born to each other, building complex interelationships that set the world on fire, is a good sign that both empires promote from the same talent pool as the west, self centered social accountants and process lawyers.
        • There's a reason that every time you see a Taliban big wig they're carrying an AK or PK over their shoulder. It's not that they want to look tough, its the fact the guy standing right behind them is already measuring the crown to see how well it fits.

          Nah, in that context it's all about projecting a macho, alpha-status image, which they have to do to maintain dominance and position. It's the hubris that prevents them realising they've no chance of actually deploying their symbol of authority AK/PK before they get a pesh-kabz in the kidney.

          With Xi and Putin, I think everyone is just waiting for them to shuffle off naturally although I wouldn't be surprised if they had an unfortunate accident.

          Well, in Putin's Russia, involuntary defenestration counts as "natural causes."

      • The entire western medical world is working on extending life while preserving mental acuity....you think these two at the dead end bosses have an evil lab bigger the western pharmaceutical industry can not seem to discover anything more than brains fall apart at 85 years old. We can do anything we want to primate subjects in the west, cute little monkeys, without involving any protestors to cure anything around cognitive decline. If the worst of the worst communist mobbed up nation would discover how
    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      At least they're not drinking lead or something.
      China kinda have a long tradition of looking for ways to get immortal by weird means.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      "I strongly suspect that a baby born 200 years from now will most likely have a life expectancy of over 120 years"

      I strongly suspect pollution will limit that quite a bit.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Neither Putin nor Xi are medial experts. They are uneducated fools discussing something they know very little about. They think they are knowledgeable but are not.

      As a transplant survivor I can tell you it is not that easy. Organ rejection sucks. Worse, sometimes the transplant an reject the body, rather than the other way around. The medication we currently use to delay organ rejection has horrible side effects beyond merely making you immunosuppressed (as in you can die from covid). Prednisone does a tone of stuff to you, including a high risk for Diabetes.

      The kind of thing they want to be true would require solid human cloning. You need to grow the organ with your own DNA if you want to actually do this kind of transplant based immortality.

      Could mankind get to 150 year life span? Quite likely - but we are just beginning the long road on that process.

      Most of human life extension has NOT been extending human life to live longer, but instead stopping people from dying young. That is, cave men could easily live to 90 years old, just like modern man, but most of them died before the age of 20. In civilized countries that are not at war, we generally do not die as children any more.

      That said, I strongly suspect that a baby born 200 years from now will most likely have a life expectancy of over 120 years. But we are no where near that yet.

      This, a large part of people living longer in the last 50-100 years has been the marked decline in infant and child mortality.

      One of the reasons that huge families with 12 kids isn't a thing any more is that kids don't die nearly as often from easily preventable diseases. Although your friendly neighbourhood anti-vaxxer is trying as hard as possible to change that.

      Plenty of people still die in their 50s and 60s, however the severe reduction in deaths under 12 really makes the average go up significant

    • by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @09:20AM (#65638488)

      I'm skeptical of claims that we can meaningfully extend human lifespan. In order to do that, we'd have to stop the biological process of aging- not just fix problems aging causes piecemeal.

      Increases in life expectancy to-date have mostly been from reduced infant mortality (fewer kids are malnourished, vaccines have stopped most childhood diseases, and the birthing process itself and neonatal is far less lethal due to surgical and other medical interventions). Besides that, it's (again) better nutrition/harsh living conditions, and medical interventions allowing a few people who would have died early from things like heart disease and cancer to live to the point aging gets them. But even with all that, most humans hit a wall sometime in their early 80s to early 90s where the body just stops working well. It's not one thing- it's everything. Muscles waste, the brain can no longer process information the same, the circulatory system doesn't work as well, the immune system stops working as well- everything breaks down. You won't fix it with a new heart or liver. The tiny minority to make it to extreme old age (100+) mostly appear to have a rare genetic predisposition to it, and even that one in a billion who makes it to 110 eventually succumbs to general frailty.

      At best, we could use gene editing to give everyone the aging genes of those super centenarians who make it to 110+, but we don't have any great answers for how to stop the process beyond that. Of course, the world is full of scientific charlatans who sell the fountain of youth. It's probably a good way to get grant money.

      • While we do not have the technology now, we do have good theories on how to do all of it, including the brain.

        With effective cloning, we an replace the various systems piecemeal. The fact that it is everything is irrelevant, we can slowly over time, replace everything - even the brain. (Find a small section of the brain with excessive damage, destroy it granting a small amount of brain damage, insert new genetically identical but young brain cells in the whole - yes this is science fiction - now.)

        Gene edi

        • Simply replacing the parts that are broken doesn't fix a systemic problem. The body of a frail 100 year old person doesn't just have a weaker heart or weaker muscles. Literally every system in the body isn't working like it would in a younger person. Even the brain of a non-demented and sharp 70 year old doesn't have the same abilities as it did when the person was 25. Even people living to 100+ are still extremely diminished compared to how they were at 30 by their 70s.

          The only animals that live substantia

    • This is being solved as well. https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/... [uchicago.edu]

      (I track this because i have an auto-immune disease with no cure)

    • Neither Putin nor Xi are medial experts. They are uneducated fools discussing something they know very little about. They think they are knowledgeable but are not.

      100% agree, but that's not what makes this exchange interesting.

      They have a reputation for being technocrats. This shows that, at least in the medical domain, they're still just uneducated fools.

      It's also telling that two old dictators are bonding over extending lifespans.

  • Bwahahaha (Score:5, Funny)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @12:01AM (#65637838)
    If that's what con artists are selling these 2 idiots I'm all for it. Have fun with transplant rejection syndrome and then dying from complications on the second surgery ya halfwitted gits.
  • places where they can get them from prisoners and the prisoners can be people who don't think the government way

  • by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @12:39AM (#65637890)
    But I really wish we didn't have to start with pooty-poot.
  • Immortality... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @04:16AM (#65638116)

    Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality," the translator added.

    Immortality through organ transplants? So that's why Trump was throwing a tantrum over not being invited. It must be seriously creepy and downright traumatic to be a translator for these people.

  • ... you can't get a brain transplant and alzheimer will always catch up to you.

  • by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @04:36AM (#65638144)

    I have actually got some chronically immortal cells [wikipedia.org] in me.
    I wouldn't be happier if Putin got some in his body too.

  • ...rather than one of them had a medical issue.

  • by CaptainOfSpray ( 1229754 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @04:48AM (#65638158)
    ... They would be discussing Organ Transplants and Immorality
  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:13AM (#65638178)

    Just their OWN.

  • Weird how it's never the decent chaps that discuss immortality isn't it? Even now in the West we're seeing lifespans extended but with a resulting rise in ill health, with dementia being arguably the worst outcome. Cognitive decline is going to happen - will voters really want presidents with the hearts of young men but unable to remember the names of countries?
  • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @06:59AM (#65638274) Homepage
    Putin, a guy who needlessly threw a million of his own men into a meat grinder in Ukraine, is concerned about human longevity? I call BS.
    • Putin own personal longevity is amazing considering the number of people around him that make money from Chaos in the Russian system. Russia at war is alot less chaos than branching out to the west with yet another long term energy contract, alot of the right now money is trapped for another 2 decades. I figure the 110+ russian billionaires are much more tied into Russia Leader Future than the 1000+ billionaires tied into the system in the US, and only takes about 20 with a really sour taste in their mo
  • Which part of Putin is the leader ?

    If we replace all the parts is he still the leader, or can mutiple leaders be constructed from his discarded parts?

    I can see this leading to a war between the Putins in various stages of decomposition.

  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    Now can they please leave the tigers and pangolins alone?

  • Excluding a few extraordinary examples of genetic luck the useful lifetime of a human brain at even a generous 75% cognitive levels is 95ish years. After that you are no gaining years for an individual you are gaining years for a sack of organs with a brian that sinks downhill and is no longer even a evil despot beyond 100 plus or minus 5 years. You think with 10,000 dietary combinations depending on where humans live we would have already stumbled on something that would extend this, but we have an
    • Yes, and it's why you almost never see dictators continue past their early 80s. They may retain their title, but someone else has the power by then (for example MBS taking power from the king even while he retains the title). By their mid-80s, even very healthy people no longer have the physical and cognitive strength. Putin and Xi (both early 70s) have about 10 years left before they hit the wall. I'm sure they know it at some level, which is why they are whistling past the graveyard.

      My grandfather (very m

  • What do evil people talk about? Sounds about par for the course, stealing organs from slaves and hoping to live indefinitely Since Putin tends to talk about whatever the other person is interested in, (being a former KGB) it seems more like this is where Xi is at
  • What the wealthy will end up doing is performing mind transplants into whole bodies to ensure they live forever.

    That's the premise of "Freejack"
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

  • by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:05PM (#65639062)
    The UN tracked that China, for a time, had the world's shortest wait time for organ transplants that was unnaturally brief.. well, because they had a number of involuntary donors.
  • Now imagine, both Putin and XI get sold on a life extending treatment, and instead end up swapping bodies! Oh, the hijinks they'd be up to!
  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday September 04, 2025 @04:07PM (#65639370)
    I'll eat their livers with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

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