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Chapter 1: How is Vladimir Putin's health perceived?
How healthy is Vladimir Putin?
Well, you know, he always projects this kind of image of a virile, sort of strong man. He likes taking his shirt off. He hasn't done it in a while now, but he used to have his picture taken shirtless and, you know, jumping in ice lakes or, you know, sort of riding horses and whatnot.
No one knows.
I do investigative journalism and I speak a lot to Western spooks, you know, the CIA, people like that. And they've always said there's no truth to these claims that he's somehow ill or, you know, decrepit or whatever.
But thanks to some new reporting from the Wall Street Journal, we do know that Putin is spending billions of dollars trying to extend his life, maybe even live forever. And that in Russia, there's a long and fascinating history of people fiddling with human longevity. That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
Lyme disease is one of the fastest growing threats to human health around the world.
It's often difficult to diagnose. It may be difficult to treat. And now we have a vaccine that is safe and effective in preventing it.
That is, we had a vaccine back in the early 2000s. But then the Lyme vaccine became a cautionary tale. That's this week on Unexplainable, wherever you get your podcasts.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week is our last regular episode of A Touch More before I kick off a limited series, A Touch More, The Beautiful Game, a special series for the World Cup featuring in-depth interviews with some of soccer's biggest stars.
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Chapter 2: What is Putin's $26 billion quest for longevity?
Are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin best friends? Some have made films about it. Song about it.
while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have been discussing it. But I actually knew he was being serious because he's quite serious about his issues and I had read previously about other stuff he's interested in in that domain. So I decided to kind of look up and see what he was talking about. And it turned out that he was actually talking about a state program.
Part of what they're researching within that initiative is indeed organ replacement, exactly what he was talking about.
So that $26 billion is money that is being spent on this longevity project. And one of the things that it's being spent on, as you said, organ replacement. Where do the poor pigs fit in here? Tell me what happened.
The mini pigs. Yeah, that's a bit creepy. Poor little mini pigs. So essentially there are two ways they're looking into to achieve this organ replacement for humans. One of them is 3D printing. It's called 3D bioprinting. I think everyone by now has heard of 3D printing. Basically, 3D printers are printing things. They can print a glass. They can print a glove. They can even print a whole house.
And there are also 3D printers that print biological material, tissues, and the Russians are hoping even organs quite soon. So the idea is you print an organ in the lab and then you kind of implant it into a human being, like say lungs or liver or even the heart perhaps. That's the aspiration. The second thing is the mini pigs. They are genetically sort of close to humans in some ways.
They're genetically modified, I think, as well. And they're growing organs in these mini pigs and then they're implementing them, implanting them into human beings. It has to be said, this is already being done. I don't think people who get organs like that live long or, you know, for various reasons, the body rejects the organs or whatever. But it is a technique that is actually quite promising.
It's not a fantasy. It's something that other countries are doing as well. I mean, China notably is doing this as well.
You also wrote that Vladimir Putin loves a reverse sauna.
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Chapter 3: What innovative methods are being researched for organ replacement?
Participation in knowledge does not embrace everyone. Pure science will remain indifferent to struggle and depredation.
But he became essentially kind of the Socrates of Moscow. And he had a little group of acolytes who would listen to his ideas and then translate them to other people, either orally or write them down. And in fact, Peterson, his acolyte, wrote down a bunch of his ideas and sent them to none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky. who really latched on to them and became obsessed with them.
In fact, you can really see some of these ideas in The Brothers Karamazov. So one of the great questions of The Brothers Karamazov is, you know, who does not desire the death of his father? And all throughout this, you see Fyodorov's ideas kind of percolating up and bubbling into it. So he was really influential among the kind of literary set.
He also met and had kind of a frosty, a little bit of a prickly relationship with Liev Tolstoy as well. Tolstoy greatly admired Fyodorov, but was not about to buy into his ascetic lifestyle. Even when he was pretending to kind of go back to the land as a peasant serf, he still wore silk undershirts.
So he was not about to get on Fyodorov's train of sleeping on a trunk with newspapers as a blanket.
Okay, there is something looming on the horizon here, which is, of course, the Russian Revolution and then the Soviet era. This is a massive change in Russian society, right? And I can imagine when power changes hands, when there's this big upheaval, this guy's ideas vanish into nothingness. And yet, I suspect something different happened?
Yeah, not entirely. So his ideas were building, but obviously with the entrance of the Soviet era, there were...
There were a lot of revolutionary ideas, and there were a small group of kind of an offshoot, sort of second and third generation of Fyodorov acolytes who, you know, really grabbed onto the language of the time and declared, you know, death as ugly and inadmissible and these sorts of things.
But under Stalin, a lot of the great thinkers of the Russian Empire were sent to labor camps or killed, and that included a lot of the early cosmists. But... What was interesting is that some of his acolytes had been the initial kind of people who had thought about what it might look like to travel into space.
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