gave him a small vial of white, fluffy resveratrol powder—marked only with the letter R—to try on insects in his lab. He took it back to Rhode Island, mixed it with some yeast paste, and fed it to his fruit flies. A few months later, I got a call from him. “David!” he said. “What is this R stuff?” Under lab conditions, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster typically lives for an average of forty or so days. “We added a week to their lives and sometimes more than that,” Tatar told me. “On average, they’re living for more than fifty days.” In human terms, that’s an additional fourteen years.
