Kaeberlein is doing a large clinical trial of rapamycin in companion (pet) dogs, which are not a bad proxy for humans—they’re large, they’re mammals, they share our environment, and they age in ways similar to us. In a preliminary phase of this study, which he calls the Dog Aging Project, Kaeberlein found that rapamycin actually seemed to improve cardiac function in older animals. “One thing that’s been surprising to me,” he says, “is the different ways that rapamycin not only seems to delay the decline but seems to make things better. There clearly seems to be, at least in some organs, a
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