06/07/2026: Under Siege, Turning The Ship Around, The Dog Aging Project

24:38Significantly.

24:43It's so busy here. It is busy. He took us to Hanwha's shipyard in Korea, where nine ships are being built at once, four in a row, like Lego sets the size of football fields. Steel chunks bigger than buildings hover over the ground. They're lifted above the water, or they just glide by. He showed us how far ahead they are technologically. Rows and rows of robots. But even with all the automation, the human workforce keeps growing. There are over 26 ,000 workers on site, many getting around on low-tech, because this place is so vast. And the yard keeps hiring, training 400 workers at once, way more than the 20 in Philly.

25:41And they're taught using cutting-edge virtual reality. He's learning to paint. It's a dance of tech, cranes, trucks, and bikes. And this yard also builds military vessels, including submarines, which the U.S. desperately needs, since our fleet is aging and we can barely make new ones. From a Hanwha perspective, we build great submarines. Here in Korea? Here in Korea, yes. We have told the U.S. government that if they so wish, we will build submarines for them in the United States and in Philadelphia, just like we do in Korea. Is the ultimate goal for your company to build nuclear submarines for the U.S.

26:25Navy? The submarine program in the United States is heading in the wrong direction, and we think we can help. Another way Hanwha says it wants to help the U.S. is with transporting liquefied natural gas, or LNG, hoping to build these giant LNG tankers in Philly. The United States is the largest producer of natural gas, and yet we don't have any LNG ships that we make ourselves. Is that correct? That's correct. Not a single one. This leads to an absurd situation. While we export LNG on foreign carriers to over 30 countries... One country we don't send it to is other parts of the United States. Colin Grabo, a trade expert at the Libertarian Cato Institute, explains that a century-old law called the Jones Act requires that any cargo shipped between U.S.

27:21ports, say from Baltimore to Boston or Seattle to Juneau, that cargo has to be on an American-made ship. So if the cargo is LNG, it has to be on an American-made LNG ship. But we don't build any. That's right. There aren't any. And you might think, well, this seems like an easy problem to solve. Go build the ship, transport the gas. Except the math doesn't work. If you want to build one of those ships in Asia, the cost is around$260 million. Here in the United States, about a billion dollars. Well, wait, are there parts of this country that cannot get natural gas because of this law? That's right.

28:00New England. In winters, New England has to import pricier natural gas from abroad, even though it's extracted only a few states away. In fact, Puerto Rico imported Russian natural gas the same month as Russia invaded Ukraine. No. So we take a stance against Russia. On the other hand, we're importing their energy, something that we have in abundance. You can't make this stuff up. Last year, President Trump made solving our ship crisis a national priority, signing an executive order, creating a multi-agency action plan, and a White House office of shipbuilding.

28:36Bill Whitaker:We're way, way, way behind. We used to build a ship a day, and now we don't do a ship a year practically. But the White House has conflicting priorities. So here's the administration. It wants to build ships, and they're putting huge tariffs, 50%, on steel, which is the main component in a ship. What's wrong with that picture? Yes, this is one of the paradoxes of the Trump administration. We're artificially increasing the cost of building ships in this country. So why can't shipbuilders just use American-made steel? There's no tariffs on those. That's true. But when we put heavy tariffs on imported steel, we drive those costs up, that's a great opportunity for Americans to raise their own price.

29:19What we note is today, American steel is roughly twice as expensive as steel in, say, China. What you're saying is when the price of steel goes up because of tariffs, then the American steel manufacturer hikes the price of steel? These are profit-oriented enterprises. He actually thinks we should be able to just buy and use ships from our allies, South Korea, not build them. And he points to another conflicting White House priority, making it harder to grant skilled immigrants work visas. Traditionally, a lot of immigrants have been willing to this kind of work, and yet we are turning our back on immigration and adopting a more hostile stance.

30:02The administration seems to be fighting its own policy. Yes. It didn't help when last September ICE raided a Korean battery plant in Georgia, alleging visa violations. Agents dragged off 300 Korean technicians and engineers in cuffs and chains despite their coming here to train American workers. Hanwha's Michael Coulter says this caused a backlash in Korea. Have you been assured that what happened in Georgia will not happen in Philadelphia? We've been assured that our visas are the right visas and our team is not going to be impacted. The White House is committed to making ships here. So last year, when President Trump threatened to put tariffs on Korean imports, Korea's president offered instead to invest$150 billion to revive the U.S.

31:00shipbuilding industry, promising Philly is just the start. There's a recognition that the United States has a problem, that Korea may be uniquely positioned to help. It's like aid for the United States. Wow. Wouldn't it be more profitable and wiser if the United States just bought the ships from Korea? That doesn't solve the problem. At the end of the day, shipbuilding is a national security necessity. The U.S. needs to be able to secure our own commerce. We need to be able to export our own energy. The idea that we now rely on Korean expertise to help us build an industry that we need for national security reasons.

31:46Should we be ashamed of ourselves? Should we feel weak? I don't think we should be fearful or feel weak. We are in a shipbuilding crisis in the United States, and every American should be aware of that. But that doesn't mean that it's not solvable. We once deployed ships to save South Korea. Now we've been forced to turn to South Korea to save us. In a statement to 60 Minutes, the White House said, quote, no president has done more to bolster American maritime power. With gas prices becoming increasingly volatile due to the war, the president has temporarily suspended the Jones Act to ease the transport of oil and gas within the U.S.

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34:06Everyone knows the old adage about dogs being man's best friend, but you may not know that dogs might also be one of man's best hopes to treat age-related illnesses. That's because our canines develop many of the same diseases we do, including dementia. As we first reported last March, dogs' brains are a lot like ours, so studying how dementia and other diseases naturally progress in them may also help us. That's what the Dog Aging Project is all about, unlocking secrets to a longer, healthier life for humans and our four-legged friends. What do you think? You ready to do your test? At hundreds of vet clinics and hospitals around the country, including here at Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, people are bringing in their dogs.

34:57Does he ever seem more irritable? Yes. The Dog Aging Project is a collaboration of dog owners, scientists, and veterinarians studying dogs. More than 50 ,000 of them so far by collecting data on their diets and exercise, analyzing blood samples, and doing MRIs of dogs' brains. Matt Kaberlein, a biologist who spent decades trying to understand and reverse the causes of aging, co-founded the project in 2014. Where did the idea of the Dog Aging Project come from? I had this light bulb moment, which I still remember vividly. I realized, oh my God, we know about three or four or five ways to slow aging in laboratory animals.

35:39Some of those are going to work in dogs. You think that's possible? Absolutely. I have no doubt that's possible. The biology of aging is so conserved or shared across the animal kingdom. Much of this works the same way in dogs. Much of it works the same way in people. You're okay. To help study how the brain ages, Kaberline recruited Stephanie McGrath, a veterinary neurologist from Colorado State University. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that there are neurologists for animals. Yes, a lot of people are surprised. And you believe looking at dogs and looking at dogs' brains can help us not only help dogs, but humans as well?

36:16Yes, of course. Absolutely. There's no doubt. Why? Why? Because right now we are using mice and we are putting them through treatment trials and then we go directly to human trials. I've read that as many as 90 % of the things that work in mice do not end up working in humans. Right. So to have something in between would be hugely beneficial. Right, and not just in other species, but a species that very closely mimic naturally occurring diseases of aging in humans. Cancer, dementia, all these diseases that we see as humans age occur in dogs. One reason? They live alongside us and are exposed to the same environments.

36:57They exercise with us, eat our food, drink the same water. Also key, McGrath says, is the fact that dogs have shorter lives because they age faster than humans. We can get a ton of information that would take decades to do in humans. In a human being, if you wanted to do a lifelong study, obviously you would have to do it from the age of 1 to 60, 70, 80. Exactly. So many decades versus 5, 10 years. So we just check to make sure his sensory's good. McGrath has been tracking hundreds of dogs to see how their cognitive ability changes as they age, including 12-year-old Murphy, a German Shepherd poodle mix.

37:39He gets his puppy zoomies about once a week now versus once a day. Okay, all right. They're still in there, though. They're still there. For Pat Schultz, like many of the dog owners we met, enrolling Murphy in the dog aging project was personal. Her husband, Bill, suffered from Alzheimer's disease, progressing to the point he stopped recognizing Pat as his wife. What do you do in a situation like that? Just go along with it. He asked me out on a date. Really? Yeah. Can we go on a date? Sure, let's go have dinner, you know. Throughout his decline, Murphy was Bill's constant companion. Murphy was a caregiver in some ways.

38:16Murphy was like his nanny dog. Bill would forget his phone. I have a tracking collar on Murphy, so as long as Murphy had that tracking collar on, I knew where Bill was. So while Bill is dealing with Alzheimer's, you hear about the dog aging project. I think I was looking at clinical studies, and I found something about dog studies. I thought, oh, dog studies, I hadn't ever heard those. Murphy was getting older, knowing that he's a big dog. They don't have as long a lifespan usually. For the past three years, Murphy has undergone testing to assess his physical and mental fitness. In games like these, dogs are shown where a treat is hidden and seconds later allowed to go and get it.

38:59If they can remember where it is. When it was Murphy's turn, he struggled, wanting to stay with Pat, too anxious to do the test. Puppy, look. Okay. On the second try, he got a little turned around, but eventually found the tree. There you go. Atta boy. Good job. The anxiety that Murphy showed, is that a potential sign of dementia? Yes, is the short answer. In the last few visits at CSU, he's really progressed in terms of his challenges with his tasks, both here and at home. Another dog, Ralph, was also tested. At 14, he's already shown signs of advanced dementia.

39:45Bill Whitaker:Puppy, look. Ralph quickly forgot about the treat, wandered off, and picked up a piece of lint off the floor. All the information collected in the Dog Aging Project, including from these tests, goes into a public database accessible to researchers around the world. It's been used in more than 50 scientific studies so far, many of which found correlations between lifestyle, environment, and disease risk. One finding, dogs that live with other dogs appear to suffer from fewer diseases. And when it comes to cognitive decline, dogs that don't exercise were found to have a six times greater chance of developing dementia.

40:27When some of the dogs in the aging project die, their brains are donated and examined. Dr. Dirk Keene is a neuropathologist from the University of Washington. For the past 20 years, he's studied thousands of human brains looking for causes of Alzheimer's. His motivation for participating in the Dog Aging Project was watching his mother suffer from Alzheimer's and also seeing his dog Spring decline from what looked like, to him, the same disease, what some call doggy dementia. So that's Spring when she was a healthy, happy dog. Tongue out, tail wagging. She was a happy dog, yeah. And this is spring, near the end of her life.

41:07She would get confused and sort of lost. She would stare at walls. She would just stop and stare into space. She would lean against things. This happens to people. It's not just memory when we start to have dementia. Dementia is a very complex thing that includes confusion. It includes loss of the ability to remember sort of spatial references. Very similar to what we're seeing in dogs happens in people. This is half of a human brain. This is half a human brain. That's the dog brain. That's the dog brain. Half a brain. Wow. Dr. Keen showed us how similar dogs' brains are to humans. You can see the dog brain has the same frontal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe.

41:41It's the same basic shape as the human brain. It's very, very similar. And it turns out dementia changes brain size and structure in very similar ways in both species. This is a person in their 80s who was not demented. This is a person who was in their 70s who was demented. And so the most important sort of thing to notice is how much different in size they are. I'm going to let you hold this if that's okay. So just grab on there. Yep. You can sort of feel how much difference. The weight difference between a healthy brain and an atrophied brain is stunning. As disease kills off neurons, the brain shrinks, and the space in the middle cavity enlarges.

42:20I mean, it looks like something has completely fallen out here. Yeah, it's remarkable. It's so depressing. Dementia in dogs also results in enlarged spaces and brain shrinkage. This is Spring's Brain. Under a microscope, Spring's Brain, one of the first to be donated to the Dog Aging Project, shows beta-amyloid plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. And this is a human brain. And it looks strikingly similar to the plaques in a human brain as well. Progress in preventing Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, which will affect an estimated 40 % of Americans over 55, has been slow. The Dog Aging Project hopes to change that by testing the drug rapamycin.

43:01In mice, it's been shown to slow cognitive decline and increase life expectancy by a remarkable 60%. That's led some longevity researchers and influencers to suggest rapamycin for human use. To understand whether it might work in dogs, Julie Moreno, a molecular biologist from Colorado State University, helped conduct a pilot study of 12 dogs, all with signs of dementia. Ten-year-old Hubert was among those given a placebo. Thirteen-year-old Monkey received rapamycin. After the dogs died, Moreno examined their brains and found that Monkey's brain showed fewer microglial cells, which produce inflammation commonly associated with dementia.

43:46So if you just kind of focus in on this side, you see quite a bit of those teal-colored microglial cells. And then if you look over here, you just see less, right? Like there's just less number of them. Two other dogs receiving rapamycin, including Ralph, have since died. Their brains also showed fewer cells associated with inflammation. So rapamycin, at least in this study, worked on dogs. Yeah. What did you think when you first saw this? I was super excited. What's your hope in doing this study? If it works on a dog and it's safe and it's helping their cognition, then maybe it would help humans.

44:24The Dog Aging Project is now conducting a larger clinical trial funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, giving hundreds of dogs, including Murphy, either a placebo or rapamycin to see if the drug can extend life. The first ever longevity drug on the market. There are three other drugs being developed by the for-profit company Loyal, a biotech startup founded in 2019 by 31-year-old Celine Hollywock. Does she like how it tastes? My vision is that this is, you know, it's a daily beef-flavored pill that are given preventatively to keep them healthier longer, similar to a statin, you know, for older Americans.

45:01And you think it will actually help extend a dog's life? Yeah. How long? Approximately one healthier year of life. Maybe it'll be more, maybe it'll be less. One of their drugs in a clinical trial is being given to dogs over the age of 10 who are monitored for signs of aging. The FDA has signed off on the drug safety data and says it has a reasonable expectation of effectiveness. But final results from the trial won't be known for several years. That extra year would be a healthier year than otherwise. An aging drug is about delaying and slowing the rate of decline that a dog or a human has over time to give them more healthier years.

45:39It's not something that you would give to a dog or a human on their deathbed to give them another year. It doesn't work like that. Silicon Valley is betting big on longevity. Hollywa's company has raised more than$250 million to bring its drugs to market. If we can achieve this, this is a massive, multibillion-dollar company. If we only do that, we're all happy. But oh, by the way, this also unlocks the possibility of us working on human longevity one day. I think going dogs first is the fastest way to work on and understand the biology of human aging. After a long struggle, Pat Schultz's husband, Bill, died two years ago due to complications from Alzheimer's.

46:19As part of the Dog Aging Project, she won't know for another few years whether Murphy got the rapamycin or not. But for now, she told us she's simply focused on making sure they both age as best they can. You've cared for a human with Alzheimer's. You're caring for a dog in this study who is aging. What have you noticed in terms of similarities? The thing I notice is that they both need to be loved and cared for. Just holding Bill's hand and patting his hand was enough just to decrease that anxiety, decrease that fear that you know was there. And that works with Murphy, too. And that works with Murphy, too.

47:00Bill Whitaker:Yep.

47:05Bill Whitaker:Good boy, Ralph. What Ralph's life meant for science and his family. I mean, your pets are family too, right? At 60MinutesOvertime.com. Are you really buying a car online on AutoTrader right now? Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget. You can really have it delivered. Or pick it up. Mommy, look! I think your kid is walking up the slide. Really? AutoTrader. Buy your car online. Really? Sunday, June 14th. Paramount Plus presents A Night for the Angels. Live at the White House. UFC stars don't come bigger than this. The world's greatest fighters on America's biggest stage.

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