Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, Michael YoungNOBEL MEDIA. III. N. ELMEHEDThe 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been jointly awarded to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young for their work on circadian rhythms. The trio is recognized for research on the period gene in Drosophila—a central regulator of the circadian clock whose discovery led to the identification of such genes in humans and other animals—plus the protein machinery governing the timing of biological rhythms.
In the course of their research, collaborators Rosbash and Hall at Brandeis University and Young independently at Rockefeller University, “solved the mystery of how an inner clock in most of our cells in our bodies can anticipate daily fluctuations between night and day to optimize our behavior and physiology,” Thomas Perlmann, secretary general for the Nobel Assembly and Nobel Committee, says in a statement.
Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, tells The Scientist that he’s “thrilled and delighted” by the news. “These are the people who gave us our first working model of how the molecular clock might tick. The three of them . . . have formed the platform of our understanding of the molecular ...
