Steve A. Kay

Courtesy of Scripps Research InstituteIf he weren't so young, the moniker "Father Time" might fit geneticist Steve A. Kay quite well. At 44, the man whose lab determined how flowers know when to bloom is admittedly obsessed with clocks, whether they go off in Arabidopsis, Drosophila, or the mouse. The fascination began after he helped discover the cab gene in the early 1980s as a postdoc at Rockefeller University. "These circadian rhythms were doing a lot to me," he says in his characteristic, t

Christine Bahls

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Courtesy of Scripps Research Institute

If he weren't so young, the moniker "Father Time" might fit geneticist Steve A. Kay quite well. At 44, the man whose lab determined how flowers know when to bloom is admittedly obsessed with clocks, whether they go off in Arabidopsis, Drosophila, or the mouse. The fascination began after he helped discover the cab gene in the early 1980s as a postdoc at Rockefeller University. "These circadian rhythms were doing a lot to me," he says in his characteristic, tongue-in-cheek way. "They were controlling how aware I was, and why I needed to drink so heavily at meetings for the awake-sleep cycle."

Raised on the Isle of Jersey, he spent his childhood "looking at weird crap washing up on the beach, [like] survival boxes from British Navy ships." Now a principal investigator at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., Kay got a genuine ...

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