Medicine Nobel prize awarded for body clock discovery

By Umur Kocak Semiz and Sena Guler

ANKARA

The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded Monday to three American scientists for their work on the 24-hour body clock.

Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were rewarded for discoveries that "explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth's revolutions". 

“The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm,” said the press release.

Using fruit flies, the three scientists managed to find a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that “this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day”.

“We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans,” added the statement.

The award's cash prize, worth 8 million Swedish krona (nearly $979,000) will be shared by the Nobel laureates.

Jeffrey C. Hall, 72, spent most of his career at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where Michael Rosbash is a faculty member.

Michael W. Young, 68, is a faculty member at Rockefeller University in New York.

The Nobel Prize Award will be handed out on Dec. 10 on the anniversary of the death of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who created the award in 1895.