Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to 3 American circadian rhythm researchers

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/02/554993385/nobel-prize-in-medicine-is-awarded-to-3-americans-for-work-on-circadian-rhythm

"Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young are the joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, winning for their discoveries about how internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life.

The three Americans won "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm" the Nobel Foundation says.

From the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, which announced the prize early Monday morning:

"Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year's Nobel laureates isolated 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. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

"With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day. The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism."

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