- Person
- Michael Rosbash
- Lived
- b. 1944
- Field
- Genetics, chronobiology
- From
- American
The story
Michael Rosbash was born in Kansas City in 1944 to German Jewish refugees: his father, a cantor, had fled the Nazis with his mother in 1938, just months before Kristallnacht. At Brandeis University near Boston, from 1974, Rosbash became one of the scientists who solved a mystery as old as biology: how living things keep time.
Nearly every organism has an internal clock that runs on about 24 hours. It tells our bodies when to sleep, when to release hormones, how to adjust body temperature and how to manage metabolism. In the 1970s researchers had found fruit flies with faults in a gene they called period that scrambled the insects’ daily rhythms, but nobody knew how the gene kept time. In 1984 Rosbash and his colleague Jeffrey Hall isolated the period gene, as did Michael Young’s group in New York. Rosbash and Hall then discovered that the protein it makes, PER, builds up during the night and is broken down during the day.
In 1990, with Paul Hardin, they proposed the mechanism: PER protein builds up, enters the cell’s nucleus and shuts off its own gene; as it breaks down, the gene turns back on, and the loop repeats roughly every 24 hours. Rosbash’s group later identified other parts of the machinery, including the light-sensing protein that resets the clock each morning and the brain cells that serve as the fly’s master pacemaker. The same kind of loop runs the clocks in human cells. Rosbash, Hall and Young shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The discovery turned the body clock into something doctors and scientists can study at the level of genes. The Nobel committee noted that a mismatch between our inner clock and the outside world causes jet lag and that chronic misalignment is associated with higher risk of disease, which shapes today’s research on shift work, light exposure and the timing of sleep. In 2001 researchers found that people in families who fall asleep around 7 p.m. and wake around 2 a.m. carry a mutation in PER2, a human version of the period gene.
Why it matters
Rosbash’s clock-gene discoveries are the foundation for understanding sleep disorders, jet lag and the health effects of shift work.
About Michael Rosbash
Son of refugee German Jews who uncovered the gene feedback loop that runs the body’s 24-hour clock, the basis for today’s understanding of sleep disorders, jet lag and shift-work health.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017 NobelPrize.org
- Michael Rosbash, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- First Human Circadian Rhythm Gene Identified ScienceDaily
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.