A cantor’s family escapes Germany
Michael Morris Rosbash’s parents were German Jews. His mother, Hilda Sonntag, came from a secular, comfortable Berlin family; her father owned a pharmacy that still operates under the same name today. His father, Alfred, grew up in Baden-Baden in a religious, kosher household; his own father had come from Kremenchuk in Ukraine around 1907 and run a small grocery store. Both were university students, she in medicine and he in law, until the Nazis barred Jews from those professions around 1933. They turned to Jewish careers instead: Hilda studied Jewish education, and Alfred, who had a fine voice, became a cantor, taking his first post at a synagogue in Breslau in 1937.
Alfred loved the Germany of his youth and did not want to leave; Hilda insisted they go, telling him she would leave for America with or without him. They sailed in 1938, a few months before Kristallnacht. The morning after that night of violence, the Gestapo came to his grandmother’s home in Baden-Baden asking for the tall one. She told them they were too late: he had gone to America.
Kansas City and Boston
In New York Hilda cleaned hotel rooms while Alfred searched in vain for work among the many refugee rabbis and cantors. Hilda spotted an advertisement for a cantor at a Reform congregation in Kansas City. Alfred objected that they were not Reform Jews; she replied that they were now, because making a living came first. He got the job, and Michael was born in Kansas City on March 7, 1944, at the Menorah Hospital. In 1946 the family moved to Boston for a post at a larger synagogue, living first in Brookline and then in Newton.
In the autumn of 1954 Alfred Rosbash died of a heart attack in the synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur, shortly after chanting Kol Nidre. He was 42; Michael was ten. His mother, who had just been admitted to Boston University medical school to finish the degree the Nazis had interrupted, had to go to work instead. She trained as a cytologist and built and ran the cytology section of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital for many years.
Caltech, Paris and MIT
Rosbash was, by his own account, an indifferent high school student who probably had an attention disorder, and he chose the California Institute of Technology partly to get as far from an unhappy home as possible. Caltech’s dean later told him he had the lowest projected grades in his class. After a difficult start he buckled down, was inspired by the chemist Norman Davidson, whose obvious joy in the laboratory convinced him to do research for a living, and graduated in chemistry in 1965.
A Fulbright scholarship took him to Paris for a year, which he spent learning French, travelling and absorbing the city’s politics and culture rather than in the laboratory. He then earned a PhD in biophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, studying how genes are expressed in the laboratory of Sheldon Penman, and was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. After postdoctoral work in Scotland, mostly at the University of Edinburgh, he joined the faculty of Brandeis University near Boston in 1974, where he has stayed ever since.
A difficult character
Rosbash is candid that he was not an easy young man. At MIT, when his adviser Sheldon Penman bought a new car and offered him the identical old one for parts, Rosbash spent a Sunday swapping his own driver’s door for Penman’s, which carried a faculty parking sticker, and parked in the prestigious faculty lot for a year in a two-tone car until the police caught up with him and Penman was ticketed. Another time, while Penman was away, he was so rude to a technician over space at a fume hood that she walked out, and he had to spend half an hour throwing pebbles at her window that night before she would accept his apology. A simple, polite summary, he wrote, is that he had a difficult character, and he was grateful for the tolerance of Caltech and MIT.
He was equally frank about choices that worked out. Considering devoting more time to anti-war politics, he took advice from the young MIT professor David Baltimore, who told him that a laboratory head could fairly insist on full effort; Rosbash stayed in the laboratory and later concluded that his science had done more good than his politics might have. Brandeis recruited him while he was still a postdoctoral fellow in Edinburgh, on the recommendation of the biologist James Darnell, and offered such generous terms that the extra salary paid the deposit on the house he still lives in.
Opening the body’s clock
Almost every living thing keeps time. Plants open and close their leaves on a daily cycle even in constant darkness, and people have internal rhythms of sleep, hormones, body temperature and metabolism that run on roughly 24 hours. In the 1970s Seymour Benzer and Ronald Konopka found fruit flies with mutations in a gene they named period that disrupted those rhythms. Nobody knew how the gene kept time.
At Brandeis, Rosbash teamed up with his colleague Jeffrey Hall. In 1984 they isolated the period gene, as did Michael Young’s group at Rockefeller University. Rosbash and Hall then found that the protein it makes, PER, builds up during the night and is broken down during the day. In 1990, with their postdoctoral fellow Paul Hardin, they proposed how the clock ticks: PER protein accumulates, enters the cell’s nucleus and switches off its own gene; as the protein breaks down, the gene switches back on, and the cycle repeats about every 24 hours. In 1998 Rosbash’s group identified further parts of the machinery, the clock and cycle genes that switch period on and the light-sensitive protein cryptochrome that resets the clock each day, and in 1999 the small group of brain cells that act as the fly’s master pacemaker.
Why the clock matters to health
The same type of feedback loop runs clocks in human cells, in nearly every tissue. It times when we feel sleepy, when hormones rise and fall, and how our metabolism changes across the day. The Nobel committee noted that a mismatch between our internal clock and the outside world causes the misery of jet lag, and that chronic misalignment between lifestyle and the inner timekeeper is associated with increased risk of various diseases. That knowledge now informs advice and research on shift work, the timing of light exposure and sleep, and the timing of some medical treatments.
The genes found in flies have direct counterparts in human disease. In 2001 researchers showed that families who naturally fall asleep around 7 p.m. and wake around 2 a.m., a condition called familial advanced sleep phase syndrome, carry a mutation in PER2, a human version of the period gene. Rosbash himself served on the advisory panel of the National Center for Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health and co-founded a company, Hypnion, to develop sleep medicines. Before turning to clocks, his laboratory had also made important discoveries about how cells process messenger RNA, the molecule that carries genetic instructions to the protein-making machinery.
In more recent years his laboratory has mapped how the clock is organised across different groups of neurons in the fly brain, finding cells that respond to dawn and promote waking and others that respond to dusk and promote sleep. That work helps explain how a network of clocks, rather than a single one, coordinates the daily cycle of activity and rest.
Jewish identity and an atheist’s ties
Rosbash’s story is woven through with Jewish history: a grandfather from Ukraine, parents driven out of their professions and then out of their country, a cantor father who died in his synagogue on Yom Kippur, and a mother whose ambitions were cut short twice. Most of her own family scattered to Brazil, and she saw her parents only once after 1938. He jokes about his own Jewish guilt.
He also writes with complete frankness that he is a devout atheist and quite anti-religion, yet admits an irrational connection to his father’s death on the holiest day of the Jewish year and to his family’s history. He has described the complicated feelings of his German-Jewish parents, including his father’s sadness, in 1945, at watching newsreels of the German surrender: life, he concluded, is not simple.
Family and legacy
Rosbash is married to the scientist Nadja Abovich, who is Chilean; they have a daughter, Tanya, and a stepdaughter, Paula, and still live in the house he bought near Brandeis in the mid-1970s. He suffered a heart attack himself at 38 and has spoken openly about his family’s health history. He has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1989 and directs the Brandeis National Center for Behavioral Genomics. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jeffrey Hall and Michael Young for discoveries of the molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.
Because of his work, the daily rhythm that tells us when to sleep and wake is no longer a mystery but a set of genes and proteins that can be measured, studied and, increasingly, used to improve health, from treating sleep disorders to protecting the millions of people whose jobs or travels pull them out of step with the sun.
Sources & further reading
Michael Rosbash, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017, NobelPrize.org · First Human Circadian Rhythm Gene Identified (ScienceDaily, January 2001) · Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine, JINFO · Michael Rosbash, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.