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Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded For Insights Into Internal Biological Clock

Posted by BeauHD on from the group-effort dept.

Dave Knott quotes a report from The Guardian: The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to a trio of American scientists for their discoveries on the molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms -- in other words, the 24-hour body clock. According to the Nobel committee's citation, the researchers were recognized for their discoveries explaining "how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth's revolutions." The team identified a gene within fruit flies that controls the creatures' daily rhythm, known as the "period" gene. This gene encodes a protein within the cell during the night which then degrades during the day. When there is a mismatch between this internal "clock" and the external surroundings, it can affect the organism's wellbeing -- for example, in humans, when we experience jet lag. All three winners are from the U.S. Jeffrey C Hall, 72, has retired but spent the majority of his career at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where fellow laureate Michael Rosbash, 73, is still a faculty member. Michael W Young, 68, works at Rockefeller University in New York.

Hall and Rosbash then went on to unpick how the body clock actually works, revealing that the levels of protein encoded by the period gene rise and fall throughout the day in a negative feedback loop. Young, meanwhile, discovered a second gene involved in the system, dubbed "timeless," that was critical to this process. Only when the proteins produced from the period gene combined with those from the timeless gene could they enter the cell's nucleus and halt further activity of the period gene. Young also discovered the gene that controlled the frequency of this cycle.

36 comments

  1. Re: 3 white males by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haha! You have period genes.

  2. Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Kjella · · Score: 2

    My clock is definitively not set for 24 hours, and I don't mean off by a little. If I try to follow a rhythm of staying up until I'm tired and sleep until I wake by myself without caring about the outside world I'm closer to a 36 hour cycle, awake for 24 and sleep for 12. Obviously that's impractical so with a combination of alarms and feeling undernourished on sleep I mostly manage to keep regular hours, but if I turn off the alarm I not only oversleep for hours but the following night I got no chance to fall asleep at all. If they start to understand the working of the internal clock, maybe they can fix it on a more fundamental level than sleeping aids.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      Try getting outside.

      That helps. Unless you live near the Arctic Circle or something like that.

    2. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a night person and I've always been this way. I can get work done without having to be around/be distracted by other people and their idiosyncrasies. I don't work in an office so it works out just fine for me (and no health problems, either).

    3. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by ledow · · Score: 1

      That's normal.

      Humans often assume an approximately 28-hour cycle if removed from all natural stimuli.

      Personally, I wake when I want and sleep when I'm tired, modulo work. That often means staying up all night only to go back to work, and then sleeping longer the next night etc. I don't see any reason to be bound to a particular timetable. If I didn't need to go to work, I would literally be completely unpredictable and live as much during the night as during the day.

    4. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, that is far from normal. If true, both of you have extreme cases of N24 or some other issue which will cause horrible health problems as you get older. Having a non-average cycle is ok, so long as you follow it. But both of you are trying to force your schedules at least some of the time. Please read up on circadian rhythm disorders and seek medical, non-drug (diet, sleep hygiene, hypnosis, etc...) related help.

      Human average is closer to 24.4 hours. Citations: https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/cycle_length.php

    5. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by SirMasterboy · · Score: 1

      Do you exercise?

      I find that If I don't exercise on a given day that I don't get very sleepy in the late evening. If I do exercise though then I fall asleep really easily and sleep really well that evening.

    6. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used to work an extremely flexible engineering job (I don't work there anymore; the culture that once existed has been extinguished by new management). As long as you worked your 40 hours, you could do it whenever you wanted. Work from home was available too, but within reason (you pretty much needed to show up 3-4 times a week). I very seriously considerd a 6x28 week. Each day your day shifts by 4 hours later. So, for example, every "Friday" sleep 4:00 AM-12:00 noon, every Sunday 8:00 AM-4:00 PM, every Monday 12:00 noon-8:00 PM, every Tuesday 4:00 PM-12:00 midnight, every Wednesday 8:00 PM-4:00 AM, every Thursday 12:00 midnight-8:00 AM. I never did it, but I was convinced that was the ideal rotation for me. I'm never tired after 16 hours, even after a long day in the sun.

    7. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      That is just being single and lazy.

    8. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used to be on a 28 hour schedule. It was glorious.
      Up for 20 hours, sleep for 8. I have never been as productive.

    9. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

      Absolutely, that sleep pattern indicates they aren't getting enough sunshine or exercise. We evolved on this planet and we're tied to it's cycles.

    10. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by epine · · Score: 2

      I'm writing this for Kjella, who can skip to the bottom if TL;DR concerning his entire future life.

      It's long, detailed, and lucid for a good cause.

      I free ran with a 25.5 hour period not so long ago—for three years straight, like a metronome. During the year I recorded most assiduously, I didn't deviate from my period by more than +/- 4 hours.

      Note that my cycle was somewhat elliptical. I advanced more slowly during the day portion of my cycle, and more quickly during the night portion of my cycle, but over any 16.5 day interval (calendar days), my daily period averaged out to 25h25m. I couldn't even detect seasonal drift with a Canadian change in solar day length.

      Before I free-ran, I had partially treated my condition with a small dose of melatonin taken mid-afternoon. This reduced my period to around 24h10m, which means I was drifting over an hour a week. Every fourth or fifth week I would cease taking the melatonin, put in a week of night mode, and in so doing, reset myself to a very early rise time, which would then inexorably advance until it became too much to bear (if I started the cycle rising at 0500, a month later I'm rising at 0900, and I'm rolling into the office at 09:45, which was as far as I could reasonably push things).

      I guess I was a bit in denial about the 10 minute/day drift residue. I tinkering with every variable over a two year period: dose, time of day, coffee consumption, light exposure level, bedtime strategy (fixed or adaptive), etc. Mostly I kept my dose time in a fairly narrow window around 15:30. I suspect, in retrospect, that as my internal clock drifted my melatonin became less effective, because the dosing time became less optimal, and so there was an acceleration effect near the end of each three- or four-week compliance interval, because it was usually a day when I woke up around noon where I finally said "oh, fuck it" and suspended melatonin for a week.

      This lifestyle gradually became unbearable because of a second straw: the three zombie hours every day an hour or two after taking the melatonin. Work—putting in longer hours than anyone else, because I seriously needed the social credit, return home—vegetate on couch, regain mind for one good hour before bedtime, then head punctually to bed (this period of my life was highly compliance oriented), to battle with ever-ramping insomnia, until it all fell apart again.

      I put up with it while I retained hope that I was maybe one inspiring fiddle away from breaking either of the two straws. But I never did.

      The free-running period was not gainfully employed, but by this point, my quality of life was near zero, so what the hell? I didn't really expect it to last more than six months and my theory was that I would be productive free-running, and that the whole thing would be massively inconvenient, but I'd finally have time for both a working life and a personal life. All I needed was some kind of work I could do during my long nights in the night phase of my cycle, and then pack my social life into the other half.

      It didn't work out that way, because N24 was only half the diagnosis. This was the most important thing I've learned about my condition in thirty years.

      My "formal" personal diagnosis now has the august title: disordered circadian rhythm—induced split-cognitive-modality syndrome.

      What I learned was that I was in full possession of my mental apparatus for three or four days out of every sixteen, the days when I was best aligned with day mode. This shocked the hell out of me, because over thirty years, I'd never observed my period having any connection to the solar day. This included a three-week bicycle trip in my twenties through Washington and Oregon—in the month of June, during which we never once saw a cloud after rising at the crack of dawn every day—yet we finally had to cancel the California leg, because I simply couldn't get up before noon under any coercion for even one more day. I

    11. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Close enough at 63 degrees north, daylight is from 4.5 hours to 20.5 hours so not really getting much help there. Particularly in the winter when I work in the office from before sunrise to after sunset it's basically just Saturday and Sunday and in the middle of summer it doesn't get darker than twilight, the last 3.5 hours it's just slightly below the horizon. But even in the spring and autumn where we have "sane" daylight hours it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    12. Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Well, I suppose you can try light therapy.
      Other than that there isn't much one can do. In those kinds of places a lot of people have sleeping disorders because of that.

  3. Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists by Mascot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ask yourself: if it takes "scientists" to do your job, why can we outsource it to low-wage workers in the other side of the world with no loss whatsoever?

    My language doesn't attach the word "science" to computer degrees, so we're ahead of you on that one (well, except for Bachelor and Master degrees, but those are international names so don't blame us).

    As for the quoted statement, in my experience we can't. Any company I've been in that has outsourced, and every friend who has been in the know in his or her company, tells the same story: outsourcing looks great on paper, but is a pile of stinking poo in reality. Money saved on wages for developers, gets lost in the poor quality of the delivered product, and the extra resources needed to manage them.

    The only remedy I've seen is to not rent resources but instead establish a local office, then send people there a lot in order to bring that culture more in line with our own. It takes a long time, and costs a lot of money, but eventually they might become productive. I can only think of one example of it working, and it took about a decade to get there.

  4. IgNoble prize, then ? by Laxator2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I am much more interested in the IgNobel prizes than in the Nobel prizes, especially since Dunning and Kruger were awarded the IgNobel prize for their work.

    I was so grateful that somebody finally did some research into a phenomenon I am encountering every day.

  5. Cure for jet-lag? There's a precedent! by wisebabo · · Score: 2

    So I know this probably wasn't the prime motivation for their research but if it could please lead to a cure for jet-lag I would hope they would be showered with huge monetary awards as well! As I've gotten older, jet-lag has made long-distance flying a source of real debilitation. I know this is (mostly) a first-world problem but there are plenty of pilots/military/leaders for whom being able to arrive reasonably alert (or at least not literally feeling sick) would be quite valuable for them and for those that they serve.

    It isn't unheard of for a Nobel prize in medicine to lead, relatively quickly, to a treatment or a new drug. I think the scientists who discovered vasoconstriction inhibitors(?) found that it could be used therapeutically and it was commercialized rapidly. I'm talking about Viagra of course and I just happen to know about this because I'm, uh... interested!

    1. Re:Cure for jet-lag? There's a precedent! by ledow · · Score: 1

      To be honest, in the modern era is jet-lag even a thing? It's a disconnect between "visible daylight" and "time spent awake", and let's be honest - we're living more into the night now than we ever have in all of human history.

      I don't know of anyone who suffers serious jetlag, because most of the ones who travel far are night-owls and easy-sleepers. I think that's got ten times more to do with things than anything you could take in pill-form or similar.

      Myself, when I get off a plane, I'm just glad to be off it as I see the whole waiting/security/waiting/flying/more waiting/more security thing as an completely unnecessary chore. I'm usually bouncing out of the airport and barely sleep the first night (whenever that happens to be) because I'm just glad to be doing things.

      Do you sleep on flights? Do you often sleep during the day? Can you stay up through the entire night without getting tired until the night after? Though I'm sure they are all linked to your body clock, you can pretty much train your body to anything, and I'm damn sure I've trained my body to totally ignore whether it's sunny out or not in order to sleep through the day and work through the night when required. And literally never had jetlag, even on trans-Atlantic flights.

    2. Re:Cure for jet-lag? There's a precedent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      who suffers serious jetlag.

      Really? Maybe it's because I've long-hauled only 2 or 3 times but I noticed the dehydration, dry throat, lack of deep sleep, joint-swelling, posture stiffness, sweat-drenched clothes.

      ... train your body to anything ...

      "I can do it, so can you": You should do tele-marketing. Humans have amazing stamina, we outperform most animals, but that doesn't beat biology. Doing anything for 10-12 hours exhausts most people and continuing further results in a massive drop in alertness and performance. Unless you're one of the lucky(?) few, you're only training yourself to be dishonest. By the way, those few who can skip a night's sleep, suffer severe memory loss afterwards. Also, reclaiming that sleep debt seems to be a function of youth: Thirty-somethings who continue pulling double shifts working with heavy machinery, don't get to be forty-somethings.

    3. Re:Cure for jet-lag? There's a precedent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most of your symptoms : dehydration, dry throat, joint-swelling, posture stiffness, sweat-drenched clothes; are symptoms of the low pressure experienced in most modern aircraft and being shoved for hours into an economy airline seat. They have nothing to do with jet lag.
      The cure is to fly first class or economy plus on Boeing 787s or Airbus A350s. The higher cabin pressure fixes the dehydration and dry throat. Not flying economy takes care of the joint-swelling, posture stiffness and maybe even the sweat-drenched clothes, since maybe you're sweating because your body is uncomfortable due to the altitude effect of being at the equivalent of 8000 ft and being crammed in a economy seat.

  6. Take a very long trip by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Actually, jet-lag happens to be worst in trans-Atlantic trips, where the time zone difference is about 5 hours and the flight time is about 7 hours. I once took a trip from the East Coast to Taiwan, 11 hours difference, 20 hours flight time.

    Before the trip I was told that I will have no jet-lag and it turned out to be true. I was to exhausted after the trip and my internal clock was so messed up that I had a long sleep when I arrived at the destination and when I woke up I was fully adjusted to the new time zone.

  7. End DST now! by rylyeh · · Score: 1

    Nice to see they are being recognized for their important work!
    Daylight Savings Time is causing health issues and should be abolished!
    http://www.businessinsider.com...

    --
    Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
  8. Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists by Bongo · · Score: 2

    [Please] stop using terms like "computer science", it's low-grade engineering at best.

    You have a point. Software is a combination of logic, planning, design, analysis, creativity, try-it-and-see, composition, original ideas, etc. -- and all to varying degrees. Perhaps there should be a new word for that. New things often borrow old forms, but at some point it's nice to have a proper name.

    Anyone who knows their Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, are there any good words upoin which we could base the notion of a "code creator" ?

  9. BUG 12387667381: body clock unstable by amorsen · · Score: 1

    Description:
    Body clock is unstable and the daily cycle extends as long as 36 hours unless reset. A proper quartz clock should be implemented.

    Status:
    REJECTED

    Comment:
    A more accurate body clock is not system critical. The timekeeping will be regularly reset by day/night cycle. If you stay away from light for a sufficiently long time for this problem to manifest, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

    --
    Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
  10. Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As much as it pains me to say this, as a programmer myself, I have to agree. Most all of us are shitty people, and the vast majority of us are in this job not because we wanted to be, but because we landed in the quicksand when someone else pulled themselves out and we ended up being good, or good enough, at it to stay stuck.

    If I could make the money I make doing development work doing ANYTHING else, I would. Fuck the digital janitor routine.

  11. BRAWNDO The Thirst Mutilator by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ct1hkROmxc

  12. Re: Congratulation to REAL scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Legislator ;)

  13. Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Those are researchers in REAL science, not nerdy autistic computer shit. Stop using terms like "computer science", it's low-grade engineering at best. All you butthurt geeks who will downvote this comment because they're hurt by the truth, ask yourself: if it takes "scientists" to do your job, why can we outsource it to low-wage workers in the other side of the world with no loss whatsoever?

    Computer Science != Coders, period. Sadly, many people are uneducated and still think that those 2 are the same. Probably, it is because those who graduated with computer science major can work in coding.

    Yes, there are losses, especially in quality. The truth is that you know nothing but conflate everything using your little falsify knowledge. Maybe you are one of those AHole CxO.