Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded For Insights Into Internal Biological Clock

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.

Comments

Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien

[cheesybagel]

Try getting outside.

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

Re:Maybe now they can find out why I'm an alien

[epine]

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

Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists

[Mascot]

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.

IgNoble prize, then ?

[Laxator2]

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.

Cure for jet-lag? There's a precedent!

[wisebabo]

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!

Re:Congratulation to REAL scientists

[Bongo]

[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" ?