2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine Awarded for Research on 'Biological Clocks'

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their work on mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm, the Nobel Assembly said Monday.

"The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm," the statement read.

​The Nobel Assembly noted that the doctors managed to discover how humans, plants, and animals adapt their biological rhythms to changes in the environment which have been taking place over the centuries.

"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 according to the same principles in cells of other multi-cellular organisms, including humans," the Nobel Assembly added.

​​Hall, born in 1945, received his doctoral degree at the University of Washington in Seattle. He currently serves as an associate at the University of Maine. Rosbash was born in 1944, received his doctoral degree in 1970 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and currently works at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Young, born in 1949, received his doctoral degree at the University of Texas in Austin in 1975. The scientist has been working at Rockefeller University in New York since 1978.