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Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young

• dbcooper 9y ago
  >Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. The three United States-born scientists used fruit flies to isolate a gene that controls the rhythm of a living organism’s daily life. Mr. Hall, Mr. Rosbash and Mr. Young were “able to peek inside our biological clock,” helping make discoveries that “explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions,” the Nobel prize committee said. By examining the internal workings of fruit flies, the three helped determine that the gene they were analyzing encoded a protein that accumulated in a cell at night, and then degraded during the day.