Hall, Rosbash and Young share $500,000 Gruber neuroscience prize

For their pioneering work in uncovering the molecular basis of circadian rhythms in the nervous system

July 1, 2009, New York, NY – The 2009 Neuroscience Prize of The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation is being awarded to Jeffrey Hall, professor of neurogenetics at the University of Maine; Michael Rosbash, professor and director of the National Center for Behavioral Genomics at Brandeis University; and Michael Young, professor and head of the Laboratory of Genetics at Rockefeller University. On October 18, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, Illinois, these three distinguished scientists will receive this prestigious international award for their groundbreaking discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian (daily) rhythms in the nervous system. Their research was the first to establish a simple relationship between single genes and a complex behavior.

"The combined discoveries of Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young are stunning in their creativity, breadth and significance. These researchers began with a complicated animal behavior, established that single genes can define specific aspects of this behavior and determined mechanistically how such genes act," says H. Robert Horvitz, David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT. "Hall, Rosbash and Young have not only defined the genetic, molecular and biochemical bases of a complex animal behavior but have also established a paradigm for how such analyses should be done."

Before Hall, Rosbash, and Young published their seminal studies on the molecular underpinnings of the circadian rhythms of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, many people questioned whether a compelling relationship between genes and behavior could be established. By the early 1970s, the first fruit fly mutants with altered circadian rest/active cycles had been identified—making a case for the genetic control of behavior—but the mechanism behind the phenomenon remained unknown. What was running the internal biological clock in Drosophila?

In 1984 came the first breakthrough. That year Hall and Rosbash, working at Brandeis University, and Young, working at Rockefeller University, simultaneously cloned the period (per) gene of Drosophila. That pivotal discovery led to subsequent studies from all three labs that eventually unmasked the general molecular mechanism for circadian clocks: a transcriptional feedback loop that oscillates during the 24-hour cycle.