Nobel honour for ‘body clock’ find

THE Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to three researchers whose work explains why some of us are night owls while others are early birds.

The US scientists share a $1.1million (£830,000) prize for finding how ‘the biological clock’ that governs our lives works – and runs either faster or slower.

Michael Rosbash, Jeffrey C Hall and Michael W Young showed changes to a single gene can mean you wake up early or want to stay up late. As a result, they ‘were able to peek inside our biological clock and elucidate its inner workings’, the Nobel citation said.

Michael Hastings, of the UK Medical Research Council, said the discoveries had opened a whole new field of biology and medicine.

Issues with our body clock – known as circadian dysfunction – have been linked to sleep disorders, depression and neurological diseases.