Nobel prize winners’ quest for answers to sleep mysteries

As I type this column, I am exhausted from sleep deprivation — a pretty standard state of being for me. Despite a lifetime of boring, monkish routine and impeccable sleep habits, my circadian rhythm has always been syncopated rather than regular or in any kind of harmony.

I’ve suffered from periodic bouts of insomnia for nearly all of my life.

As a young child, I would cry myself to sleep at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning and then feel completely wrecked at school. It drove my teachers absolutely crazy that I was half-asleep and headachy most of the time.

No, it’s not my thyroid, or narcolepsy. All the usual medical suspects have been ruled out time and again — I simply come from a long line of restless sleepers. Such medications as sleeping pills either don’t work or give me nasty side effects. Meditation helps, but only to a point.

My best hope is for science to figure this all out in time for sleep deprivation to not finally get me with its increased chance of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and possibly even Alzheimer’s disease.

We only understand how the delicate cycles of sleep and wakefulness are related to physical and mental well-being because of years of research.

Last week, three of the researchers behind some of these insights got an acknowledgment for unraveling a few of sleep’s deepest mysteries.

Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their pioneering work in figuring out how the body’s sleep/wake rhythms regulate critical functions like sleep, hormone levels, blood pressure and body temperature.

Using fruit flies as a “model organism,” the trio of scientists isolated genes they dubbed “period,” “timeless” and “doubletime” that regulate the daily circadian rhythms.

The researchers found that these genes encode a protein that accumulates in cells during sleep at night, which then degrades during the day.

Subsequently, the researchers identified additional protein components of this machinery inside the cells. Eventually they found that these “biological clocks” function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

This recognition of achievement in their field comes after three decades of their intimate study of the humble fruit fly, which yielded many of the facts about our bodies’ daily rhythms — like when we have the best coordination, the highest body temperature and the fastest reaction times — that so many breakthroughs in understanding the importance of sleep are based on.

When you think about it, the most stunning part is that these scientists dedicated their careers to something as elemental and mysterious as sleep.

“I just thought it was a terrific problem and maybe the toughest thing I could try to tackle,” Young told Adam Smith, the chief scientific officer of Nobel Media, “because it was behavior; you know, what could we learn about a fairly complicated behavior that we all exhibit, which was most easily represented by sleep/wake cycles. And frankly I thought we might find out maybe a little bit. I never thought we would really understand what the motor behind this was, at the time. We were very lucky, we managed to find genes that fit together like puzzle pieces to explain how this thing worked.”

The next frontier in sleep science is applying this knowledge about sleep rhythms to the quandaries of preventing obesity and mental health disorders and how to optimize everything from exercise to the uptake of vitamins and medications.

Selfishly, I’m hoping that it won’t take another 30 years to figure out how to get reluctant creatures of the night to slumber.

But I’m perfectly willing to wait for whatever scientific discoveries can make me sleep way better than I did when I was a baby.