Kansas City native shares a Nobel Prize for his work on circadian rhythm

One of three Americans who share the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine is a Kansas City native.

Michael Rosbash, 73, is on the faculty of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He, Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael W. Young were recognized for their discoveries about how internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life, NPR reports.

The Nobel Assembly announced the prize Monday morning for the scientists’ “discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm,” the Nobel Foundation said.

The three used fruit flies as a model organism and isolated a gene that controls normal daily biological rhythms.

“With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day,” the foundation said. “The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism.”

Rosbash told The Associated Press he received a call about the prize at 5:09 a.m.

“When the land line rings at that hour, normally it’s because someone died,” Rosbash said. Then, on finding out that he had won a Nobel Prize, he said, “I was stunned, shocked.”

Rosbash studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He has been at Brandeis since 1974. Rosbash started working on biological rhythms in 1982.

“I am very pleased,” he said of the Nobel Prize. “I am very pleased for the field. I am very pleased for the fruit fly. And it is a great thing for the university. I stand on the shoulders of giants. This is a very humbling award.”

Hall, 72, was born in New York and has worked at institutions from the University of Washington to the California Institute of Technology. For decades, he was on the faculty at Brandeis. More recently he has been associated with the University of Maine.

Young, 68, was born in Miami, Fla., and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Texas in Austin. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto before joining the faculty at the Rockefeller University in 1978.

This story was originally published October 2, 2017 at 11:43 AM with the headline "Kansas City native shares a Nobel Prize for his work on circadian rhythm."