Michael Young: Determining the benefits of sleep  

But more than 40 years of studying the circadian rhythms of fruit flies have increased researchers’ understanding of how sleep cycles work and are influenced, thanks to Dr. Michael W. Young, PhD, of Rockefeller University in New York City. 

Young is one of the three 2017 Nobel Prize winners in Medicine or Physiology along with Drs. Michael Rosbash and Jeffrey C. Hall of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, for their “discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm,” according to the Nobel Prize Committee.

“We found it quite wonderful that as we started isolating new genes, they all pointed back to the same fundamental mechanism,” Young said.  

Which could be good news for the legions of sleep-deprived or sleep-disrupted individuals in search of relief. “Many disorders of sleep are bought on by disruptions of genes, mutations of genes,” explained Young. “Once we know that someone has a mutation that causes a sleep disorder, we can think about appropriate therapy.”

The news was surprising

Young initially heard the news of his award from a colleague, because his landline phone is connected directly to an answering machine. Then he heard it on his cell phone at 5:30 a.m., went online, and saw he had received two other calls, so his wife plugged in the house phone and began fielding calls and “waiting for calls from the Nobel committee,” he said.  “We finally connected. Phones were ringing all morning long.”
The “next adventure,” as he put it, involved getting dressed and getting to Rockefeller for a press conference. While he, Rosbash and Hall had received several awards for their work over the past eight years or so—some of which other scientists said were precursors to the Nobel Prize—the news still was surprising, Young said.  “You hear things like that, but precursors are not for everyone. This is something you don’t count on. There is so much in medical science going on—the number of people working on medical science has increased so much over the past 100 years, that the chance that you’ll be tapped diminishes.”

It was magical

The ceremonies in Stockholm also gave Young a chance to reflect on how far his research has come. “It was so magical, the whole week we were there. They had this tremendous week all laid out, a tremendous series of events.” One of the activities he enjoyed most, Young said, was a trip to the Nobel Museum. Honorees were asked to bring something related to their work and Young brought records of his earliest experimental results and equipment used in the 1980s to collect data on sleep and wakefulness including a locomotor activity monitor, a device designed at Rockefeller, which is about the size of a shoebox.

Key competitors for many years

Young began his circadian rhythm research while at the University of Texas in Austin, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He came to Rockefeller University in 1978, after completing post-doctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine. According to Rockefeller University, “a fly’s circadian clock is formed through the actions of a small group of genes. Six of these genes were first characterized in the Young laboratory, and mutations in any of these ‘clock’ genes can lengthen or shorten the period of behavioral, physiological and molecular circadian rhythms, or can abolish the rhythms altogether.” 

In the early 1980s he realized a group at Brandeis was doing similar work. “I heard they were trying to isolate a gene. There was a chance someone else would find it fascinating, too. We both continued to work on it.” 

The two labs were keen competitors for a number of years. “We finally got together and decided to expand the genetic screening and see how many genes we could find that compromised the circadian clock.” There was a lot of overlap initially when everyone focused on just one available gene called period and it was frustrating. I decided in the late 1980’s that we weren’t learning enough working on this gene, and would try to isolate mutations in new genes and this proved successful, identifying a second gene we named timeless. Eventually, both groups found more mutations that were connected to more genes.

“We found these mutations especially interesting because many of them seemed only to affect the circadian clock,” noted Young. “The only manifested changes these mutations produced were changes in the rhythm behavior of the fly, so many of the gene seemed to be dedicated to circadian rhythmicity.”

A widespread genetic pre-disposition

Another branch of research is looking directly at people, such as those who have difficulty falling asleep, night owls and especially night owls who have relatives who are night owls. “Our lab has studied large numbers of families and discovered that some of them carry a mutation in a clock gene called Cry1, a gene also affecting circadian rhythms in the fruit fly,” according to Young. In a publication from Young’s lab in 2017, this mutation was found to be carried by about 1 percent of the population, indicating that staying up late can be a widespread genetic pre-disposition.

A curiosity about nature

Young’s interest in circadian rhythms grew out of his curiosity about nature. “As a kid, I was interested in all kinds of biological mysteries of one kind or another; migration and navigation, nocturnal animals. I grew up in south Florida and there were lots of exotic animals and plants around and I witnessed a lot of biological evidence for circadian rhythmicity firsthand. A neighbor had a plant with flowers that opened during the night and closed during the day. It had its own rhythmic patterns that resembled the sleeping and waking cycles of animals, a manifestation of circadian clocks.”

The benefits of sleep

He plans to continue his study of fruit flies, with an emphasis on sleep and sleep duration. “Sleep occurs every 24 hours, but there is much that controls how long we sleep each night,” Young continued. “We found mutations that control the amount of time an animal sleeps each day. Mutant flies can sleep much less than normal flies; the mutations we are studying cause them to be sleep deprived, and the mutants that sleep five- to- six hours a night have severely disrupted biologies. They have much shorter life spans. We’re trying to use those mutants to determine the benefits of sleep.”