Michael Rosbash

Michael Rosbash (born March 7, 1944, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American geneticist known for his discoveries concerning circadian rhythm, the cyclical 24-hour period of biological activity that drives daily behavioral patterns. Rosbash worked extensively with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and he contributed to the discovery of genes and molecular mechanisms involved in the regulation of biological rhythms. The work had far-reaching implications, particularly for understanding the influence of genetic cues on daily physiological processes in humans. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael W. Young).

Rosbash was raised in Boston, where his mother worked in cytology and his father was a cantor. He studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1965, and biophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating with a Ph.D. in 1971. He joined the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, as an assistant professor in 1974.

In the 1970s Rosbash became interested in the influence of genetics on behaviour and began a productive collaboration with Hall, a friend and colleague at Brandeis. Rosbash and Hall were interested in the so-called period gene, a gene that had been discovered a decade earlier to play a role in the regulation of circadian rhythm in Drosophila but that had not yet been isolated from the fruit fly genome. In 1984, at about the same time as Young, who was working independently at Rockefeller University in New York, Rosbash and Hall successfully isolated and sequenced the period gene.

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In the 1990s Rosbash and Hall shed light on the mechanistic role of the period gene, showing that levels of the protein product, PER, oscillated during the circadian cycle, accumulating in cell nuclei overnight and being degraded through the day. Their findings led them to propose a model whereby PER was self-regulating, inhibiting its own transcription (synthesis of RNA from DNA) when its protein levels reached a critical point. Rosbash and Hall subsequently discovered additional genes involved in the regulation of the circadian rhythm. Their later work, along with that of Young and other researchers in the field, helped confirm the idea that a self-regulating clocklike mechanism governs circadian rhythm. A significant number of human genes were subsequently found to be regulated by a mechanism homologous to that described in Drosophila, leading to new insights into human physiology.

Rosbash received numerous honours throughout his career, including the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry (2011), and the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2013), all shared with Hall and Young. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003).