Michael Young receives Gruber Foundation's 2009 Neuroscience Prize

Michael W. Young, Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor and head of the Laboratory of Genetics at Rockefeller University, has received the 2009 Neuroscience Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, the foundation announced today. He shares the $500,000 prize with Jeffrey Hall, professor of neurogenetics at The University of Maine, and Michael Rosbash, professor and director of the National Center for Behavioral Genomics at Brandeis University.

The scientists are honored for their groundbreaking discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms in the nervous system. Their research was the first to establish a simple relationship between single genes and a complex behavior. Other researchers investigating the clock mechanisms in mammals have found them to be strongly analogous to what Hall, Rosbash and Young had found in Drosophila. Their findings have implications for sleep and mood disorders, as well as for dysfunctions related to the timing of gene activities underlying visual functions, locomotion, metabolism, learning and memory.

Before Hall, Rosbash and Young published their seminal studies on the molecular underpinnings of the circadian rhythms of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, many people questioned whether a compelling relationship between genes and behavior could be established. By the early 1970s, the first fruit fly mutants with altered circadian rest/active cycles had been identified — making a case for the genetic control of behavior — but the mechanism behind the phenomenon remained unknown. It wasn’t until 1984 that scientists began to understand what was running the internal biological clock in Drosophila.

That year, Hall and Rosbash, working at Brandeis University, and Young, working at Rockefeller, simultaneously cloned the period (per) gene of Drosophila. That pivotal discovery led to subsequent studies from all three labs that eventually unmasked the general molecular mechanism for circadian clocks: a transcriptional feedback loop that oscillates during the 24-hour cycle.

In the 1990s, Young identified per’s partner gene, timeless (tim), and showed that these two proteins accumulate, pair up in the cell’s cytoplasm and then migrate into the nucleus where their presence switches off their production by shutting down the per and tim genes. These events are strictly timed within the cell, as PER and TIM are retained in the cytoplasm for a fixed interval lasting several hours. This delay promotes RNA and protein rhythms and determines the period of the clock. Another of his laboratory’s discoveries is that the enzyme casein kinase 1 regulates the pace of this 24-hour molecular clock by restricting the longevity of the PER protein in this process. It has recently been shown by others that faulty interactions between casein kinase 1 and PER are responsible for certain heritable disorders of sleep in humans.

Young received his undergraduate degree in biology in 1971 and his Ph.D. in genetics in 1975, both from The University of Texas, Austin. Following postdoctoral work in biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine, he was appointed assistant professor at Rockefeller in 1978 as part of The Rockefeller University Fellows Program. He was named associate professor in 1984 and professor in 1988, and in 1991 he was appointed head of the Rockefeller Unit for the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Biological Timing. He was also named the university’s vice president for academic affairs and Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor in 2004.

Young was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1987 to 1996, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.