Tag: Circadian rhythm

(STOCKHOLM) — An American researcher who shared this year’s Nobel Prize for medicine bluntly criticized political developments at home in his address at the awards’ gala banquet Sunday night. Michael Rosbash, who was honored for his work on circadian rhythms — commonly called the body clock — expressed concern that U.S. government support such as that received by him and colleagues Jeffrey Hall and Michael Young is endangered. “We benefited from an enlightened period in the postwar United States. Our National Institutes of Health have enthusiastically and generously supported basic research … (but) the current climate in the U.S. is a warning that continued support cannot be taken for granted,” he said in a short speech at the ornate city hall in Stockholm. The 2018 federal budget proposed by President Donald Trump calls for cutting science funding by billions of dollars. “Also in danger is the pluralistic America into which all three of us of born were born and raised after World War II,” Rosbash said. Thurlow said the Hiroshima blast left her buried under the rubble, but she was able to see light and crawl to safety. In the same way, the campaign to which she belongs is a driving force behind an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, she said after ICAN received the Nobel prize it won in October. “Our light now is the ban treaty,” Thurlow said. ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn, who accepted the prize along with Thurlow, said that while the treaty is far from ratification “now, at long last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.” “This is the way forward.