Body Clocks by Howard Miller – Not Just Yet

Three Nobel Prize winners were just announced for the work they did which shows that how clocks are regulating every cell in our body. Amazing discoveries about how these internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life.

According to a recently superbly written NPR Report on the body of work performed on how clocks regulate so many aspects of the human body, it summarized the article particularly well in NPR’s following three paragraphs:

“With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day,” the Nobel Prize committee wrote of the work of Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young. “The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism.”

We humans are time-keeping machines. And it seems we need regular sleeping and eating schedules to keep all of our clocks in sync.

Studies show that if we mess with the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle — say, by working an overnight shift, taking a trans-Atlantic flight or staying up all night with a new baby or puppy — we pay the price.

Have the major hi-end clock manufacturers found a way to try to develop new products to support the intelligence gathered, or undergone major new research projects. We are hopeful that  Jeffrey C. Hall (currently at the University of Maine), Michael Rosbash (currently at Brandeis University) and Michael W. Young (currently at Rockefeller University), who are the joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, will reach out to Howard Miller Clocks, Hermle Clocks, Kieninger Clocks and Ridgeway Clocks to see if there is any possible intersection between physical and physiological clocks that can be joined or optimized to begin to better address how biological rhythms and clocks govern human life.

Clocks, whether digital, biological, mechanical or some hybrid of these three are here to stay. One well-known clock company used the phrase when selling its grandfather clocks that a “grandfather clock is the heartbeat of the home”. It many ways that hasbeen true, but it may be a lot more relevant that anyone among us ever imagined.