Three scientists found the actual molecular gears of your body's 24-hour clock

Working with fruit flies, Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young isolated the 'period' gene and showed how its protein builds up at night and breaks down by day, driving a self-sustaining biological clock. The 2017 Nobel Prize-winning work explained how nearly every living cell keeps time.

— Nobel Prize Committee, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017 — Karolinska Institute, 2017