Appointment to a professorship in the Center for Advanced Study is the highest recognition that the campus can bestow upon a member of its faculty. For more information contact the Center for Advanced Study, 333-6729. The reckoning of time has been a focus of human interest from the ancient solar calendars of Stonehenge and Tulum to the nanosecond atomic clocks of the present. We now order our world with temporal schedules for work, entertainment and travel. It is surprising, therefore, that only in the late 20th century have biologists established that time-keeping is an innate property of living things.
Biological clocks mark the passage of time in electrical and chemical events.
They pattern inner workings and overt behaviors into 24-hour cycles. Travel or shift work can alter the relative rhythms of external and internal time, desynchronizing body systems and inducing a maladaptive state. Specific, temporally restricted signals can adjust clock timing and resynchronize the body to day and night. Professor Gillette discusses the evidence for a biological clock in the brain, clock properties and regulators, and how new studies are providing insights into the workings of the biological timepiece. Come together at the Center for a series of noon hour explorations of some of the best scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.