The dewy glow of a morning lark's skin...

My son called me at 6 a.m. today. Lest you think 'what an early bird that teen!', let me tell you he'd not yet been to bed. He'd just pulled one of those college all-nighters, and was calling me to request a noon wake-up call so that he wouldn't miss his 12:30 class...yet again.

Researchers have devised an innovative way of finding out whether folks are morning larks or night owls (as opposed to, say, just asking them). European biochemists recruited a group of willing subjects* who self-identified as morning or evening persons. The scientists then nipped a couple of skin samples from the group and cultured the cells in the lab. They then minced up a few fireflies, and inserted the gene that makes the insects glow into the gene that regulates the internal clock of human skin cells.

The purpose of melding human DNA with that of fireflies was to get a visual on the cells' 'inner slave clocks', that part of our body that responds to the brain's call to bounce out of bed or snooze onward. Indeed, these skin samples began glowing like a Midwestern summer's eve at a time determined by the subjects reported biorhythms. Now how bizarre must that have been--these cell communities in petri dishes switching on and off there in the lab based on the behavior of their previous human owners.

Interesting, but what's the point? Says chronobiologist Achim Kramer who helped design this study, "Pinpointing individual clock cycles could pave the way for personalized sleep and drug therapies." If they can pave a way to get my son up in the a.m., that is scientific progress at its best.

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*I used to dub them volunteers, but discovered in a recent New Yorker article that many of these experimental subjects are 'professional guinea pigs,' often making an adequate living from payments for participation in studies like this.