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Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young are the joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, winning for their discoveries about how internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life.

The three Americans won "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm", Npr.org reported, citing the Nobel Foundation.

Hall, 72, was born in New York and has worked at institutions from the University of Washington to the California Institute of Technology. For decades, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, west of Boston; more recently, he has been associated with the University of Maine.

Rosbash, 73, was born in Kansas City, Mo., and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Since 1974, he has been on faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Young, 68, was born in Miami, Fla., and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Texas in Austin. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto before joining the faculty at the Rockefeller University in 1978.

Last year's winner was Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who was recognized "for his discoveries about 'autophagy' — a fundamental process cells use to degrade and recycle parts of themselves," as NPR's Rob Stein reported.