By: Amy Liu

If you talk in technical terms, humans didn’t invent time. But they have invented the ways of

telling time, in hours, minutes, and seconds, and we have the right to change the system any way we want. This, at least, was the position the Senate took on March 15, when surprisingly

uncontested vote, it passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The new law would make daylight

saving time permanent, starting November 5, 2023.

This could cause some problems such as groggy mornings. Also, when darkness descends

shortly at 4 pm, it could cause “the morale killer for Boston and Billings”, as said by The New

York Times However, those weren’t the only problems. One other very important problem is our body clock.

Us humans all have a sleep cycle. But recently, scientists have discovered that all of our body,

not only the brain, has an internal clock. Our cells contain genes that might be thought of as

“gears in a mechanical watch”, keeping time internally. Also called clock genes, there are about six of them that are important to the “watch’s operation”. They dictate other processes in other parts of the body and release hormones into the brain.

For example, if you take the liver, it “determines when to rev up your metabolism based on when you eat”, as said in the New York Times. When it is in the middle of the night, your liver will receive messages from your brain, telling it to rest. So, your liver will work slower in the middle of the night than in the day.

This dysregulation can throw our physiology off the track. If we take a look at an example, such as traveling through time zones, we can see that we are unused to the different times, so we may fall asleep later, or wake up earlier. But soon, as we engage in activities based on the time, our central clocks reset themselves to match the new environment, a process called social jet lag.

This scientific finding has inspired a man called Hogenesch, who “founded and began directing a sleep-and-circadian-medicine center at the hospital to treat complex cases, which includes assessing patients’ genetic profiles”.

“I think,” Hogenesch said, “This is our time.”