This story is part of a series on how we make time—from productivity hacks and long walks to altering the function of our own circadian clocks.

Before there was electricity or the internet or screens illuminated by thousands of liquid crystals rotating polarized pulses of photons, humans mostly lived by the daily comings and goings of the yellow burning ball of gas in the sky. Like every other organism that walks, flies, swims, scurries, sways, or photosynthesizes on Earth, people evolved circadian rhythms tuned to this solar circuit.

Yours, like that of most other organisms, is controlled by waves of proteins encoded in just a handful of master clock genes. Every day, as if tracing the rise and fall of the sun through the firmament, concentrations of special timekeeping protein complexes surge and ebb inside nearly every cell in your body, in a sinusoidal curve that repeats itself every 24 hours. These proteins predictably bind and release your DNA, flipping thousands of genes on and off in synchronized choreography. They dictate more than just your sleep patterns. Fluctuations in most of your critical body functions, including blood pressure, body temperature, metabolism, and even your moods and behaviors all run on a meticulous 24-hour schedule.

WIRED Series A Tour of How We Literally and Figuratively Make Time

But lots of things can throw your clock out of whack—consuming calories at all hours of the day, binge-watching Netflix on a blue-tinged screen at 3 am, even just getting older. And when your internal timekeeper starts ticking off-beat, lots of other things start to go wrong, from depression and other mood disorders to metabolic malfunctions and heart disease. Which is why one of the newest ideas in the emerging field of circadian medicine is to create drugs that actually amplify the cadence of our internal timers. The scientists leading this charge think such “clock-enhancing molecules” could help astronauts in the future stay on Earth-time even as they’re up in orbit or en route to Mars. Closer to home, these drugs could one day be used to combat the obesity epidemic, stave off incurable diseases like Alzheimer’s, and even slow aging itself.

Up until the mid-2000s, circadian rhythm science had been mostly viewed as a kind of cute, niche little corner of biology. But advances in gene sequencing technologies post-Human Genome Project led scientists to realize that the clock controlled more than 10,000 genes in nearly every cell in the human body. Even more recently, they discovered that clock was malleable. “Almost all the important functions in your body have a temporal component that we can tweak through the power of circadian manipulation,” says Jake Chen, a biochemist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. He’s spent the last ten years hunting for compounds with circadian-boosting properties and testing the hypothesis that they can make people live happier, healthier, longer lives. If he’s right, curing or preventing some of society’s most common and costly diseases might come down to chemically resetting our clocks. “The time has come for the biomedical research community to recognize that biological timing is a bonafide therapeutic target.”

Chen’s interest in circadian-modifying molecules began back in 2008, when he was a postdoc in the lab of a biochemist named Steven McKnight. At that time, most of the genes that control our molecular clocks had already been mapped out by a few dedicated chronobiologists, including a trio of American scientists who would go on to win the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine for their contributions. But no one was quite sure how to use that knowledge to help people live healthier lives. Chen thought if he could find compounds that nudged the hands of that clock by activating or deactivating the genes that control it—speeding it up, slowing it down, making it disappear altogether—he could help identify what happens inside the bodies of people whose clock genes turn on willy-nilly or not at all. What he found instead, after screening more than a quarter-million chemicals, was a class of molecules that supercharged cells’ clock functions. If you imagine the clock as an oscillating sine wave that represents the rate of timekeeping protein production, like a sound wave coming out of your Bluetooth speaker, these compounds make the peaks higher and the troughs lower, the molecular equivalent of turning the volume knob way up. And the louder the clock keeps time, the more the body’s tissues stick to their respective schedules.