Alfred Hershey

Who was Alfred Hershey?

Alfred Day Hershey was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist.

He was born in Owosso, Michigan and received his B.S. in chemistry at Michigan State University in 1930 and his Ph.D. in bacteriology in 1934, taking a position shortly thereafter at the Department of Bacteriology at Washington University in St. Louis.

He began performing experiments with bacteriophages with Italian-American Salvador Luria and German Max Delbrück in 1940, and observed that when two different strains of bacteriophage have infected the same bacteria, the two viruses may exchange genetic information.

He moved with his assistant Martha Chase to Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1950 to join the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics, where he and Chase performed the famous Hershey-Chase experiment in 1952. This experiment provided additional evidence that DNA, not protein, was the genetic material of life.

He became director of the Carnegie Institution in 1962 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, shared with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück for their discovery on the replication of viruses and their genetic structure.