Alfred Day Hershey

Alfred Day Hershey
(1908 - 1997)


American biologist who, along with Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969. The prize was given for research done on bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria).
Hershey earned a doctorate in chemistry from Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in 1934 and then took a position at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo. He joined the staff of the Genetics Research Unit of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1950 after giving up his position as professor at Washington University. In 1963 he became director of the Genetics Research Unit.

Hershey, Delbruck, and Luria began exchanging information on phage research in the early 1940s. In 1945 Hershey and Luria, working independently, demonstrated the occurrence of spontaneous mutation in both the bacteriophages and the host. The next year, Hershey and Delbruck independently discovered the occurrence of genetic recombination in phages--i.e., that different strains of phages inhabiting the same bacterial cell can exchange or combine genetic material. Delbruck incorrectly interpreted his results as specifically induced mutations, but Hershey and one of his students proved that the results they had obtained were recombinations by showing that the genetic processes in question correspond with the crossing-over of parts of similar chromosomes observed in cells of higher organisms.

Hershey is most noted for the so-called blender experiment that he performed with Martha Chase in 1952. By showing that phage DNA is the principal component entering the host cell during infection, Hershey proved that DNA, rather than protein, is the genetic material of the phage.