Alfred Hershey

Alfred Hershey was born on 4 December 1908 in Owosso, Michigan, and died on 22 May 1997 in Syosset, New York. A bacteriologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's genetics laboratory on Long Island, later folded into Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he studied how bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, reproduce inside their host. In 1952, working with Martha Chase, he showed that a phage injects its DNA into a bacterium while its protein coat stays outside, evidence that DNA rather than protein carries hereditary information. Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.