Alfred Hershey

ALFRED HERSHEY d1997.  American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist. He began performing experiments with bacteriophages with Italian-American Salvador Luria, German Max Delbrück 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 research partner Martha Chase to Laurel Hollow New York in 1950 to join the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics, where he and Martha 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 (which later became Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) 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. In 1981, he became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. He died in New York aged 88 on May 22nd 1997