Abstract
Alfred Day Hershey (1908–97) was an American geneticist who developed bacteriophage as the premier organism for the study of the molecular mechanisms of recombination and replication in the two decades between 1940 and 1960. He found both host-range and plaque-morphology mutants, and showed that coinfection with two different parental phages allowed the detection of genetic recombination in bacteriophage. Hershey and his collaborator Martha Chase carried out their most famous work, an experiment that came to be known as the Hershey–Chase experiment, in which they found that the protein and nucleic acid components of the phage dissociated upon infection, with most of the protein remaining susceptible to removal by shearing while most of the nucleic acid had entered the bacterial cell. This result strongly confirmed the belief that DNA is the physical basis of the gene.
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