Awards & Winners

Alfred Hershey

Date of Birth 04-December-1908
Place of Birth Owosso
(Shiawassee County, Michigan, United States of America)
Nationality United States of America
Profession Scientist, Chemist
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 to Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1950 to join the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics, where he performed the famous Hershey-Chase experiment with Martha Chase 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.

Awards by Alfred Hershey

Check all the awards nominated and won by Alfred Hershey.

1969


Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
(for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses)

1958


Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
(Joint award for their part in the discovery of the fundamental role of nucleic acid in the reproduction of viruses and in the transmission of inherited characteristics.)