Alfred Day Hershey

In 1945, he married Harriet Davidson, popularly known as Jill, and they were blessed with a son, Peter.

He died of a heart failure on May 22, 1997 in Syosset, New York. He was buried at St. John’s Church Cemetery, Oyster Bay, New York.

He was born on December 4, 1908 in Owosso, Michigan, U.S., to Robert Day Hershey, an employee in an auto manufacturing firm, and his wife, Alma Wilbur Hershey.

He received his early education from the Owasso High School and after graduating from school in 1925, he was enrolled at the Michigan State College.

As an undergraduate student in the college, he developed a keen interest in bacteriology. He obtained his Bachelor in Science degree in Chemistry in 1930.

He went on to earn his doctorate degree in bacteriology from the same college in 1934. His doctoral dissertation was on the chemistry of bacteria, Brucella, responsible for Brucellosis or undulant fever and his thesis mainly described the separation of bacterial components.

After his doctorate, he was appointed as an instructor in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis. He got to work along with Jacques Jacob Bronfenbrenner, a pioneer in the field of bacteriophage research.

As Bronfenbrenner was pursuing his research on the physical and lysogenic properties of bacteriophages, he encouraged his faculty members to study the viruses. From 1936 to 1939, he and Bronfenbrenner published papers on the growth of bacterial cultures.

He worked for 16 years in the Washington University, from 1934 to 1950, which included teaching and researching. He was promoted as an assistant professor in 1938 and an associate professor in 1942.

During the early 1940s, he conducted his own experiments regarding immunologic reaction of phages and other factors that influenced phage infectivity. In 1943, he received an invitation from a biophysicist, Max Delbruck, who was also pursuing the same line of investigation of phage study. Delbruck wanted to discuss the results of his phage experiments with him and Salvador Edward Luria, a biologist.

Hershey accepted the invitation and went to Nashville and it was there that the three scientists formed a ‘phage group’, a team of scientists who encouraged research on particular strains of bacteriophage and met every year at Cold Spring Harbor to discuss their work and advances.

He is best known for the phenomenal ‘blender experiment’ he conducted with his colleague, Martha Chase, in 1952, which concluded that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), not its associated protein, is the genetic material of life. It derived the fact that DNA is the blue print of every existing lifeform on the planet which laid the groundwork for modern molecular genetics.