Alfred Day Hershey, Ph.D., a Nobel laureate who spent the first 16 years of his career at the School of Medicine, died Thursday, May 22, 1997, at his home in Syosset, N.Y. He was 88.
Hershey joined the Washington University Department of Bacteriology and Immunology in 1934 after receiving a doctorate in chemistry from Michigan State College. Inspired by department head Jacques J. Bronfenbrenner, he began to work with bacteriophages -- viruses that infect bacterial cells.
At a time when few people were studying the chemical or genetic properties of viruses, Hershey developed ways to recognize and analyze viral genetic traits, believing that studies with such a simple form of life might reveal basic hereditary principles. In 1946, he produced the first convincing evidence that two strains of a virus can exchange genetic material if they infect the same bacterial cell.
Hershey moved to the Genetics Research Unit of the Carnegie Institution at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1950. Two years later, he and geneticist Martha Chase discovered how bacterial viruses infect cells and provided a critical piece of evidence for the view that DNA, not protein, was the genetic material.
They labeled the protein coat of one batch of phages with radioactive sulfur and the DNA core of another batch with radioactive phosphorus. Tracking the labels during infection, they observed that most of the protein label stayed outside the bacterial cell and could be removed with a blender, whereas the DNA label entered the bacterium and reappeared in progeny phage. This experiment proved that genetic information is in DNA, not protein, as some researchers had proposed.
Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria for "discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses." At the ceremony, it was noted that the three scientists must "be regarded as the original founders of the modern science of molecular biology."
Retiring from active research in 1972, Hershey also received the Lasker Award of the American Public Health Association and the Kimber Genetics Award of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hershey liked to sail, read, plant trees and work with wood.
He is survived by his wife, the former Harriet Davidson, and his son, Peter M. Hershey, who resides in Texas.
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