Alfred Day Hershey
Alfred Day Hershey (born December 4, 1908 in Owosso near Lansing , Michigan , † May 22, 1997 in Syosset , New York ) was an American chemist, biochemist, microbiologist, geneticist, cell biologist and Nobel Prize laureate in medicine . He was one of the pioneers in molecular biology .
Life
Hershey studied chemistry from 1926 to 1930, then worked as a research assistant at Michigan State College at the University of Michigan, where he received his doctorate in 1934 with a dissertation on bacteria . Then he worked at Washington University in St. Louis . In 1950 he moved to the genetics department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Cold Spring Habor, New York. In 1962 he became director of the institute.
With the research that became known as the Hershey Chase experiment , Hershey and Martha Chase were able to clarify that the genetic information is encoded in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and not in proteins . This proof was achieved by working with radioactively marked bacteriophages (bacteriophage T2, a subtype of Escherichia virus T4 ), which smuggle their DNA into bacterial cells and can reproduce in the bacterium through these alone.
In 1958, Hershey received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and in 1965 the Kimber Genetics Award . In 1958 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1969, Hershey was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine together with Salvador Edward Luria and Max Delbrück .
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1969 award to Alfred Day Hershey
- Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Max Delbrück: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1969. In: nobelprize.org. August 15, 2020, accessed on August 16, 2020 .
- ^ Gisela Baumgart: Hershey, Alfred Day. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 579 f.
- ^ Gisela Baumgart: Hershey, Alfred Day. 2005, p. 579.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hershey, Alfred Day |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American biologist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1969 |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th December 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Owosso , Michigan |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 22, 1997 |
| Place of death | Syosset , New York |