Martha Chase
Martha Cowles Chase (born November 30, 1927 in Cleveland Heights , Lorain , Ohio ; married as Martha C. Epstein ; † August 8, 2003 ) was one of the leading researchers at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the 1950s .
With the research that became known as the Hershey Chase experiment , Chase and Alfred Hershey 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 1952 they published the results under Independent Functions of Viral Protein and Nucleic Acid in Growth of Bacteriophage .
Chase left the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1953 and worked with Gus Doermann at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and later at the University of Rochester . During the 1950s, she returned to Cold Spring Harbor every year to attend meetings of the Phage Group of Biologists . In 1959 she began her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in the laboratory of Giuseppe Bertani. Bertani moved to Sweden and Chase completed her dissertation with Margaret Lieb in 1964.
While in California in the late 1950s, Chase met and married colleague Richard Epstein and changed her name to Martha C. Epstein. The marriage was brief and divorced without children. A series of personal setbacks in the 1960s ended her scientific career. She moved back to Ohio to live with her family and spent the final decades of her life with a form of dementia that stole her short-term memory. She died of pneumonia on August 8, 2003 at the age of 75.
Web links
- Linus Pauling and the race for DNA: Martha Chase , 2015
- Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Stuart Lavietes: Martha Chase, 75, a Researcher Who Aided in DNA Experiment . In: The New York Times .
- ↑ a b c Milly Dawson: Martha Chase Dies. via web archive from March 14, 2012, doi: 10.1186 / gb-spotlight-20030820-01
- ↑ A. D. Hershey, Martha Chase: Independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage. In: The Journal of general physiology. Volume 36, Number 1, May 1952, pp. 39-56, PMID 12981234 , PMC 2147348 (free full text).
- ↑ Illuminating life: selected papers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1903-1969 , Jan Anthony Witkowski, 1947-, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory., Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 2000, ISBN 9780879695668 , OCLC 42462623 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Chase, Martha |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cowles, Martha Cowles; Epstein, Martha Cowles (married name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American molecular biologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 30, 1927 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cleveland Heights , Lorain , Ohio |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 8, 2003 |