Alfred Hersey And Martha Chase

In the early 1950’s, when Alfred Hersey and Martha Chase were preforming experiments to determine which material in a cell was the hereditary material, the scientific community was much different that it currently is. To begin, female scientists were discriminated against heavily, especially if that woman was not a full-time researcher or also taught students (Gur-Arie). Unfortunately, this problem is still present today to a lesser degree. Also, scientists were often recruited to top research facilities by the director of the institute or the leading researcher (Cold Spring Harbor). At the time, it was understood that proteins and DNA were both in chromosomes, and that chromosomes carried hereditary material. However, there was still dispute over which of the two molecules carried the genes for each person, and most assumed that protein was the more likely of the two.
The experiment by Hersey and Chase was a breakthrough because it answered fundamental questions about how cells and heredity worked. Since the structure of DNA was already known, when Hersey and Chase finally disproved any lingering doubt over DNA, not protein, being the agent of heredity, it answered how genes were chemically carried and how they could be replicated. As the strands run antiparallel to each other, there was a template to replicate the information; it also showed that there was a molecular code of four nucleotides to carry the genetic information (Alberts et al., 2013). Eventually, Hersey and 2 contemporaries were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1969, which is awarded by the Karolinska Insitutet. The process is confidential until 50 years after the proceedings, causing controversy (Nobel