Martha Chase: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 15:23, 20 February 2009
Martha Cowles Chase (1927 – August 8, 2003), also known as Martha C. Epstein, was an American geneticist famously known for being a member of the 1952 team which experimentally showed that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life. Chase was born in 1927 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. In 1950 she received her bachelor's degree from The College of Wooster and in 1964 her PhD from the University of Southern California.
In 1952 as a young laboratory assistant of American bacteriophage expert Alfred Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, she and Hershey conducted one of the most famous experiments in 20th-century biology. Devised by Hershey, the experiment demonstrated the genetic properties of DNA over proteins. By marking bacteriophages with radioactive isotopes, Hershey and Chase were able to trace protein and DNA to determine that DNA is the molecule of heredity.
Hershey and Chase announced their results in a 1952 paper. The experiment inspired American researcher James D. Watson, who along with England's Francis Crick figured out the structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge the following year.
Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück. Chase, however, did not reap such rewards for her role. A graduate of The College of Wooster in Ohio (she had grown up in Shaker Heights, Ohio), she continued working as a laboratory assistant, first at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and then at the University of Rochester before moving to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. There she married biologist Richard Epstein and earned her Ph.D. in 1964 from the University of Southern California. A series of personal setbacks through the 1960s ended her career in science. She spent decades suffering from a form of dementia that robbed her of short-term memory. She died on August 8, 2003.
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What it do CUZ!!!!
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