Alfred Day Hershey, a Michigan-born leading pioneer in DNA research shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria for “their contributions involving the replication and the genetic structure of viruses.” Using a Waring blender at his Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, Hershey and colleague Martha Chase blended specially labeled bacteriophage cultures to help prove that DNA, and not proteins, carried the instructions for virus reproduction. This experiment confirmed the results of a 1944 experiment led by Oswald Avery at Columbia University. Dr. Hershey died on May 22, 1997.

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