Alfred Hershey

Alfred Hershey, born in Owosso, Michigan, was part of the generation of scientists who made the critical leap from understanding that traits are inherited to figuring out how they are inherited. He worked closely with Martha Chase, and together they designed the famous Hershey-Chase experiment, using bacteriophages to deliver a rather shocking blow to the scientific consensus of the day.

Prior to Hershey and Chase, many scientists believed that proteins were the carriers of genetic material, largely due to their complex structure. But with elegant simplicity, their 1952 experiment demonstrated that it was DNA entering the bacterial cells, not protein, thus unequivocally establishing DNA's role in heredity.

This monumental discovery earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, an honor he shared with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria for their work on viral replication mechanisms and genetic structure. His work was pivotal in setting the stage for the explosion of molecular biology that followed, including the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

While his Jewish heritage is a matter of record, Hershey himself maintained a notoriously private life and didn't seem to wear his religious identity on his sleeve. His contributions to science, however, are loud and clear, echoing through every genetics textbook on the planet, making him undeniably kvell-worthy.