Martha Chase

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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 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.

Martha Chase was given scant credit in life for her contribution to Alfred Hershey's Nobel Prize, but others took note. In a speech he gave at Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg's Memorial on November 30, 2006, Stanley Falkow said he found “a suggested topic for a term paper to meet the requirements for a passing grade in a bioethics course in Pomona College. Let me read it to you.

’Martha Chase, Daisy Roulland-Dussoix, and Esther Lederberg are women who participated in important discoveries in science. Martha Chase showed that phage genetic material is DNA not protein. Daisy Dussoix discovered restriction enzymes, and Esther Lederberg invented replica plating. Yet each of these discoveries is often credited to the male member of the team (Al Hershey, Werner Arber, and Joshua Lederberg, respectively). Using the resources of the library (at least five sources), write a five page paper that examines how history of science has treated each discovery (generally by Hershey, Arber, and Josh Lederberg, who all received the Nobel prize) and include your own appraisal of how you might have reacted to the reward structure in each case. The unnamed Professor who posed this question noted that ‘(This one is a challenge! Feel free to reflect in your paper on why it might be so hard to find relevant information.)^[1]’ ^[2]

Twenty-first century science historians are beginning to look back on the mid-twentieth century as a time when researchers made great strides in the sciences, but lagged far behind in the area of gender discrimation. For a look at how one web site highlights the accomplishments of Esther Lederberg and other under-credited female scientists, see "Scientific Legacies".