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.
It was also known that DNA was a helix shape, composed of two separate strands.
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
Prize). A recent discovery in cell biology that is interesting and of practical importance, is the discovery of a certain protein that helps explain how healthy fertilization occurs. This protein, Cft19, suppresses the recombination of some parts of DNA during the process of meiosis. When this protein is not present in a sufficient amounts, it can lead to aneuploidy and eventually congenital defects in children. This is important to society because it offers an explanation to how some congenital defects occur. If the protein is tested for, a mother could know the chances of a defect occurring before she attempted to become pregnant. It also explains some cases of infertility, as some aneuploids are inviable. The experiment preformed to demonstrate this was like Hersey and Chase’s in the fact that both used model organisms to show a complex process, with yeast and bacterial phage’s, respectively. Also, both marked the DNA, with florescence to observe recombination or isotopes to track DNA and protein. Thus, while the recent study contained more advanced technology, both followed rather similar patterns to come to the study’s conclusion (Medical Press).