Martha Cowles Chase is remembered for a landmark experiment in genetics carried out with American geneticist Alfred Day Hershey (1908-1997). Their experiment indicated that, contrary to prevailing opinion in 1952, DNA was genetic material. A year later, James D. Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick proposed their double helical model for the three-dimensional structure of structure of DNA. Hershey was honored as one of the founders of molecular biology, and shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück.

Martha Chase was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a bachelor's degree from the College of Wooster in 1950 and her doctoral degree from the University of Southern California in 1964. Having married and changed her name to Martha C. Epstein (Martha Cowles Chase Epstein), she later returned to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where she lived with her father, Samuel W. Chase. After graduating from college...