Alfred Hershey was an American biochemist born in 1908 who received his B.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry. He taught and researched at Washington University for 16 years. Hershey and his wife Martha discovered that DNA, not protein, was the genetic material. Through his experiments on virus replication, Hershey found that all the genetic material in viruses was contained in DNA. Alfred Hershey died in 1997 in New York.