About

Sydney Abel, Abigail Boateng, Adrian Lam, Kari White and Hope Zimmerman are students at the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus. This website was a product of our capstone biology course, AUBIO 411 - History and Theory of Biology.

Sydney Abel

Abigail Boateng

Adrian Lam

Kari White

Hope Zimmerman

Land Acknowledgment

We acknowledge that the land on which we gather, traditionally known as Asiniskaw Sipisis (Stoney Creek), is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground for many Indigenous peoples. The land on which the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta is located provided a travelling route and home to the Maskwacis Nêhiyawak, Niitsitapi, Nakoda, and Tsuut'ina Nations, the Métis, and other Indigenous peoples. Their spiritual and practical relationships to the land create a rich heritage for our learning and our life as a community.

By focusing our attention on searching for a marginalized biologist and reporting our findings through this website, we hope to have brought to light the story of Martha Chase in a way you may not have thought of before as for most of us, we have only ever known her as the counterpart to the Hershey-Chase experiment. While her case may not exhibit the greatest extent of marginalization, an obvious example of Rosalind Franklin comes to mind, she still experienced sexism and lack of recognition as did Franklin.

Main Findings

While a hyphenated name normally denotes equal partners in scientific discoveries (ie. Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick), Her name in the Hershey-Chase experiment might denote an equal partnership. While her surname appears as equal in the experiment name, she was not held in equal regard by Hershey when she was not acknowledged during his acceptance speech or lecture at the Nobel Prize awards.
While she was a post-graduate, and reportedly an underpaid research assistant in Hershey's laboratory at CSHL, she still could have received equal recognition. While we realize that the Nobel prize committee has a rule of only three laureates per award, Chase did deserve some type of recognition.
Martha fell into the shadows after the excitement of their discovery. We can speculate that greater opportunities should have presented themselves based on previous work and accomplishments as a geneticist. However, her career was halted when she was not recognized as a counterpart to the discovery of DNA as the genetic material.
We recognize that scientific opportunities did not often extend to the role of a 1950s woman, so men might have viewed Martha as "out of place".

Thank you for exploring our website; we hope you've gained insight into Martha Chase's story and the societal constraints that often limit women in science. Furthermore, we trust that you recognize the ongoing efforts to overcome these discriminations. In many ways, Chase navigated unfamiliar territory as she sought her path in the world of science.

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