Chase's Lasting Impact

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), established in 1966 as the International Committee on Nomenclature of Viruses and renamed the ICTV in 1977, is responsible for developing, refining, and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy (Lefkowitz et al. 2018). The 2018-2019 ICTV report proposed ten new families of prokaryotic viruses, one of which was named Chaseviridae (Adriaenssens et al. 2020). The committee stated that they named this taxon in honor of Martha Chase Cowles who was part of the discovery of DNA as genetic material along with Alfred Hershey (Adriaenssens et al. 2020). This goes to show that over 60 years later, there are still attempts to recognize Chase's integral role in the Hershey-Chase experiment, despite the lack of recognition at the time of the discovery.