Martha Coles Chase, also known as Martha C. Epstein, born November 30, 1927 – died August 8, 2003, was an American geneticist who became famous in 1952 with Alfred Hershey when she helped confirm that DNA was the genetic material of life rather than protein, which was then the prevailing ingredient of life. Chase was born in 1927 in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the sister of Ruth Chase. She received her bachelor's degree from the College of Wooster in 1950, then worked as a research assistant before returning to school in 1959 and earning her doctorate in microbiology from the University of Southern California in 1964. In 1950, Chase began working as a research assistant at Alfred Hershey's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the study of bacteriology and genetics. In 1952, Chase assisted her "boss" Hershey in a key experiment that enabled them to confirm that genetic information was transmitted by DNA, not by protein as was common at the time. The experiment involved sending the T2 bacteriophage and seeing if the protein would carry the bacteriophage's infection to Escherichia coli or the DNA. They found that the nucleic acids did the transfer, helping to resolve the controversy over the composition and carrier of genetic information. During this time, Hershey won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his late discovery in 1969, but Chase was not included. Chase left Hershey in 1953 and went to work with Gus Dauerman at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and later at the University of Rochester. Chase returned to participate in biologists' meetings at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, but as a guest rather than a laboratory worker. In 1959, she began her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California, focusing on her work in Giuseppe's laboratory, and moved to Sweden to defend her dissertation with Margaret Leed in 1964. While in California, Chase met and married fellow scientist Richard Epstein in the late 1950s, changing her name to Martha Epstein. Her marriage to Richard was unsuccessful, and they divorced shortly thereafter. She experienced a series of personal setbacks during the 1960s, and her career in science ended. She moved to Ohio to live with her young family and spent the last decades of her life suffering from a form of dementia that robbed her of her short-term memory, dying of pneumonia on August 8, 2003, at the age of 75.