[1] Dodge was the author of over 150 papers dealing with the life histories, cytology, morphology, pathology and genetics of fungi, and with insects and other animal pests of plants.
[2] Dodge's work on the genetics of Neurospora laid the groundwork for the discoveries that earned George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum the Nobel Prize in 1958.
Dodge's father was widely acquainted with the writings of Shakespeare, Byron, Chaucer, Spenser, and Pope, and supplemented the income from his Mauston, Wisconsin farm by teaching in the local schools.
He recalled to biographer W. J. Robbins that at the age of 10 a bumper crop of sorghum required operation of the mill day and night during the rush period of syrup making.
He taught high school and then entered the University of Wisconsin as a special student in 1896, only to leave college less than a year later when his funds were exhausted.
While still a high school principal in Algoma, a chance meeting with an amateur mycologist (a Bohemian tailor with a basket full of "Pilze" (mushrooms) that were "gut fur essen" (good to eat)) aroused an interest in collecting fungi.
He found that the ascospores of several species of Ascobolus which rarely germinate under ordinary conditions on artificial media, do so readily after being subjected to 50-70 degrees Celsius for five to 10 minutes.
One day Dodge temporarily set down a batch of test plates inside a hot-air sterilizer which was not running, while he went to teach a class.
[…] I had found that I could pass the rust on the Black Diamond blackberry (dewberry) by grafting to young shoots of this species, and was trying to culture the rest on cornmeal agar in plates and flasks.
Over the next 30 years, Dodge published over 40 papers on Neurospora, which was easy to grow and required little space (and only a few days) to complete its life cycle.
In his own Nobel Lecture, Edward L. Tatum wrote: I shall not enumerate the factors involved in our selection of this organism for the production of chemical or nutritionally deficient mutants, but must take this opportunity of reiterating our indebtedness to the previous basic finds of a number of investigators.
She wrote her Master's thesis on Neurospora crassa[5] and published two papers on Neurospora crassa[6][7] before beginning her studies of the bacterium Escherichia coli, and her highly influential development of replica plating, the discovery of fertility factor F (inheritable sex change due to viral infection), temperate lambda bacteriophage, and her pioneering work in transduction.