[1] Her father was a Western Reserve University Science Instructor and she grew up with her family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

In 1952, she and Hershey performed the Hershey–Chase experiment, which helped to confirm that genetic information is held and transmitted by DNA, not by protein.

They found that nucleic acids but not protein were transferred, helping resolve controversy over the composition of hereditary information.

Throughout the 1950s, she returned yearly to Cold Spring Harbor to take part in meetings of the Phage Group of biologists.

She moved back to Ohio to live with family and spent the last decades of her life suffering from a form of dementia that robbed her of short-term memory.