The Hershey–Chase experiments were a series of experiments started in 1952 by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase.

These experiments were to confirm that DNA was the genetic material in living things, which had previously been discovered by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in his experiments on white blood cells, or leukocytes, between 1868 and 69. Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his “discoveries concerning the genetic structure of viruses.”