A kitchen blender helped settle whether DNA or protein carries heredity

In 1952, biologists still debated whether genes were made of DNA or protein. Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase labeled a virus's DNA and protein coat with different radioactive tags, let it infect bacteria, then whirred the mixture in a blender to strip off anything left outside the cells. Only the DNA had gone in, and it alone was enough to produce new viruses.

— Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, Independent Functions of Viral Protein and Nucleic Acid in Growth of Bacteriophage — Journal of General Physiology, 1952