Howard Gest received his B.A. in Bacteriology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1942. During his undergraduate studies, he worked with Salvador E. Luria and Max Delbruck (who along with Alfred D. Hershey won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses) doing research on bacterial viruses at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Gest began graduate work with Delbruck at Vanderbilt University, but World War II interrupted his studies. At that point he accepted a position to work on the Manhattan Project with the eminent physical chemist Charles Coryell at the University of Chicago, and later at Oak Ridge, TN. In 1946, Gest became Martin Kamen’s first graduate student at Washington University. Martin Kamen was a professor in Biochemistry at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine. During Gest’s graduate work with Kamen, he became associated with Alfred Hershey in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at the School of Medicine. Gest received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Washington University in 1949. Gest was a faculty member at Western Reserve University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1959. Gest returned to Washington University as a faculty member in 1959.  He was also a member of the Interdepartmental Committee on Molecular Biology.  He remained a professor until 1966 when he joined the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. As of 2006, he served as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science.