Frederick Griffith

Fred Griffith with a dog named Bobby, 1936. Frederick Griffith (born 1877 or 1881, died 1941 in London) is a British physician and scientist who in 1928 was the first to investigate and describe the phenomenon of DNA transformation. He was born in Hale and studied at Liverpool University where he was involved in genetics. At the beginning of his career he worked at Liverpool Royal Infirmary, Thompson Yates Laboratory and the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis.

He died while working in the lab during one of the raids on London during World War II. Griffith's experiment

Frederick Griffith was involved in the study of the vaccine against pneumonia, which killed hundreds of thousands of people a decade ago during the Spanish flu epidemic.

He studied two strains of the Pneumococcus bacteria: strain S, which produced a polysaccharide envelope and was pathogenic, and a R strain that was unprotected against the immune system without the envelope. Viral strains of S strain after killing by heating and injection of mice did not cause disease symptoms. However, if dead S-strain bacteria were injected together with living rats, the R-strain of mice died.

After isolation from these pneumococci mice, it became apparent that insecticidal R-strains acquired the characteristics of strain S and began to produce polysaccharide coatings. This characteristic has become the next generations of these pneumococcus. Griffith formulated the hypothesis that a "transforming factor" derived from the killed by S-strain bacterial mutation made the R-bacteria change into a permanently virulent strain. This process was called transformation. It was not until 1644, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarthy of the Rockefeller Institute in New York, that they explained the mechanisms underlying the phenomena observed in this experiment, while arguing that the transforming factor is DNA.

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