Fred Griffith

Frederick Griffith (1879 - 1941) was a genetic engineer.

Frederick Griffith was born in Hale, England and attended Liverpool University where he studied genetics. In his younger days he worked for the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, the Thompson Yates Laboratory, and the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis.

In 1910 he was hired by the British government to work for the Ministry of Health under Arthur Eastwood. The government spent money sparingly in times of expected war, so the laboratories Griffith worked in were primitive. However, his creativity and inquisitive mind allowed him to excel in his scientific exploration. One of his friends claimed that "he could do more with a kerosene tin and a primus stove than most men could do with a palace."

The pneumonia infections in the epidemics during World War I hit even harder than expected, and Griffith left his lab work to become a British medical officer. He dedicated himself to creating a vaccine to protect against this disease.

In his post-war attempts to manufacture a vaccine for pneumonia,Griffith studied how the bacteria that caused the disease, Streptococcus pneumoniae, was able to evade the human immune system. He suspected that there was a gene for an enzyme that would catalyze the manufacturing of a slimy capsule to protect the bacteria. It was known in the scientific community that genetic information was inherited, but it was hotly debated how genetic information carried out different processes and which molecules were included in the process.

Griffith set up a simple yet foolproof experiment in which he discovered what he called a “transforming principle”, which basically suggested a link between DNA and heredity in cells. He constructed four pneumococcal strains. The first used the bacteria that caused so many deaths in World War I. Normally, as in this first strain, the bacteria is encased in a slimy capsule which allowed it to resist the human immune system. The white blood cells could not destroy the bacteria through the slimy capsule. This strain was called the S-strain (smooth strain) and is expected the kill the host. A second strain, called the R-strain (rough strain) consisted of the bacteria without the slimy capsule surrounding it. Therefore, white blood cells would be expected to be able to destroy the bacteria and the host would survive. The third strain was a heat killed S-strain. Because the strain was killed, it could not grow and spread through the host, so the organism was expected to live through it. The last strain was a combination of the second and third strains; the R-strain without the slime covering and the heat killed S-strain.

Each of these was injected in mice. Many mice were used to ensure more accurate results. The first three worked as expected. The live S-strain caused the mice to die. The live R-strain allowed the mice to live. The mice also survived the heat killed S-strain. It was the final injection that caused confusion. The mice injected with the combination of dead S-strain bacteria and live R-strain bacteria, neither of which should kill the mice, together killed the mice.

The blood of the mice from the last experiment was analyzed, and live S-strain bacteria were found. The bacteria had grown and spread as smooth colonies which meant that the R-stain had reproduced and adopted the slimy covering to become live S-strain bacteria by something that Fred Griffith called the “transforming principle”. The genetic material for creating the slimy capsules was preserved and inherited in the next generation to combine with the live strains of bacteria. From this information, Fred Griffith concluded that a new combination of genes were inherited by each generation, that genes were physical things, and that they were preserved even when the organism died.

Almost all of Fred Griffith’s life was devoted to his studies, so it seemed natural that he was killed in London during a bombing air raid holding a page of recently discovered formulas. The formulas seemed breakthrough, but were too disorganized to be interpreted. Unfortunately, his reclusive nature caused him to die without realize that his work would significantly contribute to the scientific world.

Three years later Fred Griffith’s student, Oswald T. Avery, along with McCarty and MacLeod published a paper using Fred Griffith’s experiment and further research to explain that DNA was conclusively the material that transferred genetic information.

Griffith lived quietly and reclusively most of his life. He enjoyed skiing, walking, and visiting his country cottage in Sussex. He was known as shy, gentle, kind, and devoted with a very loving personality. His modest and self-criticizing nature meant that he did not publish much of his research, but what he did publish was of very high quality.