Frederick Griffith was a British bacteriologist (the title of bacteriologist was more attributed to him by later generations. At that time, his position was a public health officer responsible for bacterial classification and isolation in ministry laboratory). Information about Frederick Griffith's early life is very limited. Most people remember him for his experiment on the transformation of bacteria that cause pneumoniaâthe Griffith experiment. This biographical article contains only a brief introduction to the Griffith transformation experiment, with more content focusing on Frederick Griffith's education and career.
Frederick Griffith was born in 1879 in Hale, Lancashire, England. He attended Victoria University in Liverpool. After graduated, he became a doctor at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and was appointed as a researcher at the Thompson Yates Laboratory in 1903. From 1903 to 1911, he worked alongside his brother Arthur Stanley Griffith as a bacteriological investigator for the Royal Commission of Tuberculosis. Their main task was to study tuberculosis in humans and cattle. Later, he was employed by the local government as a public health officer.
During World War I, local laboratories were nationalized by British government, and he became a lab technician responsible for bacterial research at the Ministry of Health's Pathological Laboratory. He investigated several infectious diseases in Britain and identified pathogen that caused these outbreaks.
In 1915, he met a bacteriologist named William McDonald Scott in the laboratory. Thereafter, they investigated pathogens and disease transmission together, becoming good friends among colleagues. They believed that a detailed and precise understanding of microbes was crucial for control of the infectious disease epidemic.
Despite poor equipment, he and his colleagues conducted numerous studies on bacterial isolation and classification. Frederick Griffith developed a serological technique for identifying pathogenic microorganisms, which could trace the sources of infectious disease outbreaks. It was this technique that enabled him to identify different strains of pneumococcus, allowing the transformation experiment to proceed smoothly.
In a paper published in 1928, he claimed that injecting mice with a mixture of heat-killed S bacteria and living R bacteria would cause the mice to become sick and die (the S bacteria, encapsulated by a polysaccharide capsule, were not easily killed by the immune system, while the R bacteria, lacking a protective coating, were easily cleared by the immune system). He believed that the R bacteria acquired some substance called "transforming principle" from the S bacteria to induce their transformation. However, he preferred to use this phenomenon to explain the pneumonia epidemic rather than pursue the nature of genetic material.
After the bacteria transforming experiment, Griffith worked on streptococcus pyogenes and the decline of rheumatic fever and scarlet fever in Britain. He explained these epidemics by isolating and classifying bacteria. Humans have developed a considerable degree of herd immunity during epidemics, and the battle against bacteria may lead to diversified strains with different levels of invasiveness and toxigenicity. The transition from outbreak to abatement of an infectious disease is due not only to an increase in the population resistance, but also a decrease virulence in the microorganisms. Even pathogens that were once highly virulent may lead to a harmless relationship through a long-term confrontation with susceptible individuals.
Frederick Griffith worked as a government laboratory researcher until he died in the Nazi air raids on London in 1941. After his transformation experiment, he was quickly forgotten by the world. It was not until 1944, when Avery demonstrated that the "transforming principle" (genetic material) of bacteria was DNA, that Frederick Griffith was recognized as an important figure in the discovery of DNA and genetic information.