Griffith's Experiment

In Biology we learned about this man named Frederick Griffith. Perhaps you know of him (I didn't), and if you don't (like me), he was a biologist who came up with an idea called the "transforming principle".



Frederick Griffith

This principle came about after Griffith did some experiments on mice. So what he did was he took two strains of bacteria, S (which stood for smooth) and R (which stood for rough), and injected them into mice. But there was a catch... R was a non lethal bacteria, but S was not and had the ability to kill the mice.

So as you might have guessed, when R was injected, the mouse lived, but when S was injected, the mouse died. But Griffith went further... He decided to heat the S strain, which caused the bacteria to die. So when this heated S strain was injected, the mouse lived. But again, Griffith went further... this time he mixed a heated S strain and a R strain together and injected the mouse.

Well, what do you think happened? The mouse died. Why? Griffith never found out and this question was later answered by two separate groups of scientists: Avery, McCarty and Macleod and Hershey and Chase.

If that was too complicated for you here is a nice picture.


                                         
Rough strain= live mouse
Smooth strain= dead mouse

So I guess you could say that Frederick Griffith was the original DeadMau5!

 

Oops! That is a lot of extra space!