FREDERICK GRIFFITH: BIOGRAPHY, EXPERIMENT, CONTRIBUTIONS - ARTE - 2024

Frederick Griffith was a British doctor, specialist in bacteriology, who explained through one of his experiments what the process of bacterial transformation consisted of while looking for a cure for a certain type of pneumonia. It was the prelude to one of the most outstanding discoveries in science: the chemical composition of genes.

Science has accompanied man for thousands of years and has evolved with him. Researchers from different generations have turned experimental methods upside down in the imperative search for answers to events in nature that affect the biochemistry of the human body, which is considered a very advanced machine.

Frederic Griffith was a remarkable bacteriologist and his observations have been far reaching. Source: See page for author

Bacterial pneumonia was a flu pandemic during World War I, when Griffith decided to find a vaccine to fight Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacterium that causes the disease. There were virulent bacteria (they produced a polysaccharide capsule) and innocuous (they did not have a capsule).

This story began in 1928, while Frederick Griffith was working on inoculating mice with pneumococci to study the behavior of the bacteria that cause pneumonia in humans. The ability of microbes to cause disease in hosts was due to the fact that they had a capsule on the outside of their cell wall.

The discovery of DNA has been one of the most important scientific achievements of man. Since Frederick Miescher first isolated the DNA molecule, plus the studies of Phoebus Levene and the findings of Griffith, Avery, Hershey-Chase, and even Watson and Crick, it has been possible to determine that DNA is the molecule responsible for inheritance. These advances could not have happened without Griffith's work.

Frederick Griffith was a tireless researcher in the area of ​​epidemiology and bacteriology. He dedicated his life to working to discover the origin and cure of the diseases that plagued Europe for more than 100 years, caused by the viral phenomenon.

Biography

Early years and studies

Frederick Griffith was born in 1879 at Hale in Cheshire, England, and was the son of Joseph and Emily Griffith. He studied medicine and in 1901 graduated from Victoria University in Liverpool. After being a home physician and surgeon, he worked as a resident at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary.

In 1901 Alexander was appointed to the Thompson Yates Laboratory of Pathology in Liverpool, a private institution dedicated to research in experimental medicine, biochemistry, tropical medicine, and comparative pathology.

From 1903 to 1911 he served as a bacteriological investigator at the Royal Tuberculosis Commission together with Arthur Eastwood and Arthur Griffith.

In 1910 he graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Public Health, and a year later he joined the local governing board as an official physician in the London Ministry of Health, like his older brother Arthur Griffith.

Fred Griffith became close friends with William McDonald Scott, a prominent Edinburgh Bacteriologist with a Public Health degree, who was in charge of research into the spread of cerebrospinal fever in Britain. He was a student of tropical medicine and hygiene before obtaining his medical degree in 1910.

Together they developed a method to detect syphilitic diseases, but when the local government laboratories were taken over by the Ministry of Health during World War I, Griffith and Scott moved to Dudley House in Soho and turned it into a pathology laboratory.

Personal life

There is very little information on the life of Frederick Griffith; most were reconstructed through letters written by third parties and second-hand information related to their work.

These data can help you better understand your career path, as well as the development and evolution of your scientific ideas about the biology of infectious diseases.

As a seasoned bacteriologist, at the beginning of World War II he was sent to Cambridge to create and run the Public Emergency Health Laboratory, where he teamed up with Bruce White (another bacteriology expert) in the laboratory group. Griffith had no political ambitions and let White lead the project.

Apparently Griffith had no talent for organization and struggled to network and meet new people. So he decided to return to London and establish a streptococcal research unit in Queen Charlotte's isolation block in Hammersmith, where he began working with Stuart Dunsmore Elliot.

Upon his return to the British capital, Frederick Griffith went to live at his home in Eccleston Square, where he stayed with a housekeeper and his niece. His friend and collaborator William Scott also shared his residence.

Death

In April 1941, when the bombing started, his friends thought they should move from London, but he disagreed.

Days later a bomb destroyed Griffith's house and killed both scientists and the housekeeper. After his death, Stuart Elliot took over the management of the research laboratory founded by Griffith.

Experiment

In his search for a cure for the flu pandemic in Europe, Griffith studied two strains of the pneumococcus: one he identified as the S strain and the other as the R strain.

The first consisted of a shiny-looking capsule with biomolecules (polysaccharides) that were formed from the bond between various monosaccharides and whose main functions are energy and structural.

This strain was infectious and, when inoculated, caused pneumonia and killed mice within 24 hours, since the immune system did not fight it because the capsule that surrounded it protected the bacteria. In the second case, the R strain did not have such a capsule, it was rather rough in appearance and lacked a virulent condition.

Griffith heated the S (virulent) strain to kill it and found that, when injected alone, they were harmless.

However, he found that if they mixed the dead S strains with the live R, the mice became infected and died. In his findings, he observed that the R strains had developed capsule; that is, the bacteria found in the mice (R / S) were of the S type and remained so.

Transformation principle

This gave rise to the hypothesis that a phenomenon called the transformation principle occurred in the dead S-type bacteria, which years later was identified as DNA by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn MacCarty.

Frederick Griffith assured that there was something in the S bacteria that transformed the R into lethal ones by turning them into new living S bacteria, which were maintained for many generations keeping the same characteristics of their phenotype; that is, the capsule.

This was what Griffith called the transforming factor, capable of producing a hereditary trait in R-type bacteria.

The underlying importance of this work consisted in the fact that Griffith was certain that the change experienced in the biology of the bacterium not only negatively impacted the individual patient, but also reached the community, changing the epidemiological distribution of diseases and putting to the new disease in the foreground.

Other contributions and implications

Fred Griffith turned out to be a restless scientist regarding biological transformation and wondered if this was a hallmark of biology. This led him to place his work within a broad context of bacteriological, epidemiological, and medical research in the period between World War I and World War II.

Among his other contributions and implications in science and medicine, the following can be mentioned.

Study on the cultural characteristics of the bovine tubercle bacillus

Frederick worked alongside his brother Arthur on this project and they performed a large number of modifications in experiments of infections with bovine and human bacilli, and reported on the effects that arose after subcutaneous inoculations in various species, including mice, rabbits, pigs, calves, goats, monkeys and guinea pigs.

Research on streptococcal diseases related to scarlet fever and rheumatic fever

In addition to his research on pneumococcus and meningococcus, Griffith participated in various bacteriological and epidemiological projects through which he investigated the etiology of rheumatic fever and streptococcal infections.

Studies on meningococcus and pneumococcus

The idea that diseases that were detected by serology could evolve became more apparent after his report on meningococcus in the nasopharynx, which he prepared while he was in his pathology laboratory in London.

In this report, Griffith stated that the difference in antigenic capacity is that complex structures are found in more virulent strains, and simpler ones are in milder strains. These differences depend on your chemical makeup.

Griffith continued his research and in 1922 he emphasized the need to create a homogeneous technique to diagnose pneumococcal types, for epidemiological and therapeutic purposes.

He carefully classified the Streptococcus pyogenes species into 27 different types according to their serology. He indicated that streptococcus, like pneumococcus, was differentiated into several serological races that had different pathological and epidemiological values; however, they continued to form a well-defined bacterial species.

References

1. "Frederick Griffith" in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved on June 8, 2019 from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: es.wikipedia.org.
2. "Fred Griffith british bacteriologist" in Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved on June 8, 2019 from Encyclopedia Britannica: britannica.com
3. "DNA as genetic material (a bit of history)" in ArgenBio. Retrieved on June 8, 2019 from the Argentine Council for Information and Biotechnology Development: argenbio.org
4. From the Ríos Verónica. "Griffith, Frederick (1881-1941)" in Illustrious Microbiologists. Retrieved on June 8, 2019 from illustrious microbiologists: microilustres.blogspot.com
5. "1928. Griffith and Bacterial Transformation ”in Curtis Biology edition. Retrieved on June 8, 2019 from Curtis Biology 7th. curtisbiologia.com edition
6. Aliouche, Hidaya History of DNA research: Scientific pioneers and their discoveries in News medical life sciences news-medical.net
7. "Bacterial Transformation and the Origins of Epidemics in the Interwar Period: The Epidemiological Significance of Fred Griffith's Transforming Experiment" in Journal of the History of Biology. Retrieved on June 9, 2019 from Journal of the History of Biology: fp.ulaval.ca