Now in 1928 there occurred in Great Britain,
a discovery which was terribly upsetting to all of us, and especially to Dr. Avery.
Namely, an officer of the British Ministry of Health, Fred Griffith,
demonstrated to his satisfaction,
very, very crude experiments in mice.
That those pneumococcus types,
that all of us were so convinced were so stable,
were, in reality, could be changed from one to the other in the bodies of mice.
These experiments were extremely complicated;
technically, they were not very convincing,
except that Fred Griffith was a person of such technical mastery
that one had to take notice of it.
Well, we took notice of it. We had countless discussions in the laboratory about the possibility
that specific pneumococcus types could change one into the other.
But Dr. Avery could not accept it.
It went too much against all that he had taught for ten or 15 years,
and too much against the achievements of his laboratory.
So that, we did not repeat the experiments of Fred Griffith,
even though we were fully aware of them.
[Avery] left for his summer vacation in 1929,
going to Deer Isle in Maine, where he went every summer,
and I stayed in the laboratory as I did in those days,
and if I mention myself, it is not for my participation in the problem,
it is that I was witness of the experiments
and participated a bit in the experiments that confirmed Griffith's studies,
here, on the 6th floor of the hospital.
I shared the laboratory with a Canadian.
A Canadian physician who took care of patients suffering from lobar pneumonia,
but who also worked in the laboratory,
as we all did in that time.
Now, Henry Dawson was a Canadian,
he was a British Canadian, very important.
And he was absolutely convinced that anything done in England had to be right [laughter].
And I can assure you this, I am not trying be to play with this fact.
He was intensely [emotional?] about it.
Because he was so [emotional?] about it,
he decided he would try to repeat the experiments, during the summer,
that's the time when I participated in the project with him,
and he actually duplicated Griffith's results.
If I mention this it is to convey to you
that in scientific life there are all sorts of human elements
that are not sufficiently recognized.
I think it probably confirmed in our laboratory if Henry Dawson
had not been a British Canadian. [Indistinct chatter]
So he did repeat the experiment,
and very soon he did what Griffith had not been able to do.
He showed that the transformation of the pneumococcus types could occur not only in the mouse,
through very messy, complicated experiments, but could be done in the test tube,
and this was an achievement of phenomenal importance,
because it meant that from then on it could be studied by all sorts of techniques.