J. gen. Microbiol. (1966), 45, 385-397 385,
With 1 plate

Printed in Great Britain

Genetic Transformation: a Retrospective Appreciation

First Griffith Memorial Lecture

By W. HAYES

Medical Research Council, Microbial Genetics Research Unit,
Hammersmith Hospital, London, W. 12

Exegi monumentum aere perennius (Iorace, Odes, Il, xxx, 1).

(1 have completed a monument more lasting than brass.)

On the night of 17 April 1941, almost exactly 25 years ago, Fred Griffith and his
colleague, W. M. Scott, were killed by a German bomb during an air raid on London.
At the time of his death Griffith was about 60 years old. In an obituary written
shortly afterwards it was suggested that a fitting memorial to these two men would
be the construction of a new Ministry of Health building more worthy of Griffith and
Scott, and of the dedicated and important epidemiological research which they had
done within the dilapidated environment of their old laboratory. No one then gues-
sed that Griffith had already built his own memorial 18 years previously when, in
1928, he published in the Journal of Hygiene his famous and remarkable paper on
the significance of pneumococcal types (Griffith, 1928). This evening, in this first
Griffith Memorial Lecture, it is my privilege and intention to try to revive for you
the essence of Griffith’s most outstanding discovery and, in so far as I can, to present
it in perspective against the somewhat sophisticated and mature background of
modern molecular genetics to which it gave birth.

Fred Griffith has been described as a shy and reticent man, whose quiet kindly
manner, and his devotion to his job, made him a lovable personality to those few
who got to know him. Outside his work he found his pleasure in ski-ing and in
walking on the Sussex downs where he had built a cottage. Like his elder brother
Stanley, who died only a few days before him, he was a medical bacteriologist whose
primary and abiding interest, and his life’s work, was the epidemiology of infectious

disease. He believed that a proper understanding of epidemiological ppoblems could
come only from more detailed and discriminating knowledge of infectious bacterial
species, and of the nature of bacterial virulence lige For a time he worked
on the typing of tubercle bacui with stanley Griffith, whose published work on this
topic extended over many years and was prolific. On the contrary, Fred Griifith’s
output of scientific papers was, by comparison, remarkable for its paucity. In view
of the quality and distinction of what he did publish, however, I think that this must
be ascribed to an inate humility and capacity for self-criticism so that he offered
to posterity only those products of his research which he judged to be new and
important.

I suppose that Griffith would have deemed his most valuable contribution to
epidemiology to be the discovery that many serological types exist within group A
streptococci; these are the causative organisms of what were, at that time, such

 

Vol, 45, No, 2 was issued 30 November 1966
25 G. Microb. 45