WEBVTT

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Now in 1928 there occurred in Great Britain,

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a discovery which was terribly upsetting to all of us, and especially to Dr. Avery.

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Namely, an officer of the British Ministry of Health, Fred Griffith,

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demonstrated to his satisfaction,

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very, very crude experiments in mice.

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That those pneumococcus types,

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that all of us were so convinced were so stable,

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were, in reality, could be changed from one to the other in the bodies of mice.

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These experiments were extremely complicated;

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technically, they were not very convincing,

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except that Fred Griffith was a person of such technical mastery

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that one had to take notice of it.

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Well, we took notice of it. We had countless discussions in the laboratory about the possibility

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that specific pneumococcus types could change one into the other.

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But Dr. Avery could not accept it.

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It went too much against all that he had taught for ten or 15 years,

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and too much against the achievements of his laboratory.

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So that, we did not repeat the experiments of Fred Griffith,

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even though we were fully aware of them.

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[Avery] left for his summer vacation in 1929,

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going to Deer Isle in Maine, where he went every summer,

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and I stayed in the laboratory as I did in those days,

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and if I mention myself, it is not for my participation in the problem,

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it is that I was witness of the experiments

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and participated a bit in the experiments that confirmed Griffith's studies,

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here, on the 6th floor of the hospital.

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I shared the laboratory with a Canadian.

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A Canadian physician who took care of patients suffering from lobar pneumonia,

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but who also worked in the laboratory,

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as we all did in that time.

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Now, Henry Dawson was a Canadian,

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he was a British Canadian, very important.

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And he was absolutely convinced that anything done in England had to be right [laughter].

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And I can assure you this, I am not trying be to play with this fact.

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He was intensely [emotional?] about it.

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Because he was so [emotional?] about it,

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he decided he would try to repeat the experiments, during the summer,

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that's the time when I participated in the project with him,

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and he actually duplicated Griffith's results.

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If I mention this it is to convey to you

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that in scientific life there are all sorts of human elements

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that are not sufficiently recognized.

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I think it probably confirmed in our laboratory if Henry Dawson

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had not been a British Canadian. [Indistinct chatter]

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So he did repeat the experiment,

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and very soon he did what Griffith had not been able to do.

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He showed that the transformation of the pneumococcus types could occur not only in the mouse,

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through very messy, complicated experiments, but could be done in the test tube,

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and this was an achievement of phenomenal importance,

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because it meant that from then on it could be studied by all sorts of techniques.