1928: Frederick Griffith’s showed a “transforming principle,” setting the stage for more inquiry into the building blocks of life [169] [47]

Art Piece: Two Women Transforming into Trees (Daphne and Myrna?), Stefano Della Bella, 1647 [166]

Paper: A Transforming Principle [58]

One can say that beginning from the 1900s, science became ‘more’ modern than before — there was no switch that could just be flipped to ‘activate’ modern science though, but rather advances having [171] to do with scientific tools and equipment helped contribute to this modernization of science. Darwin and Wallace’s theory allowed us to understand how organisms and life in general can evolve, but we still did not entirely know how this original life came to be in the first place. Looking back to creation myths, though we had many spiritual or faith-based explanations for the building blocks of life, we did not have a large number of science-based explanations for life’s building blocks. The idea of a ‘transforming principle’ took hold though in the 1900s, with people like British army surgeon Griffith attempting to contribute knowledge to better elucidating the building blocks of life by way of unlocking this transforming principle. Notably, in his namesake experiment [47], Griffith mixed living non-virulent bacteria with a heat inactivated virulent form; he infected mice with this bacterial mixture and found that the mice developed pneumonia and then died. He was then able to isolate colonies of the virulent strain from these mice, and because the original virulent strain had been heat inactivated, Griffith was able to conclude that the non-virulent strain had somehow transformed into the virulent bacterial type. Others later confirmed what Grifffith saw, which confirmed that there was something which caused this bacterial virulence conversion — te ‘transforming principle.’ This was a large paradigm shift because for the first time, we got closer to better understanding the mechanics of both bacterial transformation, disease causing phenomena, and also the building blocks of life. The artwork above [166] is relevant to Griffith’s experiment and the idea of a ‘transforming principle’ — notably, the art piece depicts “Two Women Transforming into Trees (Daphne and Myrna?).” Though we may not totally be sure what might be facilitating this transformation directly from looking at the picture, we still see that there is a transforming principle nonetheless, much like in Griffith’s experimentation. Moreover, the scientific paper above [58] also contextualizes Griffith’s experiment and also discusses later experiments which build on Griffith’s work, demonstrating a paradigm shift towards better understanding the building blocks of life.