John Stanley Griffith (1928–1972) was a British chemist, mathematician and

biophysicist Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study Biology, biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from Molecule, molecular to organismic ...

. He was the nephew of the distinguished British

bacteriologist A bacteriologist is a microbiologist, or similarly trained professional, in bacteriology -- a subdivision of microbiology that studies bacteria, typically Pathogenic bacteria, pathogenic ones. Bacteriologists are interested in studying and learnin ...

Frederick Griffith Frederick Griffith (1877–1941) was a British bacteriologist whose focus was the epidemiology and pathology of bacterial pneumonia. In January 1928 he reported what is now known as Griffith's Experiment, the first widely accepted demonstratio ...

Career

Beginning as an undergraduate in mathematics at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...

in 1946–1949, he went on to read Part II biochemistry in 1949–1951. His research career continued in theoretical chemistry at Oxford and Cambridge, where he held a Berry-Ramsey research fellowship at King's College. He had several appointments in Britain and the US in his different disciplines. These included professorships in chemistry at

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public university, public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship university, flagship campus of Indiana University and, with ...

and at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, where he received the

Marlow Award The Marlow Medal and Prize is an early-career award in physical chemistry given by the Royal Society of Chemistry. One or two prizewinners each year, who must be junior researchers under 35 or within 10 years of completing their doctorate, receive ...

of the

Royal Society of Chemistry The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society (professional association) in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemistry, chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Ro ...

in 1961. He then spent time at the Department of Mathematics at

UMIST The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was a university based in the centre of the city of Manchester in England. It specialised in technical and scientific subjects and was a major centre for research. On 1 Oct ...

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

. In 1967 he was appointed to a chair in the Department of Mathematics of

Bedford College, London file:Bedford College in York place - photographer is unknown but guess 1908.png, Bedford College was in York Place after 1874 Bedford College was founded in London in 1849 as the first higher education college for education of women, women in th ...

, where his inaugural lecture was entitled "The Neural Basis of Conscious Decision". In 1968 he moved back to the Department of Chemistry at Bloomington.

Research

His early work was in the

inorganic chemistry Inorganic chemistry deals with synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds. This field covers chemical compounds that are not carbon-based, which are the subjects of organic chemistry. The distinction between the two disci ...

transition metal In chemistry, a transition metal (or transition element) is a chemical element in the d-block of the periodic table (groups 3 to 12), though the elements of group 12 (and less often group 3) are sometimes excluded. They are the elements that can ...

ions and

ligand field theory Ligand field theory (LFT) describes the bonding, orbital arrangement, and other characteristics of coordination complexes. It represents an application of molecular orbital theory to transition metal complexes. A transition metal ion has nine valen ...

. During the 1960s, Griffith and radiation biologist

Tikvah Alper Tikvah Alper (22 January 1909 – 2 February 1995) trained as a physicist and became a distinguished radiobiologist. Among many other initiatives and discoveries, she was among the first to find evidence indicating that the infectious agent in ...

developed the hypothesis that some

transmissible spongiform encephalopathies Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are a group of progressive and fatal conditions that are associated with prions and affect the brain and nervous system of many animals, including humans, cattle, and sheep. According to the most ...

(TSEs) are caused by an infectious agent consisting solely of proteins. This idea was eventually developed by Prusiner and others into the so-called

prion Prions are misfolded proteins that have the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It ...

hypothesis. In 1951, when he was just 23, at Francis Crick's suggestion, Griffith performed quantum mechanical calculations on what later became known as ''complementary base pairing''. Griffith has published several books, including "The Theory of Transition-Metal Ions" (1961), "The Irreducible Tensor Method for Molecular Symmetry Groups" (1962), and "Mathematical Neurobiology: An Introduction to the Mathematics of the Nervous System" (1971).

References

1928 births 1972 deaths British chemists British biophysicists {{UK-chemist-stub

Career

Research

See also

References