If Cinderella's mice had pneumonia

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a guy called Fredrick Grifith and he was about to change the world.

How? By kidnapping (and torturing ) Cinderella's mice.

Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) is the fancy name of the bacteria which causes pneumonia. Our protagnoist, took some of these and grew them on a cutlure plate. Some produced shiny colonies -S ( which was shiny due to a mucous coat) and other rough colonies-R .

To continue with his experiment, he devised a brilliant plan, involving star-crossed lovers, a single sock and a squash and kidnapped cinderella's mice.

He injected both the types of colonies into the mice.

Mice infected with the S strain died of pneumonia , while that of R strain didn't develop pneumonia.

Now he heated the bacteria and killed them.

When heat killed S strain was injected into the mice, it didn't killl them but when he injected a mixture of heat killed S and live R , the mice died. He also recovered living S bacteria from the dead mice.

This made him conclude that the R strain bacteria had somehow been transformed by the heat killed S strain, It enabled the R strain to sunthesis a smooth mucous coat and become virulent.

This opened the world to the idea of transfer of genetic material and information!

and the world lived happily every after with that info (the mice? not so much)

and now for a meme