John Stanley Griffith

John Stanley Griffith (1928–1972) was a British chemist and biophysicist. During the 1960s, Griffith and radiation biologist Tikvah Alper developed the hypothesis that some transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (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 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 was the nephew of the distinguished British bacteriologist Frederick Griffith.