John Stanley Griffith
John Stanley Griffith was a British chemist and biophysicist.
His early work was in the inorganic chemistry of transition metal ions and ligand field theory.
During the 1960s, Griffith and radiation biologist Tikvah Alper developed the hypothesis that some transmissible spongiform encephalopathies 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.
