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 demonstrations of bacterial transformation, whereby a bacterium distinctly changes its form and function.

[5] America's leading pneumococcal researcher, Oswald T. Avery, speculated that Griffith had failed to apply adequate controls.

UK government spent money sparingly on the laboratory, which remained very basic, though Griffith and his colleague, William M. Scott, "could do more with a kerosene tin and a primus stove than most men could do with a palace".

Bacteriologist Fred Neufeld, of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany, had earlier identified the pneumococcal types, confirmed and expanded by Alphonse Dochez at Oswald Avery's laboratory in America at The Rockefeller Hospital.

[8] Avery's associate Martin Dawson at The Rockefeller Hospital confirmed each of Griffith's reported findings.

[6][11] Over the following years, Avery's illness, Graves' disease, kept him much out of his laboratory as other researchers in it experimented to determine, largely by process of elimination, which constituent was the transforming factor.

[14] The first Griffith Memorial Lecture indicates that Fred Griffith died on the night of 17 April 1941[15]—though the fourth lecture indicates that he died in his apartment in February 1941[6]—alongside friend and colleague William M. Scott amid an air raid during World War II's London Blitz.

[17] In 1944 identification of the transforming factor was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine by Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty of The Rockefeller Hospital.