Imagine you‘re a biology scientist in the 1920’s. You work with all sorts of things ranging from bacteria to rats. One day you decide to conduct an experiment.

You take up a type of bacteria (I’ll spare you the name for the sake of not complicating things) and mice.

You take both a harmless, rough variety (R strain) of bacteria and a fatal, smooth variety (S strain). You inject them in the mice and observe the outcomes.

As expected, the mouse lived after being injected by the R strain and died after taking in the S strain.

You decide to take the experiment a little further and inject the R strain and heat-killed S strain (when bacteria are exposed to extreme heat, they die and do not show their effect and do not cause infections).

Therefore, after injecting these strains the expected results would be for the mice to live.

However the actual results took a turn and caught you off guard.

The surprising outcome was that the mice died.

Give it thought why that happened. What could have happened after injecting the bacteria that the two seemingly harmless strains killed the mice?

Some might guess that the S strain wasn’t actually made inactive or  wasn’t properly heat killed or something along those lines. But that’s not what happened.

As you injected the harmless R strain and the heat-killed S strain, the R strain transformed into a fatal form of the S strain.

This was the experiment conducted by Fredrick Griffith and is called “The Griffith Experiment.”

Griffith concluded that the R-strain bacteria must have taken up what he called a “transforming principle” from the heat-killed S bacteria, which allowed them to “transform” into smooth-coated bacteria and become fatal.

virulent – (of a disease or poison) extremely severe or harmful in its effects.

The transforming principle applies to us in the exact same way it does to bacteria – we are always changing according to what surrounds ourselves day after day because those things have potentials hidden to change us within them. The people around you can transform your perspective and way of being in the world.

In our human relationships, the transforming principle of an individual can bring out something in another person that was never there before.

It’s how Tony Stark brings out the best in Peter Parker and how Professor Dumbeldore guides Harry Potter to the defeat of Voldemort.

It is also how under Voldemort Peter Pettigrew became evil and Kaikeyi became greedy for her son under the influence of Manthara.

One wouldn’t have expected Pettigrew or Kaikeyi to do what they did, but when they were around Voldemort and Manthara who had a transforming influence on them, that changed.

There is always potential for something new to happen and you never know what will be brought out of someone else through the people close to them.

Those around us can bring out both the good and the bad in us, even if either is present in small amounts.

It’s important for you to choose carefully the people around you.

You are surrounded by a set of same people day after day, and their effect on you is tremendous.

In our human relationships, the transforming principle of an individual can bring out something in another person that was never there before; a quality that may be present but dormant.

Bottom Line

Be careful about who’s around you. You’re a product of your environment, surround yourself with the best.