False. Frederick Griffith established that there was a transforming principle in bacterial genetics in a an amazing experiment performed in 1928. He postulated that information could somehow be transferred from one bacterial strain to another and vice versa. This was many years before the discovery of DNA and therefor Griffith could not have stated that the transforming principle was DNA. Griffith at the time did not know the chemical and biological processes behind the transforming principle, but his contribution helped open up research regarding genetic transference of information.