Final answer:
The historically accurate relationship is that Oswald Avery's group extended Frederick Griffith's work. Frederick Griffith identified a transforming principle in bacteria, and Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty later demonstrated that this principle was DNA, setting the stage for further confirmation by Hershey and Chase. Option d is the answer.
Step-by-step explanation:
The historical relationship among the scientists that is accurate is D. Oswald Avery's group extended the work of Frederick Griffith.
In the 1920s, Frederick Griffith demonstrated that something in virulent bacteria could transform nonvirulent bacteria into virulent ones. However, the exact nature of the transforming principle was not identified by Griffith.
In the early 1940s, Oswald Avery, along with Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty, took the next step to identify the 'something' by demonstrating that DNA was this material and not protein. Their experiments involved separating the various components of heat-killed S-strain bacteria and determining which component could transform R-strain bacteria into S-strain bacteria. It was through these experiments that Avery and his team provided evidence that DNA is the genetic material.
The work of Avery and his team was later confirmed by Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey, whose experiments in 1952 demonstrated that viruses insert DNA, not protein, into bacterial cells, thus establishing DNA as the carrier of genetic information.