As a National Research Council fellow he worked with Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute. Over Avery's strong objections, Dawson recreated Fred Griffith's discovery that a soluble substance from dead bacteria of one type can effect a repeatable and inheritable change in bacteria of another type - a process Dawson termed "transformation" in his six articles on the subject - in which he was the first person in history to put the substance to work in a test tube and even to partially extract it. The phrase stuck and eventually Avery along with Colin Munro MacLeod proved the substance was in fact DNA.