On September 11th, 1984 Alec Jeffreys, now Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, discovered something called “genetic fingerprinting” in a laboratory in the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. His discovery was to become the turning point for forensic DNA analysis, paternity tests and DNA cloning.
Professor Jeffreys and his team were working on DNA patters, overwhelmed by the number of variables present even between mother and son or identical twins. “This is too complicated”, thought Jeffreys, but then came came what he calls his “eureka” moment and realized that every DNA strain contains not only the information the organism has inherited from parents, but also its unique “fingerprint” trace which repeats itself in its every single cell. What initially appeared to be a random and confusing bulk of unlinked information information, was actually the individual’s distinctive feature.
This accidental discovery opened up a new area for science, making DNA analysis crucial for criminal investigation, paternity tests and diversity analysis also among non-human species. The first real legal case involving DNA fingerprints analysis came in March 1985. A family of UK citizens originally from Ghana was accused of child swapping because the youngest one flew back to Great Britain after a trip to their hometown on a damaged passport. Blood typing analysis concluded that the boy was part of the family but couldn’t be determined if he was the son or a nephew with no residence rights. This is where Professor Alec Jeffreys got involved and scientifically proved he was a full member of the family.
Another headline-making investigation, successfully concluded thanks to Professor’s Jeffreys work, was the identification of the remains of the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. After the Second World War he fled from the Allies and escaped to South America, where he lived for the rest of his life without ever being caught. In 1996 the German government, keen to close the case, asked professor Jeffreys together with professor Erika Hagelberg, an expert in extracting DNA from bones, to analyze the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard, a man of German origins buried in the cemetery of a small Brazilian town. The man, who drowned some years earlier in a swimming accident, was proven with a 99.94% certainty to be Mengele.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery, the University of Leicester has organized various events and conferences to stretch once more the importance of Professor’s Jeffreys work. To read more about this, visit http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/jeffreys/
