Alec Jeffreys

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Sir Alec John Jeffreys, (born 9 January 1950), is a British geneticist who pioneered methods for genetic fingerprinting and DNA profiling that are now used inforensic science to support police detective work and resolve immigration issues.

He is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, and he became an honorary freeman of Leicester on November 26, 1992.

In 1994, he was honoured for his contributions to genetics.

Education and early life

Jeffreys was born in Oxford, where he lived for the first six years of his life until 1956, when the family moved to Luton, Bedfordshire. He owes his curiosity and ingenuity to his father, as well as his paternal grandfather, who held a number of patents. His father gave him a chemistry set when he was eight years old, which he improved over the next two years with additional chemicals, as well as a tiny bottle of sulphuric acid. He likes making small explosions, but a mistaken drop of the sulphuric acid caused a burn on his chin, leaving a permanent scar on his chin (now under his beard). His father also bought him a Victorian-era brass microscope, which he used to analyze biological specimens. He made a small dissecting kit (which included a flattened pin) that he used to dissect a bumblebee at about 12, but when he got to dissecting a larger specimen, he got into trouble with his parents. When doing his paper round and taking it home in his bag, he found a deceased cat on the road one Sunday morning and brought it home. He claims he started to dissect it on the dining room table before Sunday lunch, resulting in a foul odor throughout the house after it ruptured its intestines.

Jeffreys was a student at Luton Grammar School and later Luton Sixth Form College. He received a scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, on a four-year degree, where he graduated in 1971 with first-class honours in biochemistry. As a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford's Genetics Laboratory, Jeffreys completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree on the mitochondria of cultured mammalian cells.

Personal life

Jeffreys first met his future wife, Sue Miles, in a youth club in Luton, Bedfordshire, before he joined a university student, and they married on August 28, 1971. Jeffreys has one brother and one sister; he and his wife have two children, born in 1979 and 1983.

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Career and research

He then went to the University of Amsterdam, where he worked on mammalian genes as a research fellow, and then to Leicester in 1977, where he discovered a method of displaying variations between individuals's DNA, inventing, and conducting genetic fingerprinting.

Jeffreys says he had a "eureka moment" in Leicester after investigating the X-ray film image of a DNA experiment on September 10, 1984, which unexpectedly revealed both similarities and differences in the DNA of various individuals of his technician's relatives. He soon understood the potential of DNA fingerprinting, which uses genetic information to identify individuals within about half an hour. The procedure has evolved into an integral component of forensic science to support police detective work, and it has also been helpful in settling paternity and immigration issues. For example, the technique can be applied to non-human animals, as well as in wildlife population genetics studies. His laboratory was the only center in the world that did DNA fingerprinting, and was subsequently extremely crowded, receiving inquiries from around the world.

Jeffreys' DNA technology was first used in 1985 when he was asked to assist in a contested immigration case to reveal the identity of a British boy whose family was originally from Ghana. The case was closed when the DNA findings revealed that the boy was closely related to other family members of the household, and Jeffreys saw the relief in the mother's face as she learned the results. Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, two teenagers who had been assaulted and murdered in Narborough, Leicestershire, in 1983 and 1986, respectively, were identified by DNA fingerprinting, which was first used in a police forensic investigation. After samples obtained from Colin Pitchfork match semen samples obtained from the two deceased children, they were found and convicted of their murders. This turned out to be a particularly vital identification; British authorities claim that without it, an innocent man would have been convicted eventually. Not only did Jeffreys' job establish who the true murderer was, but it also cleared Richard Buckland, who was initially a prime suspect, who may not have spent his life in jail otherwise. In Joseph Wambaugh's 1989 best-selling book The True Story of the Narborough Murders and their subsequent investigation, in which Jeffreys himself appears in Episode 4 of the first season of the 1996 American television series Medical Detectives, in which Jeffreys himself appears. In 2015, Code of a Killer, a new television mini-series based on these events was released. Jeffreys' methods were used in 1992 to establish the identity of Josef Mengele's exhumed skull bone by testing DNA from his mother and son in a similar way to paternity testing.

DNA profiling, based on typing individual very variable minisatellites in the human genome, was also developed by Alec Jeffreys and his staff in 1985, with the term (DNA fingerprinting) being retained for the first test that sees multiple minisatellites simultaneously. DNA profiling made the system more robust, more reproducible, and amenable to computer databases by focusing on just a few of these highly variable minisatellites. It soon became the industry's most common forensic DNA system used in criminal case research and paternity testing around the world.

The introduction of DNA amplification by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which allowed automation, greatly improved accuracy, and a move to alternative marker systems, opened up new avenues in forensic DNA analysis, enabling automation, greatly enhanced sensitivity, and a switch to alternative marker methods. Variable microsatellites, also known as short tandem repeats (STRs), are the most commonly used markers in the Mengele case, which Jeffreys first exploited in 1990. STR profiling was further developed by a team of scientists led by Peter Gill at the Forensic Science Service in the 1990s, which enabled the establishment of the UK National DNA Database (NDNAD) in 1995. Hundreds of samples can be processed each day using highly automated and sophisticated techniques. With the new NDNAD's newest technology, sixteen microsatellites, as well as a marker for sex determination, are used, giving a discrimination power of one in more than a billion. Anyone arrested in England, Wales, or Northern Ireland is arrested on British law and stored on the website whether or not they are guilty (different rules apply in Scotland). The national database held the DNA of nearly 5.6 million people in 2020. Jeffreys has opposed the current use of DNA profiling, where the government has access to the database, and has instead suggested a database of all people's DNA, which will be managed by an independent third party.

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