The father of DNA fingerprinting pays tribute to a team effort
Jenny Foxon with Sir Alec Jeffreys
The man who discovered DNA genetic fingerprinting has paid tribute to two of his former University of Leicester colleagues who played a key role in the scientific breakthrough.
Now retired from work – and media interviews – Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys has broken his public silence to reaffirm the importance of his team that was responsible for one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
The discovery, which took place 40 years ago on 10 September 1984, had a global impact in transforming the criminal justice system, solving thousands of crimes and resolving disputes about genetic identity as well as going on to have applications in fields such as medicine, immigration, biodiversity studies, conservation, and agriculture.
The story of DNA is woven into the history of Leicestershire. It happened in a lab at the University of Leicester, Leicestershire Police were the first force in the world to use DNA fingerprinting to solve two Leicestershire murders. More recently, a form of DNA fingerprinting was used by Professor Turi King in the King Richard III case.
While Sir Alec’s name has gone down in scientific history, he’s keen those around him in the lab at the time aren’t forgotten.
Without the quick thinking of Vicky Wilson, Sir Alec might never have had his eureka moment.
Vicky was the departmental technician responsible for keeping Sir Alec’s lab running smoothly, and also contributed to his research programme.
Sir Alec takes up the story: “Vicky and I embarked on a hare-brained side-line project in the early 80s to isolate highly variable bits of human DNA, with both of us performing the lab work.
“At one stage, I tried to rationalise our growing collection of cloned DNA segments by throwing a fair number in the bin. Vicky spotted this and rescued a number of them, including, as it turned out, two clones that we subsequently discovered were superb at producing DNA fingerprints. These clones served as the foundation of all our initial immigration and paternity casework and formed a key tool that enabled us to get DNA fingerprinting going. Well done Vicky!”
Sir Alec’s research assistant at the time, Jenny Foxon, also had a key role in the development of the DNA fingerprinting process.
“Jenny and her parents, Bill and Kay Barron, were the first family to be tested by DNA fingerprinting, simply because we had their DNA stored from an earlier project,” said Sir Alec.
However, he revealed they would be the last people known to the research team to provide DNA samples.
“They were also the very last family of individuals personally known to us to be so tested, given the risk of discovering unexpected relationships!” said Sir Alec.
Jenny explains how things unfolded after Sir Alec had analysed her DNA and compared it to her parents’ DNA.
“Alec had my parents’ DNA because he had found a mutation in one of my minor haemoglobin genes and wondered if it was a ‘new’ or inherited mutation – it came from my mother, so he was fairly confident that my parents were my biological parents,” she said.
Jenny added: “Initially I was both surprised and very interested when Alec showed me the autorad [the result of a DNA analysis] and explained how I had got these bands from my mum, those from my dad and some which were unique to me.
“I don't think I realised the significance until our coffee break when a few of us started wondering how it could be used. I think, at first, we only thought of family relationships, then went into the realms of fantasy about parentage in the animal world – in particular horses, but I never thought that the experiment could be so fine-tuned to pick up DNA patterns from other bodily fluids.”
Professor Turi King, who led the genetic investigation at Leicester to establish the identity of the remains of Richard III beyond doubt, paid tribute to Sir Alec and his team’s work.
She said: “The impact of Alec and his team’s discovery has been felt in numerous fields beyond forensics: from medicine to conservation to my own work in archaeogenetics. I used a version of Alec’s technique to determine if Richard III’s living genealogical male-line relatives were related to him genetically. They weren’t suggesting that someone, somewhere in the genealogical chain, didn’t have the father that’s in the records.”