Before deciding to work in the Pharmaceutical industry, I explored working in Criminal Justice (I am proud of an interview with the FBI and a job offer from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation). I was interested in working in forensic science, specifically in DNA fingerprinting.  The scientist who developed these techniques, Sir Alec Jeffreys, was born on January 9, 1950. 

Jeffreys was born in Oxford, England to a middle class family.  He was always curious about science, something which his father encouraged. He went on to study at Merton College, completed a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford and did post doctoral work at the University of Amsterdam. In 1977, at the completion of the post-doc assignment, he joined the faculty of the University of Leicester, where he still resides. 

As with many scientists, Jeffreys had a “eureka moment” that led to his discovery. In 1984, he was working on ways to trace genes though family lineage and was looking at an X-ray film which showed similarities and differences between different members of a technician’s family. It was this image that helped him realize it may be possible to use DNA in a criminal justice application. Using the right portions of DNA, it is possible to, with a very high degree of certainty (e.g. only one person on the planet) determine the person responsible for the DNA samples obtained from a crime scene. 

Here are some interesting applications of the technique:

• In the 1950s, Anna Anderson claimed that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (there is a great Leonard Nimoy hosted program (In Search Of…) from the late 1970s on this subject). In the 1980s, after her death, samples of her DNA were tested showing this was false and that she was not related to the Romanovs.
• In 1986, Richard Buckland was the first person exonerated using DNA fingerprinting.
• In 1987, in the same case as Buckland, Colin Pitchfork was the first person convicted using DNA fingerprinting.
• In 1992, DNA from a palo verde tree was used to convict Mark Alan Bogan of murder. DNA from seed pods of a tree at the crime scene matched seed pods found in his truck.

Today. the technique developed by Jeffreys have been used to convict and exonerate thousands of people. He is still conducting research into understanding human DNA diversity (his group’s website is here). 

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