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What did alec jeffreys discover

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Sir Jefferys

It may be difficult to imagine a world without the now-indispensable tool known as genetic fingerprinting, which analyzes the unique patterns found in human and animal DNA to determine an individual’s biological identity. But in fact, this scientific breakthrough, also known as DNA fingerprinting, was discovered fairly recently, in 1984, by British scientist Alec John Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, England. It is used around the world today in forensics, paternity testing, and for wildlife classification.

Jeffreys was born on January 9, 1950 in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. Inspired by his inventor father, he was already curious about science as a young boy, conducting complicated experiments with his chemistry set and impressing his teachers and friends. He excelled at school in both biology and chemistry and entered Oxford University to study biochemistry, where he earned a first-class degree in the subject in 1972, followed by a PhD in 1975.

He moved on from Oxford to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam from 1975 to 1977,

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Alec Jeffreys is a now-retired geneticist who was one of the first to discover inherited variation in human DNA. He developed the milestone techniques of genetic fingerprinting and profiling, using variations in the genetic code to uniquely identify people. These are now widely used in forensic science and paternity testing, and have directly affected the lives of over 50,000,000 people worldwide.

Alec went on to investigate how variation in DNA comes about when DNA is transmitted from parent to child. He developed new methods to characterise rare new mutations in DNA as well as places in chromosomes where DNA is reshuffled by recombination. He identified recombination hotspots where most reshuffling occurs and carried out pioneering work to understand how these hotspots work.

Alec was knighted in 1994 for services to science and technology.

Subject groups

  • Molecules of Life
  • Patterns in Populations

    Population genetics

Awards

  • Bernal Lecture

    On 'Molecular sleuthing: the story of DNA fingerprinting'.

  • Copley Medal

    For his pioneering work on variation and mu

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    Cases

    Alec Jeffreys at work in his University of Leicester laboratory, 1985

    University of Leicester

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    Alec Jeffreys and the Pitchfork murder case: the origins of DNA profiling

    British geneticist Alec Jeffreys began working in 1977 on a technique that could identify individuals through samples of their DNA. In 1984, he and colleagues devised a way to use a newly discovered property of DNA, isolated areas of great variability between individuals called restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP), for forensic identification—the original DNA fingerprint.

    In 1986, police asked Jeffreys for help in finding a man who had raped and killed two girls. DNA tests exonerated the primary suspect. Through a genetic dragnet, police found the perpetrator, Colin Pitchfork, who gave himself away when he asked a friend for a substitute blood sample.

    Within a year, genetic fingerprinting was making the unique molecular structures of victims and suspects visible in criminal investigations around the world. Today, RFLP-based DNA analysis is being supplanted by newe

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