It looks like something that's spent too long in the spin cycle. Maybe an old receipt or a smudgy hotel bill.
We peer at the battered exhibit pinned to the wall of Prof Sir Alec Jeffreys's office, a grainy laboratory X-ray that changed his life, our lives and the whole course of genetic science in 30 seconds.
"This is the very first-ever-in-the-entire-world DNA fingerprint", he says, running a nicotine-stained finger across columns made up of boring little oblong blocks, stacked one on top of the other, some thick, some thin.
"That's the DNA of one of my technicians. That's her mum's and that's her dad's. At one fell swoop you can sort out family relationships. I was on my own in the darkroom at 9.05 on September 10, 1984, when that pattern came up and I twigged what we had stumbled upon. Just that single bit of X-ray film threw open a door we didn't even know was there. It opened the whole science of forensic DNA."
Prof Jeffreys had been trying to trace genetic markers through families to understand the inheritance patterns of illness when he made his discovery. In the fuzzy image that had emerged from his developing tank, he saw the sudden, mind-stretching possibility of a method of biological identification that could have huge implications for criminal investigation, for paternity testing, for solving immigration disputes and a whole raft of applications in the natural world.
"My first reaction was that the results were really yucky-looking and complicated. It took about 30 seconds for the penny to drop. I came rushing out of the darkroom. The first person I saw was Vicky Wilson, my technician. 'Hey, we are on to something exciting here,' I told her. We started coming on to all sorts of crazy ideas. I was running round the lab with a needle, pricking myself and spotting blood drops around, because at that point we didn't even know if DNA would survive in a forensic-type specimen.
Psst...
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Great Britons: How the DNA dude changed life, Telegraph, part 1 ( recorded by
jl55378008
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Standard American English
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