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"It was a 100 per cent accident. Science tends to be a slow, plodding discipline: two steps forward, one step back. To get a eureka moment like that, when suddenly an entire new field opens up, is really rare. Most scientists will go their whole lives never experiencing it."
Prof Jeffreys has cupboards full of trophies and the list of his international prizes, awards and honours runs to three full sheets of A4. But he is untouched by any sense of his own importance and, despite huge inducements to work abroad, is still to be found in white coat and surgical gloves in the same genetics laboratory at Leicester University where he had his eureka moment.
"I am an irrelevance", he said as he accepted his latest accolade, the Great Briton 2006 award. "I was just the lucky guy who happened to start the whole thing off. This is a fantastic honour, because the public has nominated me, but one I personally don't think I deserve."
Prof Jeffreys claims he would have had to be "as thick as two short planks" not to have spotted the significance of those results — but another laboratory had come up with similar patterns a year previously and binned them because it was not what they wanted. The only credit he can take, he suggests, was for coining the inspired phrase genetic fingerprinting and for seeing the forensic implications.
His two great fears were that the technology might not be robust enough to use in casework, and that, even if it were, no one would take a blind bit of notice.
"Even if they did, I thought it would take years for DNA to move into real investigative casework. I could not have been more wrong. There was this pressure cooker of people out there, all needing DNA, though they didn't realise it, and we had the answer."
The lid blew with the very first case: a Ghanian boy who was enabled to stay in the country after DNA successfully proved that he was related to a family already living in Britain.