English Audio Request

"Our first application was to save this young boy and it captured the public's sympathy and imagination. It was science helping an individual challenge authority. Of all the cases, this is the one that means most to me."
From that moment, Prof Jeffreys entered the realm of celebrity science. The university's switchboard was jammed with calls from people asking him to do tests. One Sunday morning, as he was pruning roses in his front garden, a car drew up and out stepped a lawyer and an immigrant family, begging him to take blood samples. "They had driven all the way from London, having heard about DNA fingerprinting. But I am not a licensed phlebotomist. I was not allowed to do it."
From 1985 to 1987 Jeffreys and his small team at Leicester were living in a pressure cooker themselves, immersed in many hundreds of cases, including the positive identification of the body of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and that of the murdered Tsar Nicholas and his family — in the course of which the Duke of Edinburgh gave a blood sample.
The first forensic application of DNA profiling again caught the public mood after two girls were raped and murdered in the Enderby area of Leicestershire. A man had confessed to one murder but not the other and the police thought genetic profiling might prove him guilty of both. When against all expectations, he was found innocent of both, the hunt was on to find a genetic profile from the male population of the area that matched samples taken from the two victims. Colin Pitchfork was eventually convicted — after being heard boasting that he had persuaded a friend to give a sample on his behalf. Jeffreys was relieved — not just because a killer had been trapped, but because if the operation had failed, the public's perception of forensic DNA as an effective tool would have been shattered.