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After two years, the technology was moved to ICI who set up a subsidiary — the birth of commercial DNA testing.
"The first two or three paternity cases are wildly exciting", he says, "but doing your tenth starts to get a bit dull. I am an experimental geneticist and I wanted to be back at the lab bench.
"When we started, my instinctive conservatism persuaded me that if DNA ever moved into the forensic arena, it would be used sparingly, as a technology of last resort. Now we have four million people on the national criminal database and the way this has impacted on criminal investigation is unbelieveable. Seventy per cent of all forensic tests done in Britain are DNA tests. If you get a crime scene DNA sample and put it on the database, the odds are that you will find your suspect straightaway. It is the most powerful criminal investigation tool there is. If you had told me all that 20 years ago, I would not have believed it."
In America, 180 long-term prisoners have been released through the evidence of DNA fingerprinting. One of them, who had spent two years on Death Row, came to Leicester to thank Jeffreys personally. "It was heartwarming stuff."
Genetic fingerprinting has not made him a fortune. He lives modestly in Leicester with his wife Sue, whom he met when they were teenagers, and they have a cottage overlooking a surfing beach at Tintagel, Cornwall. Here, he swims, surfs, reads novels and delights in being out of range of a mobile phone signal.
Once, when he was sitting outside the cottage, a lad in a wet suit came out of the sea and greeted him with: "Hey, man, you're the DNA dude" — and the name has stuck. The cottage is the only material indulgence DNA has afforded him. When he discovered DNA fingerprinting, his research was being funded by the Lister Institute, a medical charity which owns the patent. "The bulk of royalties went straight back into biomedical research — a bit like cloning myself," he says. "I've never done this for money. We lead a frugal life. We don't need much."