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Twenty-five years ago academic Alec Jeffreys stumbled on a remarkable discovery. The scientific breakthrough led to DNA fingerprinting - which has since trapped hundreds of killers, freed the innocent and revolutionised science and criminal justice.
On 10 September 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys wrote three words - "33 autorad off" - in his red desk diary. The phrase marked the completion of an experiment, set up that summer, to study how inherited illnesses pass through families. It failed completely.
Yet the project remains one of the most profoundly influential pieces of research ever carried out in a British laboratory, for it produced the world's first DNA fingerprint, a technology that has revolutionised crime scene investigations, led to the convictions of murderers and rapists, and transformed immigration disputes and paternity cases.
Twenty-five years ago the idea that scientists would one day be able to pinpoint an individual from the tiniest trace of their sweat or blood would have seemed laughable. Today we take it for granted. Along with the CCTV camera and the tapping of emails and phone calls, the DNA fingerprint has become part of a civic apparatus that can follow the movements of individuals with unprecedented accuracy.
Thanks to the research by Jeffreys, thousands of dangerous criminals have been caught and imprisoned and thousands of individuals unfairly denied UK citizenship have been allowed to settle in this country. At the same time, millions of individuals have had their profiles stored in databases in Britain, a serious threat to civil liberties according to some organisations and individuals, a point that is - partially - accepted by Jeffreys himself. More than any other modern scientific discovery, DNA fingerprinting raises crucial issues about balancing the use of technology to help society against an individual's right to privacy.
Such concerns were far from the mind of Alec Jeffreys, then a 34-year-old Leicester University genetics researcher, in the summer of 1984. At the time he was seeking ways to trace genes through family lineages and had hit on a fragment of DNA that was repeated on different chromosomes in the cells of men and women.
This genetic stutter could be unique to an individual, Jeffreys realised, and so he devised an experiment to see if he could count those repeats in different individuals and their relatives, as well as in animals such as seals, mice and monkeys.