English Audio Request

First, cells were broken open and their DNA extracted. Then this DNA was attached to photographic films. Radioactive probes - which could identify the repeated sections of DNA - were added. Everything was then placed in a photographic developing tank and left over the weekend of 8-9 September. The results, Jeffreys hoped, would reveal ways that might help him study inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
But when he entered his laboratory that Monday morning and removed the film from its tank, he found an odd array of blobs and lines. "My first reaction was 'God, what a mess.' Then I stared a bit longer - and the penny dropped." That piece of film showed a sequence of bars, each representing different numbers of DNA repeats in the various individuals and animals in the experiment.
Crucially, every individual in the sample had a different bar code and could be identified with precision. Jeffreys could even establish kinships: the bands of the DNA supplied by one of his technicians were a composite of her mother's and father's, for example. Even the animal samples showed that individuals could be identified this way. As Jeffreys put it: "It was an absolute Eureka moment. It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction. The last thing that had been on my mind was anything to do with identification or paternity suits. However, I would have been a complete idiot not to spot the applications."
He called his staff together and they began a brain-storming session to find uses for the technology they had stumbled on. Paternity cases were an obvious example, as was the identification of criminals. "But then we thought, how about crime scene samples. Could we get DNA from blood left behind after murders or robberies?"
Today this seems a silly question, attuned as we are to the marvels displayed in CSI Miami and the rest. But in 1984 no one knew how stable DNA was. For all Jeffreys knew, it could break apart rapidly after a cell had died, making crime scene sampling impossible.
"So I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks round the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains and found that their DNA was intact." Thus the genetics laboratory of Jeffreys was not only the birthplace of DNA fingerprinting; it became the first setting for a DNA crime scene analysis.