Alec Jeffreys
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2007
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys - the scientist who discovered genetic fingerprinting. It is 25 years since his 'Eureka moment' - when, pulling an X-ray photograph of his assistant's genetic code out of the developing tray, he realised he could trace the links between her and her parents and that her own unique genetic profile had been revealed. Over the following years, he was the first person to settle immigration disputes, paternity issues and crimes based on DNA identification - he even found himself confirming the identity of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who had fled Germany after the end of the Second World War.
As a boy he had always been fascinated by science - he'd made himself a miniature dissection kit so he could find out how a bumble-bee worked and later, spurred on by that success, he remembers bringing a dead cat home and dissecting it on the dining room table. He owes, he says, a debt of gratitude to his parents, who benignly tolerated him turning their family home into a science lab.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: The Opening of Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Complete books of Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser Luxury: World's Biggest Church Organ.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is Professor Sir Alec Jeffries, the genetic scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting. |
| 0:35.1 | Yet his breakthrough in a small lab in Leicester 23 years ago happened pretty much by accident. |
| 0:40.8 | He didn't solve the problem he intended but did discover an entirely new method of biological |
| 0:46.0 | identification which has gone on to revolutionize police forensics and settle family disputes. |
| 0:51.5 | The most exciting areas of science he says are the things we don't know, |
| 0:55.8 | we don't know. Can you begin by describing that moment then, September 1984, when you |
| 1:00.9 | had, let's call it your Eureka moment what happened? |
| 1:03.7 | I mean it really was a Eureka moment I'd even tell you when it was. |
| 1:07.4 | It was five past nine on Monday morning the 10th of September 1984 that was a moment that changed my life. |
| 1:14.0 | Let me just describe what we're doing in the laboratory. |
| 1:17.0 | We had this piece of x-ray film detecting these radioactive fragments of DNA. |
| 1:22.0 | We'd left it down exposing to X-ray film over the weekend. |
| 1:25.4 | So I came in on the Monday morning inside the dark room, pulling this piece of film out of the |
| 1:30.3 | developing tank, put the light on and I thought, whoa, what have we got here? |
| 1:34.6 | And when you say that it was a moment of absolute joy and clarity, the Eureka moment, what did you think |
| 1:41.3 | it meant when you saw it? |
| 1:42.3 | Did you know the |
| 1:42.9 | implications almost immediately? Well Penny dropped immediately. It was quite |
| 1:46.5 | obvious that we've stumbled upon this idea of DNA-based biological identification |
| 1:50.4 | purely by chance on that very first x-ray film. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.