13 Facts About Alec Jeffreys

Alec Jeffreys was born into a middle-class family in Oxford, where he spent the first six years of his life until 1956 when the family moved to Luton, Bedfordshire.

Alec Jeffreys says he inherited his curiosity and inventiveness from his father and paternal grandfather, who held a number of patents.

Alec Jeffreys says he liked making small explosions, but an accidental splash of the sulphuric acid caused a burn, which left a permanent scar on his chin.

Alec Jeffreys's father bought him a Victorian-era brass microscope, which he used to examine biological specimens.

Alec Jeffreys relates that he started to dissect it on the dining room table before Sunday lunch, causing a foul smell throughout the house after he ruptured its intestines.

Alec Jeffreys won a scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford on a four-year course, where he graduated in 1971 with first-class honours in biochemistry.

Alec Jeffreys completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree on the mitochondria of cultured mammalian cells, as a postgraduate student at the Genetics Laboratory at the University of Oxford.

Alec Jeffreys says he had a "eureka moment" in his lab in Leicester after looking at the X-ray film image of a DNA experiment on 10 September 1984, which unexpectedly showed both similarities and differences between the DNA of different members of his technician's family.

In 1992, Alec Jeffreys's methods were used to confirm the identity for German prosecutors of the body of Josef Mengele, who had died in 1979, by comparing DNA obtained from a femur bone of his exhumed skeleton, with DNA from his mother and son, in a similar way to paternity testing.

The most commonly used markers are now variable microsatellites, known as short tandem repeats, which Alec Jeffreys first exploited in 1990 in the Mengele case.

Alec Jeffreys has opposed the current use of DNA profiling, where the government has access to that database, and has instead proposed a database of all people's DNA, access to which would be controlled by an independent third party.

Alec Jeffreys met his future wife, Sue Miles, in a youth club in the centre of Luton, Bedfordshire, before he became a university student, and they married on 28 August 1971.

Alec Jeffreys has one brother and one sister; he and his wife have two daughters, born in 1979 and 1983.