Alec Jeffreys
| Sir Alec Jeffreys CH FRS |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
|||
| Born | Alec John Jeffreys 9 January 1950 Oxford, Oxfordshire, England |
||
| Nationality | British | ||
| Fields | Genetics | ||
| Institutions | |||
| Alma mater | University of Oxford (BA, PhD) | ||
| Thesis | Studies on the mitochondria of cultured mammalian cells (1975) | ||
| Doctoral students |
|
||
| Known for | Inventor of genetic fingerprinting | ||
| Notable awards |
|
||
| Spouse | Susan Miles (m. 1971) | ||
|
|||
Sir Alec John Jeffreys, CH FRS (born 9 January 1950 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) is a British geneticist, who developed techniques for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling which are now used worldwide in forensic science to assist police detective work and to resolve paternity and immigration disputes. He is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, and he became an honorary freeman of the City of Leicester on 26 November 1992. In 1994, he was knighted for services to genetics.
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. He attributes his curiosity and inventiveness to having been gained from his father, as well as his paternal grandfather, who held a number of patents. When he was eight, his father gave him a chemistry set, which he enhanced over the next few years with extra chemicals, even including a small bottle of sulphuric acid. He 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 (now under his beard). His father also bought him a Victorian-era brass microscope, which he used to examine biological specimens. At about 12, he made a small dissecting kit (including a scalpel, crafted from a flattened pin) which he used to dissect a bumblebee, but he got into trouble with his parents when he progressed to dissecting a larger specimen. One Sunday morning he found a dead cat on the road while doing his paper round and took it home in his bag. He 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.
...
Wikipedia