Interviewee: Alec Jeffreys DNAi Location: Timeline>1980s

I was always a curious kid and the story really started I guess back when I was about eight years old and my father bought me two fantastic presents. The first was a microscope that got me into biology, and the second was probably the world's most dangerous chemistry set. Now in those days, I mean we were living in Oxford and anybody studying chemistry in Oxford would probably have a, their own chemistry set back in their digs, not the sort of namby-pamby chemistry sets you get nowadays, I mean these were really dangerous things. So my father met up with this undergraduate who'd graduated, wanted to get rid of it, bought the whole lot, weeded out some of the more obviously dangerous things and gave the rest to me. And that got me into chemistry, I mean, I'd learned a huge amount of chemistry before I was ever formally taught it at school. I've got a beard 'cause I've actually got a sulphuric acid scar under here, one of the experiments that didn't quite work out correctly.

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