Interviewee: Alec Jeffreys. Alec Jeffreys talks about other scientists' reactions to his method. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human identification > Profiling > The first DNA fingerprints > First reactions )

It was some weeks later I gave a first talk to the department here, very informal lunchtime talk, on what we'd come up with. So I went through the biology in these bits of DNA and the shared sequence and how you could potentially pick up lots of these mini satellites at the same time and how the patterns are individual-specific. That was all fine, then I said, and we might be able to use this for example to catch rapists. And I remember these howls of derision that half of my colleagues clearly thought Jeffreys has completely lost the plot here. And that just made me even more determined that you know, this is going to work. So anyway that first day was pure magic, I mean it was a day, looking back that was, it wasn't a day, it was five minutes that literally changed my life.

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