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Happy Birthday to DNA Fingerprinting

Sep 10, 2009

Thomas Mailund points out that it was 25 years ago today that Alec Jeffreys came up with DNA fingerprinting. The BBC writes about how his discovery was accidental:

His "eureka" moment came on the morning of Monday 10 September 1984 when he pulled an x-ray film out of the developing tank in the laboratory.
He could see patterns in the genetic material which completely discriminated between the three people who had been involved in the analysis: a technician, and a mother and a father.
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