YouSaid · the spoken record

Alec Jeffreys

lines on the record: 51
first: 2007-12-09
most recent: 2007-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This comes back to Bach. I would like the world's biggest church organ if the island's big enough to accommodate. I promise not to attempt to use it to signal passing shipping. It could be done, but I've one great regret of my life was never sticking with my piano lessons and really learning the keyboard properly. And one great ambition of mine is to be able to get on a really, really big church organ. And what I'd like to do would be to really work on my bark.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My flashman, the flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser Flashman was the school bully in Tom Brown's school days, and what Fraser has done is to just chronicle his subsequent career as a scoundrel, a lecturer and a bully who managed to get himself involved in virtually every major Victorian era military engagement. Extraordinary campaigns brought to life and with a raciness I love. So possibly the whole lot.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My final choice is well, it's got to be a memory of Leicester. Leicester has been fantastically good to me. It was an accidental choice of where I was going to spend the majority of my career, but it's worked out remarkably well. It's a great city, the university has been very stimulating environment for me, and they've been so kind to me. For example, along with a handful of other people, including the Attenboroughs and Gary Linaker, I'm a freeman of the city of Leicester, which is a wonderful accolade. So what better to finish off than Leicester's only megastar, a gentleman that I've met recently in person, wonderful person, and that of course has to be Engelbert Humperdink and his first smash hit from exactly forty years ago, please release me.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will probably get on a counter, I'm a great botcher, as my family would certainly tell you, so I'll be able to botch things up, certainly botching shelters, and my attempt to botch a raft, and I do know a little bit about astronomy, so I better sort of do some triangulation to try and figure out where I was on the planet and how to get out of there. I would probably go completely mad after a certain time. I think anybody will in such an item. But there is a dangerous self-sufficiency within me. I'll probably last longer than most.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and the bangs and stinks as well, they're still there. The fact that you can use your hands to tease secrets out of nature is extraordinary.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the in terms of public significance is behind me, because I will never come up with anything as impactful, urzin fingerprinting again. But in terms of intellectual curiosity and doing real tough science, then I'm still motoring fine, thank you very much.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I am Mr DNA fingerprint. I've been described as the father of the field, the godfather of the field, the grandfather field, whatever. I mean, I don't own the field in any way sense or form. I was just a very, very lucky person. I happened to be there with the right idea of the right time and prepared to take the risk of actually showing how this could be used in case were. If I hadn't done it two or three years time, it would have happened anyway. I will never ever come up with another DNA fingerprint.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her other daughter, that's Lizzie her rather great contributions to my life enrichments of my life is introducing me to Indie Rock, modern rock music, which I think is going through the most wonderful renaissance at the moment. My favourite band of the Killers, and I like this one because it sort of summarises in a way my life. It's all these things that I've done.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's always true. It's always true that the science is racing ahead like crazy and the law is sort of flounding around. It's got to catch up.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's a very delicate bounce here between the notion of genetic privacy that my DNA is mine. It is not the property of the state. I've got no objections whatsoever to the national DNA database as a database of convicted criminals. Its impact on the fight against crime has been colossal. If we're going to extend that out to the entire population, not the police. It's only legislation that will draw clear boundaries to what the police may and may not do. So if you went down the road of putting everybody on a database, not the police database, I would see that as a quite separate database held by some independent agency, possibly a database accumulated on a voluntary basis, and then how you interface the police database with this far more extensive database, that's a matter of debate.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, what we now have, and this is really the only country in the world where this is true, we have England and Wales with a very large DNA database. With that database, four and a half million people, hundreds and thousands of those are entirely innocent. They've never committed any crime whatsoever. It is very difficult for you to get your DNA profile off that database, even if you're innocent, and it will stay there until you're a hundred years old. Now, the argument is, which I do not agree with at all, that that is a proportionate response to the threat of crime. Now, if that's true, then the police will be entirely entitled to go out on the streets and drag people in at random. Why even bother arresting them? And we would never permit that.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're quite right. There is tension there. I've always been a bit of a loner in science. I mean, you can't just do science all by yourself. I mean, you have to build up a research team built up a wonderful and very, very dedicated team of people at Leicester. But I'm still a bench scientist. So one of the things I love doing about science, this goes right back to when I was a kid, is to get your hands dirty doing something, to discover that you can find out things about the universe by fiddling with it, getting your hands on. And that sort of philosophy has never ever left me. I still love getting to the laboratory bench. I still do my own experiments, even in my advanced years. I absolutely love it. So yes, there was a tension there, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, this is music, so on this desert island, I can remember my dear wife Sue. One of her favourite singers is Leonard Cohen, and I've taken the liberty of choosing one of his sort of saddest, probably most depressing numbers. So when I'm on the island feeling very, very low, I can play this and think, well, I'm not that low, but it is a lovely number. It's actually very poignant as well. So it's Leonard Cohen and famous blue raincoat.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and went to South America, and a man that could have been Mengler, drowned in a swimming accident at sea in nineteen seventy nine was Judy Buried and then following a tip off the remains at zoomed in nineteen eighty five, and the question was it Mengler or someone else? So we managed to extract tiny, tiny amounts of DNA from these bones that might have been those of Mengola. So what we then had to do is to get hold of DNA from relatives of Mangala, specifically his widow and his son, both of whom were still available in Germany. And then you've got yourself paternity case. So you've got the mother, the child, so you can identify paternal characters in the child and ask, are they present in the bone? And that's exactly what we did. And we showed much better than 99.9% certainty that this was Mangala. Case closed. Forty year major investigation brought to a halt.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed. We will contact it in I think it was late nineteen eighty nine by the Frankfurt prosecutor who was looking into the identification of remains that may or may not have been those of doctor Joseph Mengler. Now this is the Auschwitz concentration camp, the person who did the selection on the people coming into Auschwitz. So this has got to be the most appalling war criminal ever. Now he fled Germany and evaded the Alps.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apparently, he confessed on the spot when he was arrested. Really, from that case, and that was the first criminal investigation to use DNA, within about a year, year and a half, it spread to all the major countries in the world, just like wildfire.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happened. Yes, in fact, the killer realized that with his DNA net closing in on him, that he had to come up with some clever plan. So his plan was to get a friend to stand in as a proxy for him. And he did indeed receive a letter from police clearing him from the investigation. But what then happened was pure luck that there was a woman overheard a conversation in a pub from someone saying that always stood in for someone else during this blood taking, and she fretted about that, went to the police some time later, and that led into a chapel Colin Pitchfork.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were doubting yourself and not doubting the policeman. Yeah, yeah. Science works by being sceptical. So I had a result which was either way around seemed impossible. So my first incident was to doubt the technology.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was indeed, yes, I mean this was a terrible case involving two young school girls both raped to murder, one in nineteen eighty three, one in nineteen eighty six, and a young man who was arrested shortly after the second murder. And he confessed to that second murder the pattern of the two murders so similar that the police were pretty sure the same person was responsible for both. But we went through the analysis and well the result that came back most alarming that yes the assailant DNA recovered from both of the victims was almost certainly from the same man showed the same DNA profile and that profile absolutely did not match up with the person who just confessed to one of those two murders I mean they knew they got the right guy okay so at that point I thought oh dear this forensic application just doesn't work there is there's something fundamentally flawed about the science so we did more testing”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're now into forensics and policemen and, well, DNA, I think, has brought a smile to the face of a lot of policemen. So with a million apologies, I may get leeched by... coppers up and down the lamp, so apologies to my very good friends in the police and the forensic community. I've got no choice but to choose something that has made me laugh ever since I was four or five years old and it still does. So sorry, it's Charles Penrose and the laughing policeman.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, it was pretty exhausting, I think from 1985 to 1987 when we'd at that point the technology went commercial, a company was set up and people would pay and have access to all this technology. Those two years I would not have missed for the world, but I would never ever want to live through that again. It was absolutely exhaust. It was a roller coaster.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By working about 48 hours a day, basically, for two years, we were the only laboratory on the face of the planet that could actually do this testing. So everything was coming through to me. And not just the immigration side. A few months after we'd done that case, we'd taken on the first paternity dispute. So suddenly we've got in the hot tile world of, you know, I'm not the father sort of people descending upon us.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, this was cat out of the bag big time. But what I hadn't realised are thousands and thousands of families trapped in exactly these disputes. So on one occasion we had the entire university switchboard jammed with people trying to get through to me”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed, I was at the tribunal and I was there when the mother was told that her two year battle to save her son was over, and the if I had to pick one magic moment in the story of DNA, that was the moment. It was just that look of that woman's eyes pure magic.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, like yesterday, this was the very first case ever tackled by DNA anywhere on this planet. Okay, the story very simply is a UK family originally from Ghana, whereas a young lad who had left the family gone back to Ghana, come back ten years later on its barred British passport and I think it was a suspect Ghanaian passport and not unreasonably I think the home office said I'm not too sure this lad's real so anyway they've been involved in sort of standard tests for about two years with blood grouping and the boy was allowed temporarily to stay in the UK was still threatened with deportation and out of desperation the law wrote to me and he said okay do you think you help in this case so we did the DNA test blood samples were sent up tested out it was absolutely glaring obvious this boy was a full member of the family”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a slightly odd choice, but this is really a big thank you to our wonderful elder daughter, Sarah, who introduced me to the world of dance and a beetra and so on. I have any great, and I have very few regrets in life, but one great regret is I'm too old to have really experienced as a young person the Abitha club scene. I didn't like this music when I first heard it, but I've become addicted. So if I've got a really tough PhD thesis to read,”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed. I thought these are the real big questions. How information stored in human living systems, how it's passed off from generation to generation. And that's where I went for the rest of my life.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh absolutely no question at all and I think the I mean I do look back at the maelstrom that happened immediately after 1984 I mean the pressures on my time were gigantic and at that time we had two very young daughters and I look back at that and there's a terrible guilt there that I missed out on that early part not completely but partly on the early part of that life”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other, the local youth club in Luton, in the center of Luton. And I remember it very clearly. There were rumors that there were two girls, one of whom was possibly interested in me. And I knew which one I was hoping would be the one it was actually Sue.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of everybody, yes, I said, look, it's going to take a while. Any chance you could rush it through. And they did it. So I managed to get to the hospital and it was about the last thing my mother ever saw. She did so. Surrounded by nurses, seeing her scruffy little addict being turned magically into Sir Alex, still scruffy, but he's got a knighthood.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell us what happened. But she saw all the various sort of plaudits that have come my way. I have way more than my fair share of recognition in science. But of course, one of the big ones was the knighthood back in 1994. I said her mother was, she was very seriously intermediate ill at the time. But we knew she had very, very little time to go. So I phoned up back in the palace and said, look, you were making a video of the investor ceremony.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my heroine, this is Tina Turner, who is maybe getting on in years, but she can belt those numbers out like nobody's business, and I think a tremendously brave woman and this particular number, I think, is a great aspirational number, simply the best.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could take with me so that I could entertain the young gentleman to tea. Oh, bless her. We shouldn't laugh, really, but that bone china lasted about a week, I think, before it got completely trashed.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed, but we had no history of going to university within the family. When I got that letter through saying, yes, you have been not only admitted to Merton College in Oxford, but you've been awarded a postmastership, which is a scholarship. That was quite remarkable, and my parents enormously proud. My mother was absolutely over the moon about this. I mean, what a wonderful thing for her son to have done. But she's very concerned that her son should be a young gentleman, which I most certainly was Moss. I had no idea what Osford was going to be like. My mother certainly and father certainly really didn't have a clear conception. So I remember my mum buying me this beautiful set of bone china.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In certain areas it was on polished, it was unbalanced, it wasn't rounded in the way that you get from university, but some of the, I mean, there's certain areas. I mean, for example, organic chemistry where I could have held my own against first-year undergraduate.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, very much so I have my scooter with all the mirrors on it. I had a wonderful parker. The lady next door was a French milliner who supplied me with mink fur, so my park was trimmed with genuine mink. And yes, I looked absolutely ghastly.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yes, I didn't want to be I was in many ways I was entirely normal I was in sequence a mod, a hippie, and a rocker so that was all sort of pretty conventional stuff, but I had this sort of weird scientific bent running in the background.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the microscope. Yeah, well, of course, if you're a biologist, you like to dissect things. So I remember, I think I was about age 12, I made my own dissection sets, tiny, tiny little set for dissecting a bumblebee, which I then did, and then I decided I really needed to sort of move up in terms of size. Now, I was a newspaper boy at the time, and it was one Sunday morning. I finished my newspaper round, and I started this dead cat in the road. And I thought, ah, cat, I've never done a cat before. Now, this is a seriously dead cat. Legs were stiff. So imagine this newspaper boy, the bag in front with four legs sticking out the top. Tom and I was just going to do something biological, went into the dining room. This is a Sunday morning, it was before Sunday lunch, went into the dining room, spread the cat out on the dining room table, decided to dissect it. And the smell was unbelievable. Unfortunately, I ruptured the inners as I went into the thing. And we had to evacuate the home. The smell was just appalling.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's about the same time it might well have been, yes. This is where I sort of got into biology. Age eight was the transforming year for me. So I had my chemistry set. My father also was around about the same time how he saved the money up, I don't know. I'm eternally grateful to him. He bought my first microscope, this beautiful Victorian brass microscope. I still have it. And that just opened up the world of bology for me.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is, I mean, this actually goes back to that era of I was about 14, I guess, at the time. In those days, I guess the obvious thing to be going for would be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But what really turned me on was the beach boys. And there's something wonderful about riches of the sounds. So I've chosen the beach boys and I get around because also at that time I was trying to attract my first girlfriend and it was a miserable failure. So this is a very poignant song for me.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed. Sulic acid hit me on the side of the face on my chin. If I took my beard off, there would be a little red patch there. That's my badge of honour.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely yes. If you want to turn someone onto chemistry, show them how to make bangs. Bangs and stinks, and even now, and I'm not going to do it in this studio, but give me the ingredients that I could do some jolly good explosive tricks for you. We lived in a house prone to developing holes. So we had holes appearing mysteriously in carpets, in curtains, in our back lawn on my face.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the chemist wrapped in a brown paper bag sitting on a bus with a bit of a leak so sort of steam and fumes coming off the paper bag. You can do it now.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was oh eight, nine, ten, and I was certainly bringing back for example bottle of fuming sulfuric acid extremely dangerous from”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very much so, yes. But it was really my father's fault. He started me off. He gave me at the age of eight a chemistry set. Now, if you go to a toy shop now and get a chemistry set, it's a very anodyne thing. I mean, it's going to do no harm whatsoever. This was the real McCoy chemistry set. And I got in very well with the local pharmacists, so he would top it up with absolutely lethal chemicals. I mean, this pharmacist would have gone to jail had he provided me today with the stuff.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my grandfather, yes. Yes, so this was a system whereby you could go into a studio, very quickly be photographed in very cunning way, which then enabled you to turn those photographic images into three dimensional plaster bust of yourself. Very, very convincing. Yes, I think even Neville Chamberlain went on to the studio and was done. This is back in the 30s. So there's a sort of an invented streak in the family. Now, you're going to ask natural nurture. Do I have the invention gene or is it upbringing?”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A remarkable family, just a perfectly ordinary middle class suburban family, but with a father who had this sort of amazing inventive bent, and his father in turn had the same sort of bent. In fact, he had all sorts of patents to his names, and there's one wonderful invention he came up with, it was called the Jeffreys three-dimensional photosculpture process.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is a great hero of mine, that's JS Bach, and his Takata and Fugue in D minor. Someone once said that if you could hear God he would sound like this I'm not a religious person, but I can understand that.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I didn't realise was just how big a genie it was. If you went back to that very first DNA fingerprint, my feeling at the time was it was going to take years before anybody took any notice and that it would be a technology of last resort and I couldn't have been more wrong”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Penny dropped immediately. It was quite obvious that we stumbled upon this idea of DNA based biological identification purely by chance on that very first x ray film. First of all, I sat down by myself just sort of thinking it through, then called over the technician that was very much involved in the work that led up to this first DNA fingerprint. I had my technician and her mother and father, and we could see how the patterns all sort of linked up in the sort of family relationships. And then we started brainstorming. I thought, okay, biological identification, what can we do there? We could see forensics. We could see criminal identification. So basically within about half an hour, we'd drawn up a shopping list of things that we thought might be possible using this technology.”
2007-12-09 · Desert Island Discs · Alec Jeffreys · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source