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Turi King

lines on the record: 43
first: 2026-06-06
most recent: 2026-06-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We need kind of legal representation. We need bioethicists involved and the general public to how do we want to move forward in the most humane way with the technologies that we have now.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I hope that's something that really comes out of the book, that exactly what you're saying. And it's like a... I just think it's so important for people to understand more about genetics because we are now able to do so much in terms of genetic engineering. So I think epigenetics is incredibly interesting, but also genetic engineering and the fact that we now have CRISPR. I mean, it's an incredible technology. So Jennifer Downer talks about we can change evolution. That's pretty extraordinary. We need to be having a discussion as a society about how we want to use this technology. I mean, this joke about, you know, so he, Jang Kui, he is genetically engineering embryos, which then go on to be babies. Don't throw the babies out with a bathwater. This is a kind of a really amazing. We shouldn't be saying, no, we can never do anything like this, but there has to be guidelines and guardrails. And how do we want to use this? And where are our boundaries as a society? And that involves, you know, everyone talking about this sort of thing.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that DNA's not deterministic. I think that's such an important thing. So when somebody says it's in my DNA, of course as a geneticist, I'm like, It's definitely not. I mean, unless it's something really serious.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DNA can and cannot tell you. And I'm hoping that's kind of what comes out of the book that people understand that it's not, it's very complex. It's a very, very complex thing. And it's an area that we have to be so careful about because it's very hard to have positive eugenics. Is negative eugenics on the other side of that? And they're interlinked with one another. And to have positive means that you're suggesting that something is undesirable. And I think that”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's right. And it's a real warning, I think, because the irony I found in this whole thing is that, you know, Hitler has to sign this thing to marry Ava Brown. And then I am free of hereditary disease, and yet he did have hereditary disease. He's not a genetic, he wasn't a geneticist. Us looking at the DNA would go, yeah, but that only tells us a little bit about this. But he probably would have looked at it and thought, oh my goodness, he probably would have sent himself to the gas chambers. And I think that that's a really interesting kind of thought because it's this lack of understanding of DNA. If you don't have that deep understanding about what”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of them. And I think that's another really important thing. And obviously Hitler did not act on his own. He had a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people who all helped him in his thing. So it's very much a case of we have to be really, really careful with what we can say from somebody's DNA. And that was something that I've really been at pains to try and get across with that.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Place them where do they fit on that bell curve? And you, it's not diagnostic. It's a genetic predisposition. And Hitler was very unusual because he came in the top 1% for schizophrenia, bipolar, and autism. And there's a number of kind of massive caveats in here. This is a genetic predisposition. The team actually did a calculation as to what would be the probability of Hitler being diagnosed with one of these things in his lifetime. And that comes up at 5%, so 95% chance that he wouldn't have been diagnosed with one of these conditions. This is really not to what we were very concerned about is like, oh my goodness, so he had these particular conditions. No, we don't know that. Second of all, oh, well, that explains it. And obviously people with these conditions do not go on to commit the sorts of crimes that he did. In fact, they're more likely to be on the...”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genetic variant that is known to be really sort of known to be involved in a genetic predisposition towards underdevelopment of genitalia. And that one's quite well understood. And that's a quite straightforward one to do. But we had a team, the ISAC team in Denmark looking at genetic predisposition towards neurodevelopmental orders and psychiatric disorders. And they were looking at something, so this is a polygenic score as what they're doing. So this is where scientists will take a lot of people with a particular condition and they will look at the genetic variants that they seem to have more frequently versus people who don't have the condition and they don't have these genetics or they do, but it's not as much of a frequency. And so what you get is just like this, it's a bell curve where you go, okay, these people with this condition seem to have a lot of these genetic variants. These people at this end don't. And you can take an individual.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you have genes that are conditions that are monogenic. A single gene is involved, but most conditions are polygenic. So this will be hundreds of genetic variants across your genome that each individually both predispose you or protect you against a particular condition. And on top of that, you have this huge layer of the environment. And that can be everything from what you are eating to are you getting exercise, are you smoking? Have you got trauma that happens too in your lifetime? All of these things will have an impact on your genetic predisposition, but whether or not you'll actually go on to develop this. And that's something that really came up in the Hitler project, which was a really something that we have to be really incredibly careful when we talk about because he was interested in that he had a”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“chance that both mom and dad will pass down this petitive variance, which means that And those are quite simple disorders, and then you get into ones where actually it's far more complex, and I go on it into, so I talk about a little bit about Angelina Jolie, who I think was very brave, and did an op-ed piece in the New York Times about how she knew that there was breast and ovarian cancer in her family. And she went and got tested genetically. And because we know a lot about how BRCA1, the gene works and people's risk factors, that they can give her a probability of going on to develop breast cancer or ovarian cancer. And she very publicly talked about how that was a really difficult decision and went through preventative mastectomy in order to make that less likely that she will develop it. But then there's, and with BRCA1, we already know there's interactions with environment. And this is where so many conditions come.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of whether or not you're going to develop a particular condition because you have a particular genetic variant and hunting disease, that means there's the same kind of, we talk about the same kind of conditions a lot of the time because they have their people know about them and they're very cystic fibrosis, hunting disease, ones where they have a very simple pattern of a genetic inheritance, where if you have a particular variant, you will go on to develop this particular condition. Huntington's is a very common one that we chat about. Cystic fibrosis is another one where if you've got genetic variant each from one parent, so you can have a parent who has the genetic variant, but because you've got two chromosomes, you've got the genetic variant on one, you know, the completely kind of normal genetic variant on the other, if that's why you want to call it, there will be a carrier, but they won't have the condition. But if they happen to have a child with someone who's also a carrier, there's a twin.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I am the first person to tell you to, with the genetic testing that's done through some of the genetic testing companies like 23Me and Ancestry and things like this, be careful with those. It's the sort of thing where they don't, they're not the experts in this is a particular condition, and so therefore we are looking at all of the genetic variants that are involved in that particular condition. They use some of the genetic variants. So, for example, I understood that one of the testing companies will tell you whether or not you are particularly sensitive to caffeine based on one genetic variant, but they don't look at another genetic variant which interacts with the first genetic variant to change how sensitive you are to caffeine, for example. And this is where I hope I kind of really explain is that genetics is very, very complicated. There are some conditions where it is very straightforward.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, they do. Yeah. So, I mean, I can be finding that I'm getting a DNA match for somebody with an individual who is, for example, so in this country, we have people who are from northern India and Pakistan. So when you have the new borders are put in and you get these migrations of people who come over here, more and more of these are people who are the result of these kind of political diasporas are taking DNA tests because they want to know a little bit more about their ancestry. So yes, you definitely, definitely find traces of that in these databases. And I always have to say, look, it's not, if you take a DNA test, it's not going to give you a country because DNA doesn't follow political borders. It just doesn't. And political borders change, as we know. But it will give you an indication as to areas as to where your ancestry might be from. And that might be an”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things are every time somebody takes a DNA test, it increases the chance that you might find a match that's helpful for you to answer your question.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matches going while you look like you're sharing this amount of DNA, this looks like it might be a third cousin type thing, those numbers of matches are increasing all the time. So for example, I was doing a chat called Matthew for DNA Family Secrets and I'm looking at the matches and he's coming back at the Seychelles. And then suddenly someone pops up on one of the databases and it looks like it could be a half sibling's child. So it's in between. We've done the filming with Matthew. This is where you're from. You're from the Seychelles. This match pops up and it's like, oh my goodness, who's one of your parents? One of your parents from the Seychelles. And so it's talking to them. We found a half-sibling that way for him. And my goodness, when you look at Matthew and his half-sibling, Carl, they just, oh my goodness, they still look like siblings. And that was a really lovely moment. And then being able to eventually get the matches to be able to find his father.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'll kind of use the computer to chop it up into little chunks and they go, right, where's this chunk from? And it will look in this database going, well, who has this matching kind of chunk? Oh, it's somebody who lives in, I don't know, Eastern Europe, for example. Where does this chunk come from? Oh, it comes from the Caribbean, for example. And it will do that with all of your DNA, and it will do it a number of times. So when you get the results back, what you're getting is, so you're getting about 45% this, but it'll be somewhere in between that. It's not like you are 45% whatever. It will be, this is 45%, this is where we're getting the matches is this sort of area. So every time the database updates, you will get a slightly different thing because it might suddenly be that actually now that little chunk of DNA doesn't match to somewhere in Eastern Europe. It's somewhere else. And so you're getting these differences. And also in terms of as more people take DNA tests in terms of your genetic”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when you take a DNA test with one of these DNA testing companies, and there's a number of them out there, is that they take your DNA and you go on the database. I mean, you click to say, yes, I'm happy to be involved in DNA matching and you opt into these various sort of aspects of it. And in the early days, they would have, for example, reference samples. And it's taking your DNA and it does the DNA typing and it's not doing the same DNA typing as for DNA profiling, which is looking at those tiny little stutters and just a few of them. This is looking at hundreds of thousands of these little tiny genetic typos. It's almost like they're single letter differences that we get between our various genomes. They look hundreds of thousands of them. And then what they do is they go, okay, so you've got this particular genetic makeup. They don't even do it for your entire chromosome.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's about that, it could be in six months, it could be in a year, it could be two years, that we can answer this question other times. You can answer the question within minutes because the DNA match is on there or there are DNA matches such that you can build the family trees and do that. And I think that that's also quite important to show is that sometimes you can't answer the question. And there have been cases where the show goes out, somebody calls in and says, ooh, that looks just like my someone I know or one of my relatives, would you take a DNA test and you can answer that question for somebody. So I think it's about the reality about what, you know, GIs can help you, but there's other factors that come into play sometimes.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you put somebody in front of me who is, there's a longing, a real longing that comes off of them. And I'm this massive empath. So I can really feel it and just how much it means to them to be able to answer that question. So there have been many a time where I'm able to give them the results and they're in tears and I'm in tears and you can hear the camera person by me going because it is just so incredibly moving. And I think that the power of DNA to do that is just absolutely incredible. I mean, I think one of the things about the program that we do, which is we show the reality of that DNA testing. So sometimes there are times where we can't answer your question. There are not the DNA matches on there at the moment for us to be able to answer that question. And there have been...”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And I think you're completely right. I think a lot of it is about identity. So certainly when doing DNA family secrets with Stacey Dooley, when people come to us, oh my goodness, you can really, really feel the longing. There is a question in their lives that DNA could help answer. And it's either if they're adopted and they don't know what their ancestry is, or they don't know who a particular parent is, or they've taken a DNA test and they've realized that their biological father's not who they thought it was or they've never known and you get people who are donor conceived and they would just like to know what's my ancestry or do I have any donor siblings and when they hired me they were like you're going to be the really serious scientist and Stacey is going to be touchy feely and I joke because I mean I will cry adverts it's like you know”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“know she wasn't Anastasia. But of course I love this ability of genetics to be part of the key to solving some of these mysteries? It's amazing. I mean, of course I love that kind of thing.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're both descended through Queen Victoria. So what happened was he very kindly gave his DNA at the time and they were able to use his mitochondrial DNA and match that to the Tsarina and to the children. And then they were able to do further analysis to identify the Tsar. And again, it's one of these another mystery came out of it because there was a woman called Anna Anderson who lived in the US who claimed to be Anastasia, one of the daughters. And it's this incredibly kind of romantic story about how she's managed to survive. She's managed to get to the US. And I'm Anastasia. And even though members of the family who had known the Tsarina and the children had said no, that she's not, she maintained this until the end of her life. And when the remains were first found, they didn't find the remains of two of the children, one of whom could have been Anastasia. So there was this question over this. But since then, obviously the DNA analysis has found, yes, no, we have found all of the children.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Violently caused injuries. And all of this fit with what they knew about it. But what they did was they did the standard DNA fingerprinting to look to see if this was a family group. And then they kind of go, okay, so this does look like it's a family. And we've got people who are unrelated. But is it actually them? And Prince Philip is a female line relative of the Tsarina.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer questions. And the Romanov case, I think, is probably one of the most famous ones of that one. And that was the whole reason. I was sitting in a lecture theater in Cambridge doing biological anthropology. And a lady called Erica Hegelberg was our lecturer and she worked on some of the really early cases. And it was the Romanoff case and that was the thing that changed the direction that I went in because this is Tsar Nicholas and his wife, the Tsarina, their five children. Some of their household they're killed in the Bolshevik Revolution and they're their remains are hidden in a, we now know, in a forest. And for decades, they weren't found and people didn't know where they were. And then in the early 90s, the remains are found and examined. And again, it's using DNA alongside other evidence. So, you know, they do the osteology, they look at the bones. Does this look like they're people of the right age? They clearly had injuries.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they're taking DNA tests, that just be aware that this is something that could turn up. And it does turn up from time to time”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very cool. So it means that you can go, okay, so these guys are probably all descended, well, they will be, they'll be descended from an original Mr. Attenborough who lived probably, we think, about four or five hundred years ago, probably quite close to the village of Attenborough, which is just south of Nottingham. And so it was this really kind of, it was this introduction to genetic genealogy at the time, which I didn't kind of know would become so big, but it became absolutely enormous now. But I would occasionally have people saying, well, I've got this particular surname. I think I'm related to that family over there, but we can't join us. And so I would be able to look at their DNA and go, okay, so yes, it does look like you're related or it doesn't look like you're related. But one of the things that I did make sure that we did during the project was not to test men who were closely related because it could be they don't.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People would have surnames, or they're called by names because they could change in your lifetime and they weren't hereditary. You didn't pass them down to your kids. But now we live in a society where generally, though it's changing, surnames are passed down through the male lines. So the question for my PhD was, okay, so do all men who have the same surname, are they all related to one another? And David Attenborough ended up being my poster by you, so he's turning a hundred and a couple of weeks. And he was amazing. So he took part in my project. And what I was doing was I was looking at men with the Stony Mattenburg, like his spelling, but also a different spelling. So B-O-R-O-W and just randomly around the country, I would take people with a particular surname. And then I would look to see, you know, are there Y chromosomes the same identical or nearly identical? Does it look like they're related to one another? And if you look at the Attenboroughs, about 90% of them have identical or near identical.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so okay, so this comes from my PhD and my master's project. So I started working on the Y chromosome, which just comes down through the male line. And it's passed down, unlike the rest of our DNA, which undergoes a shuffling process as it's passed down through the generations. The two pieces of DNA, so mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome, they come down through the generations in a really simple way. So they are passed down. They do accumulate mutations as they're passed down and that's quite handy for looking at relatedness between males. And when I was doing my PhD, my PhD was on the link between surnames and the Y chromosome. So surnames in this country, I loved this project. So we know that hereditary surnames were not really something that we're around until the Normans got here in 1066. They'd already been using them for a couple of generations prior to that.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, not necessarily complete, but it's not just a random bit of bone. So this is the thing. When Matthew, when he's watching the excavator go in, there's a bit of bone and he's going now, is that just a random bit of bone on his own, or is it actually attached to something? And it was attached to a skeleton. So that's what the articulated bit means. So yes, good to clarify that one.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't get a DNA match so I knew this. But when we're doing is this actually him, you've got to go, we're in the right place. We have got a youngish male. We've got battle injuries. We've got severe scoliosis of the spine. We've got this genetic matches. And you have a probability attached to all of those, which you then multiply together. And that gives you a likelihood as to whether or not this is Richard or somebody else who looks an awful lot like Richard, but it's not Richard. And that likelihood ratio was 6.7 million to one. So that translates to 99.99, 9.9999%. But what's really important there was that it's not the DNA in isolation. You bring it with all of the strands about as just as you would do in any missing person's case. So that was kind of the thing behind, I think I need to write about why DNA is not the silver blade. It's not the only thing that you use in particular cases.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're finding a skeleton in the choir of the Church of the Grey Friars. Joe Appleby does the excavation and she finds a youngish male battle injuries, severe scoliosis of the spine. So it's all those identifying features that you're doing. And then I do the genetic analysis so I am comparing the DNA from the skeleton with that of known relatives. So I look at mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the female line. We've got female line relatives. I also do male line relatives, the Y chromosome, which is inherited down through the male line. Richard had no known living descendants because our DNA is inherited, I couldn't just use any of relatives. I've got to use those ones. And I'm getting a DNA match on the mitochondrial DNA, not on the male line, not surprising to me because I know that genealogically it may look like these people are relatives, but if there's been a false paternity where the biological father's not the recorded father.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Richard III, he's been killed at the Battle of Bosworth. His is the end of the Plantagenet dynasty. The tutors come in. They are never going to say Richard was lovely and we killed him. They're going to paint him as this figure particularly. So when we start the excavation, we actually find it's a chap called Matthew Morris, who was our site director, and he spots a little bit of Lakebaum. It's the 25th of August 2012, so it's 527 years to the day when Richard is supposed to have been buried there. And so he hops into the trench and he wants to make sure, you know, is this an articulated skeleton? And he goes, yes, it is. But we can't excavate it right then because you have to have the license to lift human remains and you have to make decisions about which ones you're going to go for. We've got money to do that. So we go back, we realize that actually this individual is in the choir. So that's number one. We know where Richard is supposed to be.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like a historical missing person's case. So if you or I went missing, they would go, Well, we're looking for a woman who's about this height and this hair color and this eye color. And what you were last seen in, that sort of thing. So we have to do the same thing with Richard. So we know that he's killed in battle in 1485. He's age 32 when he dies he will possibly have battle injuries on him. We know where he's supposed to be buried. There's historical documents that talk about how he's buried in choir at the church of the Grey Friars. And we know that also there's a couple of contemporary historical documents which talk about him. Well, one talks about him having one shoulder higher than the other. potentially a spinal abnormality. And then, of course, you've got Shakespeare, who's writing in the Tudor period, who goes absolutely to town on him, and they talk about him being a hunchback or bunchback toad, so obviously not terminology weed.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so okay, so I got brought onto the case way back in June 2011 and the idea was that I would be involved in advising how to excavate what's known as clean conditions, which I always find a little bit amusing because obviously when you're excavating, it's quite muddy a lot of the time. But the clean conditions bit is ancient in ancient remains. Whilst we're alive, we have these nice long strands of DNA. And things come along and break those strands and your body has mechanisms for fixing those. But after death, that's not happening. So if we're excavating and we touch these remains with our hands or we breathe on them, we're putting huge amounts of our very plentiful and intact DNA on these remains. And it will swamp out the signal of any ancient DNA which at this point is going to be very, very fragmented and damaged. And so that was the whole sort of clean conditions bit.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the cape the name comes from, and eventually what they work out is it's not a woman who's committing these crimes, it's a woman who works in the factory where the swabs are made, where they go. So the police have inadvertently been causing this DNA sample to be found across all of these crimes because of the swabs that they're using, it's in a factory, and it was actually an older lady who worked in the factory, and it was her DNA that was being picked up at all of these crime scenes because she'd been involved in making the swabs. And this is where it is so, so important, obviously, where the DNA being taken in context is really important. The penny starts to drop, oh, that's why nobody's ever seen her, because actually, if they had looked at where the swans were coming from, it's all coming from this one location. So, yeah, so it's about how you have to take DNA.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lots and lots of really disparate sorts of crimes. And whenever they talk to the suspects in the case, you know, there's a woman involved here. And they go, no, there's no, we haven't had a woman, a female accomplice with us. And so the police are going, oh my goodness, this woman is like a criminal mastermind. She is committing all of these crimes all the way across Europe. Who on earth is this person? And she really must be quite powerful because the people that she's working with will deny all knowledge of her. And eventually what it transpires. So she becomes known as the Phantom of Halbrum because there's two police in a car and someone comes up to the car and they're both shot. And one sadly dies. One eventually comes round, can't remember anything. But the DNA that's in there is, again, it's this woman's DNA. And this is in Halbronn.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I first heard of it, I was like, oh my goodness so. Essentially, this is where you are starting to get a whole bunch of kind of crimes and they're really, some of them are murders. I mean, the first one that they kind of really spot is a lady who is, you know, she's living on her own and she's strangled and there's a coffee cup on the table in her kitchen and they do a DNA swab and they're like, oh my goodness, this is really unusual. It's both a man and a woman's DNA is here. Women are less likely to commit violent crimes, etc. And then slowly they keep finding all the way across Europe. It can be really banal crimes like somebody has burgled a shed in a back garden or they've been burgling a business and then they find it on a syringe and things like this where there's heroin. So it's”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I have a colleague who worked on this case, and the thinking for this chapter came out of a couple of things. So one was the Richard III case, where people were, you know, so I do the Richard the Third case and it's about identifying his remains. And for me as a geneticist, I am the first person to tell you, yes, the DNA is important, but you put it along all of the strands of evidence. It is not the final thingy. The other thing was that I would get people say, you know, can you tell me if I'm related to Richard III? DNA can tell me this, right? And I would have to say, no, it can't actually because of the way of our DNA is inherited. Or they would say, can my DNA tell me whether or not I am a Viking? And I thought that was really interesting. Use of present tense. There's so many things that people kind of mistakenly believe that DNA can do, but you have to take it in context of everything. So the Phantom of Hellbrown case is a really interesting one.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Andrew's DNA that of his three siblings and his mother. So even without the father. There, it's like piecing this jigsaw puzzle together. And he's able to prove that Andrew is Christiana's son. And when you talk to the family, they talk about how years of kind of worry and anxieties is, you know, Andrew going to be sent home. It all just wiped away in that one minute. And Alec to this day will tell you, you know, after everything that's happened with DNA fingerprinting or profiling as it's known now, that's still the case that he feels most proud of. But I think that's a really lovely story. And it's a way of introducing people to kind of the power of what DNA can do.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know who it is. But his was actually an immigration case. And it's a really lovely story. So it's a woman called Christiana. She was a nurse. She's working here. She's got three of her children here. One of her children, Andrew, is back in Ghana with her estranged husband. Comes back into this country and the home office doesn't believe it's actually her son. The legal team have been working for two years trying to really prove to the home office. Yes, it is her son. And the lady working on the case, Shona York, apparently, she remembers this thing. So this was the lovely thing. I get to chat to these people and she's taking the bus to work one day and she looks down on the front page of the Guardian and it's talking about how there's this new invention about how you can identify an individual and who they're related to based on their DNA. So she rings up Alec and she's really worried he won't take it on but he takes it on and the longer the short of the story is that he's able to take”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was trying to trace what are particular genetic variants that are associated with disease. And he was, so he's looking for genetic variation between individuals. And what he stumbled across was where you get like a stutter in the DNA. It's like a word that's repeated a number of times. And what he found was that the number of times that that word was repeated really varied between individuals. And because we inherit half of our DNA from each of our parents, you get two copies of that stutter. And the more he looked in the human genome was he realized actually there's lots of these stutters. And if you use those in combination, you can identify an individual using that. And one of the first cases it was used for, a lot of people don't know this because first people think about DNA profiling. They think, you know, cop shows and, you know, instantly you can identify somebody. Usually like on the television shows, it's sort of like within half an hour.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was the reason that I went to the University of Leicester because I was actually at Cambridge doing Ark and Ant at the time and went up there because I realized I wanted to apply genetics to questions in history and archaeology. And I didn't actually work in his lab, but he was on my PhD panel when I was doing it. And essentially what he did is really hard to overstate the kind of the impact of what he did. It was this thing of where you could now finally identify an individual based just on their DNA alone. So none of this, like you need photos or your fingerprints or finger marks as it's known in the trade is how people used to do a lot of the identification and it's still used obviously. But this ability to be able to not even have the individual there and you can identify them using their DNA. And the way he did that was he was actually really interested in medical genetics.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I actually got approached to write a book. And I'm in a field that is of real interest to the general public. So, for example, I do sort of ancient DNA and forensics and genetic genealogy. So for, gosh, about two and a half decades, I have had people writing to me with questions about am I related to which of the third. That's probably my biggest one that I get. But all sorts of questions. And I just basically found when I've been explaining genetics to people, they understand it better. It's always much easier if you wrap it in a story. So it's kind of come from that, really. I'm just sort of telling stories where DNA has been a big part of the picture in helping to say solve a mystery or help an individual, that kind of thing.”
2026-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · How does DNA Shape Our World? With Professor Turi King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT