Interviewee: Alec Jeffreys. Alec Jeffreys talks about how he came up with the name. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human identification > Profiling > DNA variations and fingerprints > Naming "DNA fingerprinting")

I was giving a seminar, I think it was over in Oxford, and so I briefly mentioned some of these patterns. And there was a good, a very good friend of mine, Nick Proudfoot came up afterwards, and said well, that's interesting, a bit like fingerprints aren't they. And, that's it, let's call them DNA fingerprints. And that actually was a very wise thing to do, if we had called these, say, individually discriminating southern blot mini satellite hybridization profiles, I mean we would have killed the technology absolutely stone dead, it would never have got off the starting block. But by calling it DNA fingerprints it, the public, and we did get quite a lot of press coverage on this, the public sort of, they could twig [understand] what we were trying to say.

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