Interviewee: Alec Jeffreys. Alec Jeffreys talks about the difficulties of the case. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human Identification > Family > The Ghana Immigration Case)

Now it was a really tough case, right, first we didn't have the father for testing, so we had the mother and the boy in dispute. Secondly, we didn't have the sisters for testing, over in Ghana. Third, the mother wasn't terribly sure who the true father of this boy was anyway, apparently there are two fathers, neither of whom were available. So this looked like mission impossible for us. However what we did have were three undisputed children in the family. So what we could do was to take the mother, and these were all done on blood DNA, so we had the mother's blood, three undisputed children. And you could take the mum's DNA fingerprint and the DNA fingerprint of the three undisputed kids and reconstruct the DNA fingerprint of the missing father, by identifying paternal characters in the children not present in mum. So we now had DNA fingerprint of the missing father, DNA fingerprint of the mother and then the DNA fingerprint of the boy in dispute, and every single genetic character in that boy matched either mum or a character in the missing father.

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