Free The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh

we've done, just as it happened day by day."
    The biology scientists are "interesting types," according to Vickie Wilson. But even the most interesting among them must have been startled the first time they saw the bearded geneticist with a roll-your-own dangling from his lips. He looked anachronistic, like a pot-smoking academiciao from the sixties, but it wasn't cannabis, it was Golden Virginia tobacco. He let the cigarettes go dead in his fingers when energetically involved in conversation, and never smoked tailor-mades unless going somewhere special.
    He was seldom seen without his bulky turtleneck. That "polo neck jumper" became a Jeffreys trademark.
    The geneticist's staff consisted of a research assistant, two technicians, usually a couple of Ph . D . students, and a postdoc or two, all of whom enjoyed his style.
    "Alec's always excited," another technician said of her boss. "He's such an enthusiastic scientist. His personality inspires the rest of us."
    Whenever he got excited, Vickie Wilson figured he was on to something, and he had been very excited one day in September of 1984.
    "During the course of that research Alec was poorly," she remembered. "He had glandular fever, and I had to ring him up quite often as things were proceeding. To tell him it was getting quite interesting."
    Jeffreys's process for mapping those human genes entailed taking DNA molecules extracted from a sample of blood cells, and cutting or "chopping" them into unequal bits by adding enzymes to them. The fragments were dropped into an agarose gel where an electric field caused the larger fragments to separate from the smaller ones. The DNA fragment pattern was then transferred to a nylon membrane by a technique called southern blotting, literally drawn up by capillary force when the blotting paper was placed on the membrane.
    Jeffreys's team then added radioactively labeled pieces of the DNA to act as "probes" that would stick to the hypervariable regions they fitted. The membrane was X-rayed to disclose the radioactive pattern, the darker bands appearing where the probes had adhered.
    The distribution of these bands would be unique, person to person, and so they would be looking at a DNA image that would be individually specific.
    That was the theory of how it was supposed to work.
    On a Monday morning in September the X-ray film was developed and, in Jeffreys's words, "We were just stunned!"
    Within minutes of getting the film out of the developing tank they could read it! Furthermore, they had expected to see one or two major bands on the film, but instead they had a whole series of gray and black bands, resembling the bar codes used to mark grocery items. And Dr. Alec Jeffreys knew that he was looking at huge numbers of genetic markers tha t s howed both an astonishing level of variability and an amazing degree of individual specificity.
    Jeffreys's wife, Susan, was a senior computer officer at Leicester University, and it was she who realized the possibilities of his discovery. She immediately predicted the practicality of what he'd called his "lucky string of circumstances." By that evening she was making long lists of the applications of his technology, the first being to suggest that immigration disputes could now be easily settled, and in Britain there were many. It would now be a simple matter to determine whether or not a person seeking entry into the country was entitled to do so, based upon an alleged blood relationship to a British subject.
    It wasn't long before Jeffreys and his team theorized that the system might be used on animals, with very substantial implications in determining pedigree, in artificial insemination, in ascertaining that endangered species didn't inbreed accidentally.
    It could be used in bone marrow transplants of leukemia victims to determine whether grafts had taken or not. It would be easy to determine if newborn twins were fraternal or identical, since the only people on the face of the planet with