William Allan Award Address

I am deeply honored by the Allan Award, for myself and for all my colleagues who have been involved in the often labyrinthine pathway of research that led initially from a freezer at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, and culminated eventually in DNA fingerprinting. One of the great pleasures of science for me is the unexpected and serendipitous twists of fate that can shift the emphasis of research programs and, indeed, entire careers. Such was the story of DNA fingerprinting; I think that I would have been as astonished at the suggestion, 15 years ago, that I would one day be involved in using DNA in criminal investigations, as I am today at receiving the Allan Award. My story starts in 1975 when, as a young and naive postdoc, I joined Dick Flavell in Amsterdam on a joint project with Charles Weissmann to isolate the rabbit P-globin gene by a combination of biochemical purification and cloning. During this project, we managed to develop Southern blot hybridization to the point where we could detect gene fragments not only in our partially purified fractions but also, and astonishingly at the time, in total genomic DNA-our first glimpse of a mammalian single-copy gene. Restriction analysis soon showed that the gene was a discrete entity amenable to physical mapping and was distinctly odd, with a gap in the middle-one of the first examples of an intron (Jeffreys and Flavell 1977). In the summer of 1977, I moved to the Department of Genetics at Leicester as a junior lecturer and was faced with the daunting prospect of establishing an independent research program with just myself and a part-time technician who had barely heard of DNA. This was the time for hard decisions. Should I press on with the intron work, despite the entry of many large