Family fingerprints
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While we most often associated genetic fingerprinting with forensics or paternity testing, the first case that was solved using the DNA profiling technique invented by Alec Jeffreys and his team at the University of Leicester involved an immigration dispute.
A month after he and his team had published their Nature paper, Jeffreys received a letter from London-based lawyer Sheona York. She’d seen a story about genetic fingerprinting in the paper, and wondered if it could help settle a tricky case she was fighting on behalf of a family originally from Ghana.
Andrew, a 13-year-old boy who had been born in Britain, had been stopped at Heathrow Airport coming back into the UK after a trip back to see his father in Ghana, as immigration officials thought that his passport had been tampered with or forged.
To make matters worse, Andrew referred to Christiana Sarbah, the woman who was supposedly his mother, as ‘Auntie’ - a common habit in his culture - even though she was genuinely his mum.
The officials refused to believe that Andrew truly was her son, and thought he was a cousin trying to illegally sneak into the UK. At the time, there were some basic genetic tests that could tell whether people were broadly related to the same family, but couldn’t figure out parent-child relationships. And to make things even more complicated, it wasn’t clear who the boy’s real father actually was.
By the time York wrote to Jeffreys, the situation was dire. After two years of protracted legal argument the family was distraught, and there seemed to be no way to persuade the officials to drop the case. As a last-ditch effort, Jeffreys produced DNA fingerprints from Andrew, his mother, and three other children that were definitely hers: David, Joyce, and Diana.
The results were completely convincing: the boy was undeniably his mother’s child. York presented the data to the Home Office immigration tribunal, which backed down immediately.
“It was two years of angst just wiped away in two minutes,” as Andrew’s brother Dr David Gyimah described it. In fact, the experience of being involved in the first DNA fingerprinting case inspired David to take up science and pursue a degree in applied chemistry at the University of Leicester.
The family’s joyful reunion made national headlines, opening the floodgates for many more claims from separated families. The Home Office also announced that it wouldn’t fight any future immigration cases where there was DNA evidence proving parentage.
It also netted Jeffreys and his team another Nature paper, further cementing the scientific reputation of this new technique. And from there, it wasn’t long until it would be needed to bring justice to a family in an even more desperate situation.
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