Instant Genius - The past, present and future of DNA science

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Whether it’s the swab tests many of us use to help us piece together our family trees, the painstaking detective work carried out by forensic scientists, or its use in medical screening to look for signs of our predisposition to develop certain diseases, DNA science has become a regular fixture in news stories, pop culture and dinner table conversations in many of our homes. But how exactly do these processes work, what can they really tell, or not tell us, and what developments can we expect in the future? In this episode, we’re joined by Prof Turi King, the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, co-presenter of the BBC’s DNA Family Secrets and best-selling author, to talk about her latest book, The Secrets of DNA – How Genetics has Changed the World. She tells us about the fascinating stories surrounding the development of fingerprinting techniques that now allow us to identify unique individuals based on their DNA alone, how forensic scientists really use DNA science to solve crimes, and why our DNA is still hiding many more secrets that are waiting to be discovered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Gugger, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. Whether it's the swab tests many of us use to help us piece together our family trees, the painstaking detective work carried out by forensic scientists, or its use in medical screening to look for signs of our predisposition to develop certain diseases.

DNA science has become a regular fixture in news stories, pop culture and dinner table conversations in many of our homes. But how exactly do these processes work? What can they really tell or not tell us? And what developments can we expect to see in the future? In this episode, we're joined by Professor Churie King, the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, co-presenter of the BBC's DNA Family Secrets,

and bestselling author to talk about her latest book, The Secrets of DNA, How Genetics Has Changed the World. She tells us about the fascinating stories surrounding the development of fingerprinting techniques that now allow us to identify unique individuals based on their DNA alone, how forensic scientists really use DNA science to solve crimes, and why our DNA is still hiding many more secrets that are waiting to be discovered. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

No, thank you for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, The Secrets of Our DNA, How Genetics Changed the World. So I think before we get into the sort of the meat of the book, let's just get it clear for everyone listening exactly what we're talking about. Because, you know, there's been a lot of research, a lot of news about DNA over the last, you know, a couple of decades, really. And people have a vague idea of what it is.

You know, you have all these ancestry tests. You have all, you know, CSI and shows like this, etc. But first off, what exactly are we talking about? You know, what is DNA? Okay. So I often liken DNA to a book, actually. So it's essentially sort of an instruction manual to kind of build a human, grow a human, have it go on to make new little humans.

but there's lots of kind of insupportant aspects to our DNA. So it's not all genes. So lots of people go, ooh, it's all genes. No, it's not. Large chunks of it are not genes. And one of the things that I also talk about in the book is that it's not just the kind of genetic code, so to speak. But we know that there are now things which will act as like a dimmer switch or an invisibility cloak for highlighting genes in our DNA. So there's various different aspects to DNA.

So it's about kind of the power of our DNA, but also what it's. can and cannot tell us, really. Yeah, so you sort of kick off the book talking about DNA fingerprinting and the work of Sir Alec Jeffries, which I think some people will have heard of this, like DNA fingerprinting, and they've seen the sort of smudgy pictures with the bars on. So, you know, what exactly is that? How does it work?

And you know, what can we learn from it? So this was an absolutely massive discovery. So this was the ability to identify. identify individuals from their DNA alone. And what Alec was looking at is, he was looking at the genetic sequence. And what he was finding was that it was like there were stutters in the DNA, almost as if like there's a genetic word that's repeated several times. And because you get one copy of your DNA from your mom and one copy of DNA from your dad,

for each kind of genetic marker that he's looking at where there's a set of repeats, you get different numbers potentially. So you could have, say, 10 repeats from mom and 15 repeats from dad. And what he started realizing is you could look at a number of these markers. And if you looked at enough of them, you can start to identify an individual based on just a few of these genetic markers. And that's huge being able to identify somebody purely from their DNA. So I basically go into the fact that you can use DNA to identify each of us. Yeah, so that sort of feeds into one thing that you talk about in the book, like,

to this story. It was this really interesting case of an immigration dispute. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So this is, I love this case because when people think about DNA fingerprinting, DNA profiling, as it's known now, the thing that people think about is the cop shows and, you know, the CSI effect, you go to the crime scene, you pick up the DNA, you stick it in the database and out pops this person, usually half an hour later on a kind of computer printout. But actually, the first time it was ever used was an immigration case. So, you know, and this was a lady called Christiana Sarba and she was a nurse she's living here in London with three of her children and one of her children Andrew has been back in Ghana staying with her estranged husband. He comes

back into the country and the home office doesn't believe it's actually her son. They think, oh, you know, he might be the son of one of her sisters for example and he said that Christiana's actually an auntie. And there's been a kind of a case that's been being built for a couple of years. Shona York was the person who was leading on it, and they're trying to build the evidence to say, no, look, he is actually her son. And she tells this amazing story about how she's going to work one day, and she's on the bus, and she looks down at the newspaper, and in the kind of the bottom corner, it talks about how this new technique has been invented, DNA fingerprinting,

and it can identify an individual, but also close relatives. And it's been invented by a chap called Alec Jeffries. And so she gets a hold of him and says, you know, look, I've got this case, we've got photos, we've got everything. And they have done testing, so biological testing, you know, blood types, this kind of thing. But it's not enough to actually say, yes, these two are mother and son. She asks, will he take it on? He decides to do it.

And I know, Alec, because I worked in the same department as him. He's the whole reason why I went to the University of Leicester. And he tells you that, you know, this is the first time it's ever going to be used kind of in the wild. In the lab, they've been doing it. but this is the first time it's ever going to be used in the wild. So he takes the case on. Now, the thing is the dad's not around. So what he's got is he's got DNA from the mom, and we know that she will share half of her DNA with a son, but also we've got the three siblings of Andrew who are also around, and we know that they share half of their DNA each with him as well.

So it's a bit of this jigsaw puzzle. Doing the DNA fingerprinting, does it look like Andrew shares half of his DNA with the Christiana and with the three fugitive siblings? And that's the case. And it's really interesting because DNA fingerprinting then gets used for things like paternity testing, but actually this was maternity testing for the first case. And the lovely thing about this is that, you know, the family talks about just how stressful it was for them, because they're always worried, you know, Andrew's going to get deported. And this, finally, this case is resolved and this huge relief of the family. But the other really lovely thing is that Alec will tell you it's the case he's most proud of, even now to this day, after everything it's been used for, you know, forensics and

everything like that. The case he's most proud of is that one because it reunited a family. It was his first case where he reunited a family. And I think it was a nice story to start with because a lot of people don't know about it. And I thought it was just a nice one to kind of really start with the power of DNA in terms of identifying individuals and resolving these quite tricky, you know, problems that people have that can be solved with DNA. Yeah, it is a really heartwarming, wonderful story. But you've mentioned a couple of times there, genetic markers. So a lot of people who have heard, you know, when we're talking about DNA,

you say, oh, we share, you know, a huge percentage of our DNA with chimpanzees, with bananas. Yep. So, you know, how then do we pick out these specific markers, you know, what are they? Yeah, so this is exactly what Alec was looking at. So he was looking at these, they're like basically sections in the DNA where we know people tend to differ between one another. So when he was looking at these ones, they were repeats in our DNA, so the stutter that you get. But the other kind of very common genetic marker that we look at, a variant is known as a single nucleotide polymorphism

or snip. This is where you get a single letter difference in the DNA. So it's like reading a paragraph and somebody might have the word cat and somebody else might have the word bat. It's just a single letter difference. But these little differences, these genetic markers are ways that we can tell people apart from one another. Yeah, so we're talking about sort of a direct relationship from, you know, birth parent, biological parent, to child. But if we go back into the depths of time of our DNA, we can also learn some things about our lineage. These ancestry tests, etc., have gotten really popular over the years and the television shows, you know, some of which you're a part of, people seem really fascinated by this. But that seems like a much more difficult puzzle than just

finding the direct parents. What can we say about that? How on earth do we manage that? You are completely right. So we inherit half our DNA from each of our parents, which is a complex mixture of half the DNA from their parents. So on average, you have about 25, of the DNA from each of your grandparents and on average about 12 and a half percent of DNA from your great grandparents and so on back through time. So it's it's not that many generations until it's perfectly possible to have no kind of DNA from any one particular ancestor back in time. And then at that point what you're looking at is kind of general kind of population information. So it is these tests are absolutely fantastic and you'll have seen it. So I do the television

program DNA Family Secrets with Stacey Dooley. And it is absolutely fantastic for able to say, you know, somebody comes, they're adopted, they don't know anything about their ancestry, or, you know, they don't know who parents are, or their donor conceived, or increasingly people are taking DNA tests and they find out that their, you know, biological father is not who they thought it was. That's a relatively common one that comes up. And these DNA tests are amazing for that, because the kind of density of genetic markers that it tests allows you to go, okay, I'm getting genetic matches with this person over here. That looks like it could be a second cousin. So if this person is a second cousin with the person who's tested, then they must

share great-grandparents. Who are these great-grandparents? Who are their four sets of great-grandparents? And then you look at other genetic matches and you go, oh, okay, so it looks like it's this set of great-grandparents. And then you start to build the tree down. If somebody's looking for a father, for example, you can go, okay, well, I'm not interested in any of the women. I am interested in the male descendants, and you can start to use this information to say something about somebody's parent or, you know, finding out about their ancestry, which can be incredibly moving for people. But the further back you go in time, that's harder to do. I mean, there are pieces of DNA that are inherited down through the generations in a really simple way. So there's the Y chromosome, which comes down through the male line.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is in the eggs. So females will pass it on to all of their children, but only daughters will pass it on. And those bits, you can say something a little bit more about deeper time, ancestry, but with the caveat that you're only looking at just two of your many, many, many ancestors. So you're right, these ancestry tests are amazing, but you have to realize what the limitations of them are. As you mentioned in the book, sort of for one reason or another, a lot of people, especially males, say, kind of like the idea, like the idea that they're descended from Vikings. So I don't know why.

But, you know, can we actually determine things like that? Okay, so this comes out a little bit out of my PhD. So my PhD was looking at the Y chromosome, which comes down through the male line. And my PhD was basically looking at men who all have the same surname. Are they all related to one another? because surnames come down through the male line. The Y chromosome comes down through the male line. So if they're all descended from the same, say, Mr. Attenborough,

so David Attenborough took part in the study, then you would expect them all to have the same surname, but also very identical or nearly identical Y chromosome types, because they have that common ancestor. And then a thing that kind of rose out of that was we thought, well, let's start looking at people in the north of England where we know the Vikings got to. They've got very old surnames from the area.

Vikings didn't have hereditary surname. name, so it's not like they have a Vikings surname, but it's from an area that we know the Vikings got to in large numbers. And let's look to see whether or not we find higher frequencies of Y chromosome types that look like they come from areas that we know the Vikings got to. So we've got Y chromosome types from Norway, for example, and then we look in the north of England where we know Norse Vikings have got to, which look to go, oh, you know, is there a higher proportion of men with these particular Y chromosome types? And we're doing that on a population level. But obviously people start thinking about that on the individual

level and start going, oh, have I got a Y chromosome type that looks like it's high frequency in Norway? And so I would have to say, look, yes, it does look like it's one that's high frequency in North, for example. However, that does not mean that I can say that that ancestor arrived in this country as part of the Norseify migration. It could be one that's found in other parts of Europe, but lower frequencies, it could have come in through a different route. It could have been earlier or later. But there was this real interest among the general public, members of the public who, can you tell me if I am a Viking? And I loved the present tense, because I thought that was fantastic, because the Vikings obviously haven't been around for about

a thousand years. So it was kind of talking about what you can and cannot say from somebody's Y chromosome type. But it's something which has been of real interest to the public, this idea of can I say something about my ancestry from my DNA? And one of the things I had to kind of explain to people was like, look, you've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. If you go back, keep doing that all the way back to the time of the Vikings, the number of putative ancestors you have was more than the population of the world at the time. I will guarantee you, you have Viking ancestry in there somewhere. It just won't necessarily turn up in looking at your DNA. So it is, it's a really interesting thing about genetics and identity, which I find really, really fascinating,

because the further back you go, obviously, you can't say anything really kind of meaningful. You will have ancestors from all, from everywhere, essentially. But for people who are taking tests to find about more recent ancestry can be incredibly powerful, really, really powerful. So for example, I don't know who a grandparent is. There's rumors that, you know, this, my grandmother was from this particular location and you can look at the DNA and go, actually, yes, it does fit with that. that story, that kind of thing, can be really meaningful for people.

So another thing that you hear a lot is that a huge proportion of people have DNA or ancestry from Genghis Khan. Yeah. So I'd like to talk about that, you know. What can we say about that? Is that true? Well, okay, so again, this is a very lovely friend of mine, Patricia Bellaresk who was part of this study.

And again, it was looking at Y chromosome types. And it was finding that there was a particular Y chromosome type that's a really high frequencies in Asia. And so it was postulated, well, you know, could this be something from Genghis Khan, who we know had loads and loads of sons, who would have gone on to have loads and loads of sons down through the generation. So that's where it came from. And it's really interesting because people often want to be tied to a particular individual. So having done the Richard the Third case, I get, oh my goodness, so many people contacted me saying, can you tell me if I'm related to Richard the 3rd. And I have to explain about, well, unless it's through an all-male

or an all-female line, I can't tell you that question because of how our DNA is inherited. And I have to say, look, we're all related to Richard the 3 and each other. It's simply a matter of degree. Yeah, so you sort of related to this. You talk about the genealogical and genetic ancestry. I thought that was interesting. You know, can you explain that for us? What does that mean? Well, okay, so this is this whole thing about the further back in time, while somebody may be on your family tree on paper, you could easily not be carrying any DNA from them. And that's because of this complex way that our DNA is inherited, where it halves with each generation going back in time. But also you get a shuffling of DNA information that happens, which means that you don't get exactly 25% from each of your grandparents. You don't get exactly 12.5%.

It's a range around there. So as you go back in time, it's perfectly possible not to have any DNA from somebody in your family tree. So it's that they're on paper. They're in your family tree, but you don't carry any genetic information from them. So that's the two separate things there. Yeah, so let's shift gears a little bit to something we touched on earlier that another people probably will come to their minds when they first hear of DNA.

And that's forensic science. So we see this on the television all the time. you know, people swabbing crime scenes for DNA and things like that. So are we really just leaving our DNA everywhere we go? Yes. The short answer is yes. So, yeah, there's been some amazing studies done on this. So, yes, anytime you touch something, you're going to be leaving your DNA there.

One of the interesting things that people have found is that you get people who shed DNA more than others. So they're known as shedders. So they leave more of their DNA hanging around. And there have been studies that have kind of shown. So, you know, obviously if somebody touches a door handle, then you go and touch the same door handle. You're going to be carrying the DNA of the person who touched it before you and probably several others before that on your hands, which you then might go and touch a glass, which somebody else picks up. And so you get this kind of DNA transfer that happens across multiple objects. And that can be really important to know about in crime scenes because you can find DNA.

a particular crime scene, but it doesn't tell you how it got there. And that's something that I go into in one of the chapters of the book, DNA is not the silver bullet. Just because DNA is at a crime scene, you don't know how it got there. And that's something that has to be taken into account. Yeah. So say we, let's stick with the forensics. Say we're analyzing the DNA in the crime scene, etc.

So as we've established there, we need something to compare this against in order to determine who we think that person is. So, you know, how do we do that? Where do we get that data from? So there is a national DNA database that we have in the UK, and there are such databases around the world. Various countries have got their own kind of national DNA databases. So what happens is people will go to a crime scene and they'll pick up a DNA sample, they'll do the DNA profiling, and then they're going to compare it against the national DNA database to see if there's a hit. And it will be either people, who have already had their DNA taken because they've, you know, been arrested for recordable events,

or it can be things like it's already from another crime scene. And so it's about going crime scene to crime scene or crime scene to person is what they're trying to do. If there's nobody in the National DNA database, they can do what's known as familial searching. So this is where they look for somebody who shares enough genetic markers that makes it look like they could be a parent or a sibling or a child of the perpetrator or the John and Jane Doe, if it's this kind of, if it's looking for an unidentified individual. And then the next stage is something which isn't used here,

but it is in other parts of the world. And that's forensic investigative genetic genealogy. So let me talk to you through this. So this is not using that DNA profiling that Alec discovered and was refined. So this is not looking at those markers where you get the little repeats, the stutter. This is looking at those snips, those tiny little, single-letter difference, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them across the genome.

And the density is so great that you can upload to DNA databases, particular ones that you're allowed to, that have got other individuals who've already taken DNA tests. And because the density of the markers is so great, you can find people who look like they might be second cousins, third cousins, first cousins, sometimes half siblings, this kind of thing. And then from that you can do like what I do in DNA Family Secrets, and that's where you start to build the family trees as we were just chatting about. And then you can start to work your way down. And probably the most famous case of this is the Golden State Killer case that happened in the U.S. It wasn't the first case, but it's the first really big case where it became known.

So this was a series of burglaries and then rapes and then rapes and murders in the late 70s and early 80s in California, hence the name the Golden State Killer. And then they suddenly stop in kind of the mid-1980s. And there were no hits on the National DNA database. I mean, this was before DNA fingerprinting. So it was something that, you know, they had small amounts of DNA that they could use. And slowly they were kind of running out of DNA sample that they could use. But then they found that there was a spare kit, a spare kind of rape kit that had been taken. And it was in a freezer.

And so they decided to try this testing that's done by companies like Ancestry and 23, me. And they uploaded it to databases and they started getting the genetic matches and then they start to build the family trees. And then they managed to get it down to a set of a few individuals. Then they did DNA testing to get an idea of sort of hair and eye color because on the driver's licenses in the US that says eye color. So from that, they knew he would likely had blue eyes and then that allows them to narrow down even further. And then eventually they got down to a chat called Joseph DiAngelo, and they, you can do surreptitious DNA testing in the US, and they went outside his house, he threw his trash out, they got a tissue, and then from that they did the standard

DNA profiling, which pointed it to him, it being him. So the forensic investigative genetic genealogy is investigative. It basically can be used to help narrow down suspects and even point to a particular individual, but then DNA profiling is done. And one of the things I chat about is just the, there's a lot of kind of ethical issues we need to think about this. And the fact, it's not used here yet, but I understand the home office is looking at it. And it's about how do we put in the proper guidelines and the guardrails for how it can be used properly in this country. Of course, I'm absolutely fascinated by it because not only do I have sort of 30 years of

kind of forensic genetic background, but also I ended up doing genetic genealogy during my PhD, so for the last sort of 25 years. And then having done it for a sort of DNA family secrets. So it's a subject which I find hugely fascinating. And I'm sure we'll eventually be adopted here. And it's just making sure that you have that kind of all the ethical stuff pinned down with that. Yeah, sort of kind of related to that. I think probably some people listening will think, well, is it possible to make mistakes?

You know, if you're in something really critical, such as a murder case or something, I mean, even your own answer. or something, you know, you'd like to think that that's accurate. You know, can you get things like false positives and things like that? Well, the thing where you really have to be super careful is, I mean, you're not expecting any false positives necessarily from the DNA testing, but that, of course, is a first kind of potential issue. You're hoping that it's going to come back properly and presumably what you're doing is you're doing the testing more than once and making sure that you're getting the same results. And then it's uploading it to the database. Is it a real possibility where you could

get issues is people who are doing the family trees. Because I know from my own experience when I go onto some of the websites where people are building their own family trees and they get it wrong because they don't do the kind of the due diligence and making sure that, yes, I have got the right individual. And it's making sure you get all of the documentation, the birth certificates and everything like that to make sure that the tree that you're building is correct. So again, this is where you would have kind of guardrails in and that you would probably have, you know, at least two people working on a family tree so that you're both looking at each other's work and making sure that that's done properly. And then again, it's investigative. So eventually you get down to a particular

individual or a family of individuals. And then it would be doing the DNA profiling to be absolutely certain that you have the right individual. So it's all of these kind of little steps and guardrails and kind of guidelines that you would have to put in place to make sure that when you're doing it, what you're doing is proportional and that there are, there's checks on everything that you're doing as it's being done. And I think, you know, I've always, I've chaged the police about this a lot. It's about, you know, what cases do we want to have a look at? Presumably we're going to be confining it to violent crimes. So rapes and murders. Are there any hits on the National DNA database? No, there's not. Okay. Is there any hits from the familial searching? No, there's not.

the next stage is, is there enough DNA to even do this? Okay, there is. Okay, do we want to send this down that path then? So you have a series of kind of gates that you have to go through as you decide whether or not it's going to go through this investigation process. Yeah, so let's have a look at another topic that you talk about in the book, and that's the use of our knowledge of DNA in medical applications. So one thing that you talk about, which was in the news a while back, was Angelina Jolie, the actor who found she had, had a genetic cancer risk and had actually ended up having a preemptive mastectomy. And recently there was Chris Hemsworth, the actor, who found that he maybe had a higher risk

than average for Alzheimer's disease. So, you know, what do we know about that? How do we look for those? Yeah. So this is where I talk about how there's kind of two main types. So the first of these are genetic conditions where we know there's a really simple, straightforward reason why people develop these things. It's genetic. It's down to a particular mutation. It can be down to a single letter difference. And that will mean that you will go on to develop a particular condition. And then you've got the other types of conditions where you're more genetically predisposed. And sometimes we know more about that genetic predisposition than others. So for example, breast cancer is one where we actually know quite a lot about what somebody's genetic predisposition is going to be by having

look at genetic variants that they carry. And that was the case with Angelina Jolie. And then you get ones where there's particular conditions where it's known as polygenic. So this is where there are hundreds potentially of genetic variants that all play their part in whether or not you're more likely to develop it or less likely to develop a particular condition. But alongside that, you've got things like environment. For example, smoking, we know, increases your risk of developing cancers. And it's all about that interaction of genetics with environment. And that can be everything from, you know, how you were brought up and did you suffer trauma

and what are you eating and are you exercising. There's so many different things in our environment that can have an impact on our genetic predisposition towards particular conditions. So it's basically talking about what we know about particular conditions. and whether or not it's relatively simple or whether or not it's far more complex than that. And for some cases, we're still working it out. So say we've identified these certain, I don't know what you call them, Trigger genes or genes we should be aware of. Can we do anything about that? Can we alter them? Can we change the code?

Ah, so that's all goes into gene editing, which is something which is becoming something which is being used. So one of the things that I chat about in the book is about CRISPR and about the case of Hies-Jank-Qui, who uses CRISPR to edit the genomes of two embryos, and about how we are now getting better at this. But it's also about how do we decide how we're going to do this. Can we be certain that we're making the right kind of changes to the genome? And what conditions do we want to use this for? So there are ways of doing this, and we're developing them all of the time. And it's talking about how do we decide which ones we want to kind of treat and how do we make those decisions. Yeah, so we've talked about an awful lot there, and there's obviously much more in the book.

But it's a sort of final question. So the book's titled The Secrets of Our DNA. You know, does DNA still have more secrets that we can discover? Oh, goodness, yes. So that's the wonderful thing about our, our, field that I absolutely love is that there's so much we don't know and that we are still learning. So one of the fields I sort of chat about is the field of epigenetics, which I just find completely fascinating. So this is the fact that it's not like there's, your DNA is like a book, but like I've mentioned, it's like you get like a highlighter pen, there's invisibility cloaks, you know, dimmer switches. And that's just what we're learning about now. So it's not just your,

it's not just your genetic code. It's what's going on on top of that, which we're, which will have an effect on, yeah, predisposition towards diseases and this kind of thing. So I'm finding all of that absolutely fascinating. So yeah, no, there's so much we still don't know. I'm sure that in 10 years' time, somebody else can write another secrets of our DNA, and there'll be all new stuff that's just come out. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC's Science Focus.

That was Professor Cherie King. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Secrets of DNA, How Genetics Has Changed the World. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

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