[tt] Independent: The DNA cracker: closing the book on Jack

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The DNA cracker: closing the book on Jack
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3022246.ece
[Thanks to Sarah for this.]
7.10.3

This man could have revealed the surname of the Yorkshire Ripper long
before Peter Sutcliffe was a suspect. How? He explains all to Rob Sharp


The mellifluous sound of pan pipes is pumped into a private
apartment in Wolfson College, Oxford. Here, Professor Bryan Sykes,
one of the world's leading genetics experts, explains why he began
investigating people's family trees. "Funnily enough, for most of
the early part of my career I was doing research in inherited
diseases of the skeleton," he says. "I deliberately set out to do
something entirely useless."

In spite of his "best attempts" at a dead-end career, Sykes'
working life has been long and prolific: when there has been a
major discovery about how DNA relates to people's lineage, he has
often been behind it. In 1989, he reported on the recovery of DNA
from bones found in archaeological digs (reported in the journal
Nature). A decade later, he claimed that 97 per cent of modern
Europeans are descended from, amazingly, just seven women.

In 2000, he founded Oxford Ancestors, the world's first company
offering the public the chance to trace their ancestral roots
through DNA analysis, and published the bestselling The Seven
Daughters of Eve the following year.

Sykes' techniques primarily involve using people's Y-chromosomes -
"packages" of DNA that only men carry. Y-chromosomes are passed
from father to father. The chromosomes have a "fingerprint",
defined by the order of molecules. Sykes was the first to prove, by
isolating and identifying such fingerprints, that people with the
same surnames are related. This is not as obvious as it sounds -
researchers felt that marital infidelity had blurred such links.

Sykes' research is not just a matter of curiosity. He is in talks
with the Government over implementing a trial scheme that could
potentially identify murderers' surnames from crime-scene DNA. He
believes 70 rapes and murders in Britain could be solved every year
this way.

With the backing of colleagues at Leicester University, he hopes
the Government will build a DNA database, cross-referencing samples
against the surnames of donors.

In an expensive-looking suit (this is no impoverished academic),
the professor runs through possible uses of the database, including
paternity tests carried out without the fathers' knowledge. He
talks of brazen British journalists who repeatedly approached him
with the promise of getting hold of strands of Prince Harry's hair.
"I wouldn't do that. One of the rules of DNA sampling is that you
have to have informed consent from one of the people the sample is
from," he says.

In the 1980s, Sykes' career shifted from medical doctor to work
normally associated with genealogists. "We were analysing large
families, and found it was common to discover children who could
not - due to the genetics - be the children of the people
involved," he says. "We talked about the idea of whether people who
have the same name have the same Y-chromosome. But we thought, 'Of
course they won't,' because illegitimacy must have been greater in
the past."

If Y-chromosomes were "spread" through infidelity and sons born out
of wedlock, it would cause diversity in surnames attached to
specific Y-chromosomes, he explained. Scientific thought at the
time suggested that such infidelities over time would ultimately
mean little linkage between Y-chromosomes and surnames. However, by
tracing his relationship to another prominent academic - Sir
Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College - Bryan Sykes deduced
that this was not the case.

"Richard and myself were genetically related," he says. He met the
other Sykeses at a conference, and decided to test his theories.
"Of the other Sykeses that exist, 70 per cent have the same
Y-chromosome." The infidelity rate to get this result was 1.3 per
cent per generation, which is lower than levels seen today.

This led him to consider the potential impact of Y-chromosome and
surname linkage to crime scenes. Sykes believes that the police
could take DNA from a crime scene and solve crimes by
cross-referencing it with a database of Y-chromosomes from men of
known surnames.

"What we are trying to persuade the Home Office to do is sponsor a
large-scale trial," Sykes says. "It wouldn't work every time; for
example, with the surname Smith there would be all sorts of
associated Y-chromosomes. But, apart from that, once you found the
DNA at the scene of a crime you would correlate that with the
surnames on the database and you might come up with a list of 30
names. Obviously you would be given a big leg-up in your
investigations." He adds: "I always think: how much quicker would
the Yorkshire Ripper have been caught if they had known his surname
was Sutcliffe?"

Much of this research has been carried out in association with
Professor Mark Jobling of the University of Leicester's genetics
department. Jobling says: "It seems to me that every year there are
a large number of unsolved rapes and murders. This is a technique
that promises to assist those investigations. When cases have a
pool of suspects this could be invaluable."

Both Sykes and Jobling stress that the technique would most likely
be used to reduce the size of a pool of suspects rather than
provide evidence to be used in a court of law. Sykes adds: "Also,
many of these cases are perpetrated by people who have no criminal
record. But it could help the officers involved to ask people for
help in their inquiries." Sykes cites the example of a 15-year-old
boy in the US who was conceived via a sperm donation. He used his
own Y-chromosome and cross-referenced it against a database, that
does, unlike the UK, link Y-chromosomes to surnames. He discovered
his father's name and managed to track him down.

Sykes is now using Y-chromosome analysis to reconcile families from
different countries where there was previously not conclusive proof
that the two groups were related. He's currently inviting members
of the British "Learmonth" family and the Russian "Lermontovs" to
get in touch for research.

Members of the former clan include the entrepreneur and founder of
the Crussh Juice Bar chain, James Learmond, and Variety's New York
correspondent, Michael Learmonth. Famous people with the latter
surname include Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, the 19th-century poet
who was friends with the great Alexander Pushkin.

"Genealogists are finding out new things about the Y-chromosome
that we didn't know before, and there aren't many branches of
academic science that do that," Sykes says. "I can only think of
astronomy where new comets are discovered by old buffers in their
garden with binoculars... or maybe ornithology. As an academic, it
is nice to see your work continued by hundreds of thousands of
people."

Details on Oxford Ancestors can be found at www.oxfordancestors.com

You can't escape your genes

By Mary Morgan

* The first criminal caught by DNA testing was Colin Pitchfork in
1987. The Leicester banker was found guilty of the murder of two
15-year-old girls in 1983 and 1986. In the world's first DNA
screening programme, 5,000 men gave blood and saliva samples.
Pitchfork's matched.

* DNA famously linked OJ Simpson to the deaths of his ex-wife
Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The case
highlighted difficulties of DNA evidence as the defence questioned
methods and procedures.

* In 2003, Jeffrey Gafoor pleaded guilty to the murder of Lynette
White in 1988. Fresh DNA evidence had produced 600 near-matches on
the national UK database. One was with Gafoor's 14-year-old nephew.
It was the first case of an innocent relative being used to
identify the criminal.

* DNA evidence was eventually crucial in the case of the killing of
Damilola Taylor, 10, stabbed in Peckham in November 2000. In August
2006, two brothers were convicted of manslaughter.

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