DNA Fingerprinting Discovered / Abebe Bikila became first Black African Olympic gold medalist - September 10

DNA fingerprinting was discovered on this day in 1984. / On this day in 1960, Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila set a world record for the marathon at the Olympics in Rome.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey y'all, Eve's here. We're doubling up today with two
events in history, one from me and one from former
host Tracy V. Wilson. On with the show. Welcome to
this day in History class from how Stuff Works dot
com and from the desk of Stuff you Missed in
History Class. It's the show where we explore the past
one day at a time with a quick look at
what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:26):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's September. Sir Alec Jeffries
discovered DNA fingerprinting on this day, in completely by accident.
Jefferies had been inquisitive and really interested in science from
a very early age. Some of his favorite toys in
quotation marks when he was a child were a microscope
and a chemistry set. This was back in a time

(00:49):
when chemistry sets were a lot more involved than they
tend to be when given to children today. He earned
a BA in biochemistry from Oxford in two and a
pH d into netics, also from Oxford. He was studying
the way inherited diseases and conditions are passed down through families.

(01:10):
As part of this work, he found a short stretch
of DNA that was repeated across different chromosomes in one sample,
and he had a hypothesis maybe this little repeated length
of DNA was unique to a particular individual. So he
extracted some DNA from both people and animals, attached it

(01:31):
to pieces of photographic film, added radioactive probes to spot
these repeated sections of DNA, and then left it in
a developing tank over the weekend. When he got back
to work on Monday, September tenth, he pulled this film
out of the developer and his first thought was that
he had a completely unusable mess. It wasn't what he

(01:51):
had been trying to make at all. It was this
jumble of bars and blobs. But then as he looked
at it a little more, he realized he was seeing
each person an animal whose DNA he had used in
this experiment. They had a unique pattern of bars and blobs.
It was like a bar code that could accurately identify

(02:12):
who that DNA had come from, and to take it
a step further, people in the same family had similar
but still unique patterns. He discovered this at about five
minutes past nine in the morning. It was pretty much
first thing in the day. He immediately told the rest
of his team that he thought they were onto something
really important. This was the first DNA fingerprint and Jeffreys

(02:35):
and his team published their discovery and the journal Nature
in March of There was some initial disbelief, even among
geneticists and among other scientists. People thought this idea that
you could identify someone based on a tiny sample of
their DNA was a little far fetched. But almost immediately

(02:55):
DNA fingerprinting started to revolutionize everything from the British citizenship
process to criminal investigations to paternity disputes. A lot of
the first uses of DNA fingerprinting were about proving that
immigrants to the United Kingdom were related to a citizen
of the UK and were entitled consequently to becoming British citizens.

(03:17):
A lot of times these were disputed cases. They were
people who had tried to immigrate to the UK and
been turned down. The first use of DNA fingerprinting in
a criminal case was in the murders of Lynda Man
and Don Ashworth. DNA fingerprinting was first used to establish
that they had been murdered by the same culprit, and
then it was used to confirm the identity of that culprit,

(03:39):
a man named Colin Pitchfork. Since then, DNA fingerprinting has
become a major part of criminal investigations, both to identify
suspects and to exonerate people who are wrongfully convicted. It has,
of course, also raised a lot of questions about ethics
and privacy. This was a massive change in the ability
to identify people based on things that you might be

(04:03):
able to gather from them covertly. DNA fingerprinting has also
been used to identify the remains of historical figures, people
of historical note or even infamy. In DNA fingerprinting strongly
suggested that a set of human remains found in Brazil
belonged to Nazi Dr Josef Mengela. It's also been used
to confirm the identities of remains believed to be the

(04:25):
Romanov family. Jeffrey's earned a knighthood for his work in
he was awarded the Copy Medal of the Royal Society,
and he's earned numerous other awards as well. Thanks to
Eve's Jeff Cope for her research work on today's episode,
Antatari Harrison for all her audio work on this podcast.
You can subscribe to the Day in History Class and
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and wherever else you get podcasts,

(04:49):
and you can tune in tomorrow for an address on
sisterhood and brotherhood. Welcome to this Day in History Class,
where we bring you a new tip bit from history
every day. The day was September nineteen sixty. Ethiopian marathon

(05:23):
runner Abebe Bikola became the first black African to win
a gold medal in the Olympics. Bikola was a private
in the army and in the bodyguard of highlight Selassie,
the Emperor of Ethiopia. When Bikola was training, Swedish coach
Ony Niskanen recognized his running skill. He would often run

(05:44):
twenty miles and do repeated sprints of fift and he
would often run those distances barefoot. Pikola won Ethiopia's Olympic
selection marathon in Addis Ababa in July of nineteen sixty
at high altitude. Next month, he won another marathon with
a time of two hours twenty one minutes in twenty

(06:05):
three seconds. Niskanen was convinced that Bikola could win at
the Olympics. He entered Vikola in the nineteen sixty Olympics
in Rome. The September ten marathon was staged to pass
a bunch of Roman landmarks. The course would begin in
the evening at the Campidogo on Capitoline Hill and meander
through Rome. Bikola chose to run barefoot, as that is

(06:29):
how he was used to running and the running shoes
he came to Rome with we're causing blisters. Soldiers held
torches to light the path along the Appian Way. By
the sixteenth mile of the marathon, Vikola and Moroccan Roddy
bin Abdessalam were tied for the lead, but Vigola had
saved his surge for the last mile or so of

(06:50):
the race, as he had discussed with his coach. The
Obelisk of Axim was an old Ethiopian artifact stolen by
invading Italian troops during World War Two. As he passed
the obelisk a second time, he made it out in
front of Roddy. The marathon finished at the illuminated Arch
of Constantine, just outside the coliseum. Bikola won the marathon

(07:14):
with a world record of two hours, fifteen minutes in
sixteen point two seconds. The next year, Bikolo won marathons
in Greece, Japan, and Czechoslovakia. After he finished fifth in
the Boston Marathon in nineteen sixty three, he returned to
the army in Ethiopia, but by nineteen sixty four, Bikolo

(07:36):
was back at the Olympics after running two hours sixteen
minutes in eighteen seconds at altitude in the Olympic Trials
in Oddis Ababa. Just six weeks before the Tokyo Olympics,
he had surgery for appendicitis. Though he was not expected
to compete, he joined the marathon anyway, and he won

(07:56):
the Olympic gold medal again with a record breaking time
of two hours, twelve minutes and eleven point two seconds.
Bikola continued to run marathons and made it to the
nineteen sixty eight Olympics, but he had to drop out
of that Olympic marathon after about ten miles or sixteen
kilometers because of an injury. That was the last time

(08:18):
he would compete in the marathon. In nineteen sixty nine,
Bikolo was in a car crash that paralyzed him. After that,
he began participating in archery competitions and games for disabled athletes.
He was an honored guest at the nineteen seventy two
Munich Olympics. He died in October of nineteen seventy three

(08:40):
of a cerebral hemorrhage. Bikolo was not the first ever
black African to win an Olympic medal. That was like Corte,
a Ghanaian boxer who became the first Black African Olympic
medalist when he got silver in nineteen sixty. I'm each
Chef Coote, and hopefully you know a little more about

(09:00):
history today than you did yesterday. Get more Notes from
History on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at t D I
h C podcast tune in tomorrow for another Day in History.

(09:21):
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