It's a strange fact but "nice" people don't like the 1980s. And that dislike runs so deep that things perceived to be good or groundbreaking which happened in the 1980s are often transported to adjacent decades by the likes of the BBC and on-line revisionists. Tim Berners-Lee's own site biography states:
In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory
But take a look around at how the facts are mangled and that historic fact often buried by on-line "historians".
But, whether the prigs like it or not, other things besides Reagan and Thatcher happened in the 1980s and one of these things occurred midway through the decade in a lab at Leicester University when Alec Jeffreys had a "Eureka!" moment and discovered, purely by accident, DNA "fingerprinting".
And, despite its undoubted huge benefits to crime detection, this led to the worrying scene one of us witnessed in reception at Parkside Police Station, Cambridge, yesterday, where a middle aged woman was telling one of the desk staff:
"It was all so petty - he's hardly done a thing! Yet you hauled my son in the back, treated him like sh** and took his DNA for that database. He's 18 years old!"
A frightened-looking young lad stood beside the woman.
And he's on the National DNA Database for life.
Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting on 10 September 1984.
Seems very appropriate indeed.
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