Radio Times, May 1996.

Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, a world expert and past Reith lecturer on DNA and  genetics, met a lot of nasty people in making In the  Blood, from Parkhurst to the ludicrously mis-named Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Centre. But, unlike some of  his predecessors, he entered their cells without an agenda. DNA is found in every cell in your body. It is subdivided into 60,000 genes, which carries the inherited material that distinguishes you. How relevant is it to mitigating outrage, explaining away sin, perhaps even offering a pathway to a medical treatment to prevent crime? Or, as reformed former criminal John McVicar asserts, do villains turn to crime out of free will?

Professor Steve Jones has some of the answers. We are sitting in his third floor office in Wolfson House, just north of the Euston Road in London. Professor Jones, fit, tanned and lithe, with a mellifluous Mid-Wales accent, explains science to the layman better than almost anybody. I find him slumped low in a chair busy on a mobile phone. He tells me how Dutch scientist Dr Han Brunner was   recently approached by a lady terrified of men behaving  badly in her family. There seemed to be something "in the  blood" and she feared that if she gave birth to a son, he  too would grow up a violent, tempestuous chip off the old   block. With the menfolk's cooperation Dr Brunner peeled away the machismo and peered into their irreducible genetic essence. He made a startling discovery.

One young man was found to have an anomaly in his DNA, the chemical code in the shape of a twisted ladder found in every cell. Just one letter wrong in three thousand million, but that was enough. That mutation changed an enzyme, which altered the chemistry of the brain, which messed up the way the nerves communicate with one other and pushed this man towards the threshold of rage. Had Brunner discovered the "gene for crime"? Professor Jones is well aware of the perils of science  abused. They permeate the very fabric of this building.  Its founder, Victorian psychologist Francis Galton, had  great faith in eugenics, which he believed could be used  to weed out the insane, the unfit and the criminal. "And   we all know where that ended up - Nazi Germany. There's a hell of a long shadow over genetics." "The reason the US is a dangerous place has nothing to do with genetics. The UK is the safest place in almost the world in terms of murder because we are a non-violent society with no guns. End of story. So why ask a geneticist?