The scientist who proved the body of King Richard III had been found

Turi King is one of the most pre-eminent geneticists in the world, not just because of her work identifying Richard in 2013, but also as a proponent of genetic genealogy, writes Steve Boggan

Now King is helping people piece together the jigsaw of their past (Professor Turi King)

There is something awe-inspiring about the moment scientists make astonishing discoveries, whether it was Archimedes springing from his bath and shouting “eureka!” or Newton grunting “ouch” after an apple fell on his head.

When Professor Turi King made hers, she leapt up and did a little dance around the laboratory. She hadn’t identified principles relating to gravity or buoyancy, but she had proved that a skeleton found in a car park in Leicester were the remains of King Richard III.

“I can feel it now,” she says. “It’s like a little shiver of excitement. We were looking at the DNA of a living relative of Richard, and I was opening files that had come back from the sequencing machine with results to see if we had a match. We only had fragments of Richard’s DNA – it was too old and degraded for strands of any length – so piecing it together was like a jigsaw puzzle.