Fred Turner, a 17-year-old from Yorkshire, built a functional DNA testing machine in his bedroom to see if his brother had a mutated gene that causes ginger hair. He was awarded a top engineering prize as well as a place to study biochemistry at Oxford. Continue reading for a video and more information.
Here’s what Fred has to say: “After years of jokes from my friends saying me and Gus have different dads, I built the machine to test once and for all why my brother is ginger and I’m not. The theory is that red hair appears in people with a mutated gene. They have two copies of a recessive gene which causes a mutation in the MC1R protein in DNA.”
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