Previous research had shown, for instance, that 29% of the variation in whether or not people invest in stocks depends on their DNA. Studies of professional traders had demonstrated that approximately 25% of individual variation in portfolio risk is due to genetics.

WSJ: Jonah Lehrer on Genetics, Dopamine and Wall Street | Head Case

What we were interested in doing back in those early days of human molecular genetics was just trying to find out some basic information about inherited variation in our DNA. And it was purely by accident in those studies that we generated, totally out of the blue, what proved to be the very first DNA fingerprint.

NPR: Pioneering DNA Forensics