The University of Cambridge’s infamous Naked Scientists will launch the UK’s first ever BBC Radio DNA fingerprinting ’‘race’ on 2 December 2005.

Budding scientists in schools across the east of England will be locking horns in a fierce fight to become tomorrow's forensic experts as they compete to reveal the identity of a villain, live on the radio from 6 to 7 pm on Sunday, 4 December. The show will be broadcast to eight counties in the East of England region.

The students will have to discover who from the Naked Scientists team left behind criminally smelly socks in the changing room. The team has tracked down five suspects seen entering the changing rooms on the day the socks were discovered and collected DNA samples from each of them, as well as DNA from the socks themselves.

Research supplies company ‘Bio-Rad’ have kitted out teams of pupils at each school with genetic fingerprinting equipment and samples of the DNA collected from the five suspects together with the environmentally-unfriendly socks. The winning team will get to keep the equipment that took them to victory, so that other pupils can continue to have fun learning about genetics. The socks, meanwhile, will be incinerated.

The schools taking part include Billericay School, Essex; Astley Cooper School, Hertfordshire; Mildenhall College of Technology, Suffolk; Downham Market High School, Norfolk; Southfield School for Girls, Kettering, Northamptonshire and Parkside Community College, Cambridge.

The Naked Scientists are a group of University of Cambridge medical and scientific students who serve up science with a sense of humour on their weekly BBC Radio programme which is broadcast live to eight counties across the east of England on Sunday evenings. It reaches out internationally to a further 40,000 people each week as an Internet podcast, available from their website.

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