This technique was named after its inventor, Edwin Southern, a British biochemist who developed the technique in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1970s. He is a 2005 Lasker Award-winning molecular biologist. His award is contributed by his invention of the Southern blotting, now a common laboratory procedure, when he was working at the University of Edinburgh. As a result, subsequent blotting techniques have used similar nomenclature, for example Northern blotting used for the transfer of RNA, Western blotting used for the transfer of proteins and Southwestern blotting which is used for the characterization of proteins that bind DNA.
