 Elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1970 he is best known for his studies of cytoplasmic inheritance and quantitative genetics.In recounting his own career, Nobel prize winner Sir Paul Nurse recounts how his lack of a foreign language (essential for university study in the UK in those days) had seen him rebuffed from several universities.He met Jinks fortuitously, and, recognising a promising intellect, Jinks smoothed the obstacles from Nurse's path, leading to his successful enrollment and, subsequently, Nobel winning discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases.