What's the History of Paternity Testing?

Before DNA-based paternity tests were accurate and inexpensive, scientists (and pseudoscientists) claimed all kinds of things could work. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/history-paternity-testing.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Vogelbaum here. According to legend, the twelfth century priest Saint
Anthony was once approached by a distraught woman whose jealous
husband was convinced that their newborn baby wasn't his and
had threatened to kill them both. When Anthony visited the family,

(00:24):
he turned to the infant and said, tell me, child,
who is your father. Miraculously, the baby pointed toward the
jealous husband calmly replied that is my father, and they
all lived happily ever after. So yes, a questions and
drama about paternity go a long way back before daytime

(00:45):
talk shows like Maury, though as far as we know,
Saint Anthony never sold mugs or t shirts emblazoned with
the catchphrase you are not the father. Until the advent
of accurate DNA testing in the nineteen eighties, there was
no way to be one hundred percent certain of who
a child's biological father was, but that didn't stop people

(01:06):
from trying. Nineteenth and twentieth century scientists and pseudoscientists were
obsessed with unlocking the mystery of paternity and tried just
about everything to discover the holy grail of heredity. Meanwhile,
newspapers fueled the paternity test frenzy by closely covering sordid
stories of cuckolded husbands, lecherous celebrities, and their disputed progeny.

(01:33):
In the nineteen twenties, for example, there was a rash
of anxiety in the United States over babies allegedly being
swapped in hospital maternity wards. Judges were put in the
Solomon like position of having to decide who these babies
legitimate parents were, and people were desperate for an objective
test that could solve paternity suits once and for all.

(01:55):
Some researchers insisted that the ridges on the roof of
the mouth contained patterns that were passed from father to child.
Others relied on the racist pseudoscience of eugenics to create
a list of physical traits like nose size, ear shape,
and hair texture that they claimed passed from generation to generation.
But the man who really captured the popular scientific imagination

(02:19):
in the nineteen twenties was doctor Albert Abrams and his acillophore.
Abrams had developed theories about the human body's electrical system,
which he called the electronic reactions of Abrams or Ra,
convinced like many others, that the key to unlocking heredity
was in the blood, he invented a preposterous looking instrument

(02:42):
called an acillophore that purported to measure the precise electronic
vibrations in drops of blood based on heredity of Irish
blood vibrated at fifteen olms of Jewish blood at seven oms,
et cetera. Despite these suspect and racialized science behind the
ausillophor one, Judge Thomas Graham of the Superior Court of

(03:04):
San Francisco hired Abrams to determine the outcome of a
high profile paternity suit involving a man named Paul Vittori
who refused to pay child support for an infant daughter
that he claimed wasn't his. Abram's magical machine found that
Vittori was indeed the father, instantly making the eccentric doctor
one of the most in demand paternity experts in the world.

(03:30):
For the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works.
Spoke with Nara Millinitch back in twenty nineteen. She's a
history professor at Barnard College an author of the book Paternity,
The Elusive Quest for the Father. She said, if we
can agree that an electronic blood test is crazy and
that this invention is ludicrous. Why did it get so

(03:50):
much press and why did a California judge think this
was useful technology? Milanitch believes the answer to why like
abrams got so much traction is because a frustrated legal
system wanted scientific panacea for solving the paternity problem. Also,
American society in the nineteen twenties was grappling with anxieties

(04:13):
over rapidly changing gender roles in a new culture of
feminine sexual independence. These tests, as inaccurate as they actually were,
offered the air of assurance. But what's even more remarkable
is what happened next, because in the nineteen thirties, scientists
discovered that human blood really did contain some definitive clues

(04:36):
to a person's parentage. It wasn't electronic vibrations, but blood grouping,
or what we now know as blood typing a b
ABO and positive and negative versions of each A. Blood
grouping follows some immutable rules. For example, if a baby
has Type A B blood and his mother has Type

(04:58):
A blood, then the father must have bee or baby blood. Finally,
judges could use actual science to determine if a man
could realistically be a child's father, but even science, it
turns out, has limitations. In the nineteen forties, famed entertainer
and womanizer Charlie Chaplin was taken to court in a

(05:21):
paternity case brought by his former protege Joan Berry. Barry
was twenty three years old and Chaplain fifty four at
the time, and she alleged that he was the father
of her newborn baby, named Carol Anne. The court case,
deliriously covered in the papers, featured the first high profile
use of blood group testing in a paternity suit, and

(05:42):
when the results came in, they conclusively showed that Chaplain
could not be the father of Carol Anne. The case
closed right, science wins the day. Not so fast. The jury,
composed of eleven women and one man, found that Chaplain
was indeed Carol Anne's father, if not biologically, then by

(06:02):
the merit of his close relationship with her mother and
his infamous history of marrying and quickly discarding much younger women.
Despite the real progress made in paternity science, the problem
of paternity hadn't gotten less complicated. Milinich said. The problem
with the Chaplain's suit wasn't with the test. It was

(06:24):
that people have different definitions of the father, the one
that's biological and one that's social. We've asked science to
solve something that isn't scientific. Going back to ancient Rome,
a husband was legally considered the father of his wife's children,
no matter their paternity. This legal principle is still the
law in many US jurisdictions. A husband may still owe

(06:47):
child support to a child he raised, even if a
paternity test says he's not the real dad. However, California
law was changed in nineteen fifty three to basically say
that if a test showed that a man was the
father of a child, then the matter would be considered resolved,
and other states have followed suit. DNA paternity tests, which

(07:08):
went mainstream in the nineteen nineties, have taken all of
the guests work out of determining the identity of a
biological father. They're now something like ninety nine point nine
nine percent accurate if done right, and can be bought
for around one hundred bucks at your local drug store
or online, or even conducted in a mobile DNA testing van. But,

(07:29):
as Milinich argued in her book, even the perfect paternity
test leaves a lot of questions unanswered. She said, who,
as a society do we want fathers to be? That's
not something a geneticist can solve. Today's episode is based
on the article Who's Your Daddy? The History of paternity

(07:51):
testing on how stuffworks dot com, written by Dave Ruse.
Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with
how stuffworks dot com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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