What's the History of Paternity Testing?

Humans have only very recently developed scientific ways of proving who a child's biological father is, but that didn't stop us from trying beforehand. Learn the weird history of paternity tests in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff 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, who had Britain to kill them both. When
Anthony visited the family, he turned to the infant and said,

(00:22):
tell me, child, who is your father. Miraculously, the baby
pointed towards the jealous husband calmly replied that is my father,
and they lived happily ever after. You only need to
turn on daytime TV for a couple of minutes to
know that not all paternity tests deliver such welcome news.
The daytime talk show Maury is so famous for its
high drama paternity test plot lines that it sells mugs

(00:44):
and t shirts emblazoned with the catchphrase you are not
the father. While maternity has always been taken for granted
for most of history, paternity was an open question. Until
the advent of super accurate DNA testing in the nineteen eighties,
there was no way to be scientifically certain who a
baby's biological father was, but that didn't stop people from trying.

(01:06):
But we spoke with Nara Milanich, history professor at Barnard
College and author of the new book Paternity, The Elusive
Quest for the Father. She says that 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 of the time fueled

(01:26):
the paternity test frenzy by closely covering sordid stories of
cuckolded husbands and lecturist celebrities and their disputed progeny. 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 they were desperate for an objective test

(01:48):
that could solve paternity suits once and for all. Some
researchers insisted that the ridges on the roof of the
mouth contained patterns that were passed on from father to child.
Others relied on the race by pseudoscience of eugenics to
create a list of physical traits like no size, ear shape,
and hair texture that supposedly invariably passed from generation to generation.

(02:09):
But the man who really captured the popular scientific imagination
in the nineteen twenties was Dr Albert Abrams and his
A syllophorre. Abrams developed a set of theories about the
human body's electrical system, which he called the Electronic Reactions
of Abrams or e. R A. Convinced like many others,
that the key to unlocking heredity was in the blood,
he invented an instrument called and a syllaphore that purported

(02:31):
to measure the precise electronic vibrations in drops of blood.
He said Irish blood vibrated at fifteen ohms, for example,
and Jewish blood at seven ohms. Despite the suspect and
racialized science behind the syllaphorre, Judge Thomas Graham of the
Superior Court of San Francisco hired Abrams to determine the
outcome of a high profile paternity suit involving one Paul

(02:52):
of a Tory who refused to pay child support for
an infant daughter he claimed was not his. Abram's machine
found that the Tori was in deed the father, and
the case instantly made the eccentric doctor one of the
most in demand paternity experts in the world. Paternity quacks
like Abraham's got so much traction, Melaniche believes because a
frustrated legal system wanted a scientific panacea for solving the

(03:15):
paternity problem. Also, American society in the nineteen twenties was
grappling with anxieties over rapidly changing gender roles and the
newly public sexual independence of women. These tests, as inaccurate
as they actually were, offered the air of calm assurance.
But what's even more remarkable is that in the nineteen thirties,
scientists discovered that human blood really did contain some definitive

(03:38):
clues to a person's parentage. It wasn't electronic vibrations, but
blood grouping, or what we now know as blood typing
A B, A, B, O, etcetera. Blood grouping follows some
immutable rules. For example, if a baby has type A
B blood and his mother has type A blood, then
the father must have B or A B blood. Finally,

(03:59):
judges use actual science to determine if a man could
realistically be a child's father. But even science, of course,
has limitations. In the early nineteen forties, famed entertainer and
womanizer Charlie Chaplin was taken to court in a paternity
case brought by his former protege, Joan Barry. Barry was
twenty three and Chaplain fifty four, and she alleged that

(04:20):
he was the father of her newborn baby, 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 when the results came in, they conclusively
showed that Chaplain could not be the father of Carol Anne.
Case closed right Not so fast, the jury found that
Chaplin was indeed Carol Anne's father, if not biologically, then

(04:43):
by 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 had somehow managed to get more complicated. Melanich said,
the problem with the Chaplain suit wasn't with the test.
It was that people have different definitions of the father,
one that's biological and one that's social. We've asked science

(05:06):
to solve something that isn't scientific. In ancient Rome, a
husband was legally considered the father of his wife's children
that no matter their paternity. This legal principle is still
law in many U s. Jurisdictions. A husband may still
owe child support to a child he raised, even if
a paternity test says he's not the real dad. A
decade after the Chaplain case, in nineteen fifty three, California

(05:29):
law was changed to basically say that if a paternity
test showed that a man was not the father of
a child, then the matter would be considered resolved. Other
states followed suit. Meanwhile, DNA paternity tests, which went mainstream
in the nineteen nineties, have taken all the guests work
out of determining the identity of the biological father. Milanich
says that they are ninety nine point nine nine percent

(05:49):
accurate if done right, and can now be bought for
around fourteen dollars at your local drug store or online,
a plus a one thirty lab fee for running the test.
There are even mobile DNA test sting bands where the
full testing can be conducted. But, as Melanich argues in
her book, even the perfect paternity test leaves a lot
of questions unanswered. Quote, who, as a society do we

(06:10):
want fathers to be? That's not something a geneticist consult.
Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots
of other topics that can be defined in multiple ways
based on science and culture, visit our home planet, how

(06:31):
stuff Works dot com, and for more podcasts from my
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