Short Stuff: The History of Paternity Testing

Paternity testing. It wasn't science for many years, yet they still tried to do it. Learn all about it in 12 minutes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Dave. Be quiet, let's go. So we're talking about
paternity testing in the history of paternity testing, which is
amazing because it's all pretty new as far as really
being able to do paternity testing. Yeah, you and I
grew up in a world where I mean pretty much

(00:27):
from the moment we realized that that would be an
issue that somebody would need to solve, it was pretty
much solved because if we we grew up in a
world where you could genetically test for paternity like testing
markers on white blood cells and produced basically nine accurate
assessment of whether somebody was the father of a child

(00:47):
or not. Prior to us coming of age. In this
age of genetic paternity testing, however, it was a real problem, Chuck,
like a longstanding problem. Apparently. Yeah. Should we talk about
the story of Saint Anthony. I was hoping you'd ask
twelve century priests. Saint Anthony. At one point a woman

(01:08):
came to him and she said, you know what, my
jealous husband thinks that he's not the father. He thinks
I stepped out and cuckolded him, and uh, he's threatening
to kill me and this child. And so Anthony went
to the family and said, I'm going to do a test.
It's called a paternity test. And he went to the
little baby and said, who's your daddy, And the baby

(01:31):
pointed to the jealous husband, this is an infant and
said that is my father. This is an infant. End
of story. Um, so Saint Anthony said, and like left
as he was known to do, and became a saint
shortly after that, right at the end of this episode.
Now it's not the end because a very smart person

(01:53):
named Nara Milanich, who's a history professor at Barnard College,
has authored a book called Paternity colon the Elusive Quest
for the Father where it really and Dave Rouse, our
old pal, wrote this article and um and did he
talk to Nera I believe so, Yeah, and even interviewed

(02:14):
her and she really got down on this topic of
of researching the history of paternity. And it's pretty interesting because, uh,
in the early days, like all early days of science,
and when there was a lot of pseudoscience going on,
they were doing all kinds of wacky stuff. Yeah, because
again people were like, what are we what are we
gonna do. We have no idea how to prove how

(02:35):
to prove paternity or disproved paternity, And there is a
lot of people who really want an answer to this.
So because the need was so great, um quacks were
allowed to kind of fill the void for a little while,
especially apparently in the nine twenties there was a um
the nation was gripped in a panic that babies were
being switched and maternity wards and hospitals too. So it

(02:57):
wasn't just the idea that your wife stepped out on
your had an affair um with another man, and that
this wasn't your child. Like men and women wanted to
be able to prove a child was theirs, but there
was just no way to do that scientifically. So, like
you said, pseudo science said, hey, we'll try this for
a little while. Yeah, And so a quack might step
in and say, we need to look at the roof

(03:18):
of the mouth, because uh, we want to determine if
they've eatn any Captain Crunch peanut butter cereal lately, but
just the flesh, bloody flush dangling from the roof of
the mouth. No, they thought the ridges on the roof
of the mouth had patterns sort of like a fingerprint
that were passed from father to child. Complete bunk. Yeah,
but imagine that examle but that wasn't fun. I don't

(03:42):
know blockchaw anyone. Yeah, Like, how are they gonna see
the roof of your mouth? Just gonna feel around or
maybe do an impression test? That does not sound pleasant.
What someone sticking their fingers in the roof of your mouth? Yeah,
and feeling it seems calming to me. What eugenics comes next? Uh?

(04:03):
And that is like, hey, let's look at your let's
measure your nose and ears and feel your hair, and
we'll determine that way if this is your father, and
be really racist about it. Right. And then a dude
came along in the nies named Dr Albert Abrams and
his ah, his bunk science machine, the oscilla four. Oh

(04:27):
nice pronunciation, Charles. So. Dr Abrams not only came up
with the oscilla four, I'm going to say it a
different way, the acillaphor. Okay um, he came up with
what the oscillophor measures, which makes the whole thing totally
made up. But he said that if you measure blood
with an ascile of four. Now I'm not gonna say

(04:48):
it either way. Um, you will get what's called the
electronic reactions of Abrams, which is a measure of the
electrical movement or electrical vibrations in blood, and that the
vibrations in the blood was related to your ethnic heritage.
That's right. And if you're Irish, you're gonna vibrate your

(05:08):
blood will at fifteen ohms to Jewish seven olms. Everybody
knows that, and on down the line. Uh. And so
this was the only thing going at the time, So
judges turned to Abram's particular judge named Thomas Graham Uh
in San Francisco. He hired him to determine a very
high profile paternity case involving a guy named Paul Vittori

(05:32):
who was not good an wait a minute on behalf
of all listeners, chuck, I'm sorry, that's how you're gonna say,
Paul victory, thank you. And he said, I'm not gonna
pay child support for my infant daughter. It's not my daughter.
So they brought in Abram's two court and they did
the little blood vibration and said you are the father

(05:52):
because your vibe, your blood is vibrating at the correct
uh rate. YEA and that was that, and everybody said
this is a gross miscarriage of justice, and the judges like,
what else are you gonna do? We can't do anything
like this is just as good a guess as any
But what's funny is this was in the nineteen twenties.
I believe right within a decade um, there would actually

(06:14):
be a scientific basis for testing blood to determine paternity
one way or the other. And Chuck, we're gonna talk
about that right after this message break, Chuck Kuld. That's

(06:47):
a great set up, buddy, Thank you very much. So
we we tease science finally coming into the picture, um,
and it came through with blood types. Basically, they figured
out that there was such thing as blood types, which,
by the way, way we did a really great live
show on blood types before. That was a good way
to see so um and my father in law shouted
out that I'm pregnant. That's right, yeah from the from

(07:10):
the audience, Well we're testing my blood. Yeah we tested
blood on stage. Yeah and got he got bigger laughs
than I did the entire show. But anyway, Um, the
fact that blood types were proven, somebody figured out that
oh wait, you inherit your blood types from your parents,
so we can go a pretty far away in ruling
somebody in or out is the possible father of a child. Yeah,

(07:32):
not obviously, you're nine nine nine, But there are some
things we know. Um, if the baby has a B
blood type, and you know the mother has type A
blood type, then the father's got to have either B
or a B. And so they could really narrow down
in a scientific way, like a hundred times more than
they ever could in the past. And this came like

(07:53):
really to the public. Four um, which is a phrase
I just made up. During a Charlie Chaplin paternity case.
Charlie Chaplin, the beloved Charlie Chaplin, was sued for paternity
by his longtime assistant Joan Barry. Yeah, he had a
knack for the young ladies and loving him and leaving him.

(08:16):
And Joan Barry was twenty three when Chaplin was fifty four,
and she said, this little baby Caroline is Charlie's daughter,
and um, I'm kind of tired of this pattern that
he's developed, of of getting young women pregnant and then
leaving them in the cold. So I'm going to take
him to court. And they took him to court, and

(08:37):
they used science and they showed that he was not
the father of Caroline. Right, So that was it. Right now,
now you'd think he'd be off the hook, And that
would have been the case had that had this case
been tried ten fifteen years later. But instead the jury said, well, okay,
he's not biologically the father, but because of his close
relationship with Joan, he is Caroline's father there for all

(09:00):
intentsive purposes. So we're you're still going to be allowed
to sue him for child support. That's right. Of the
twelve person jury. There were eleven women and one man,
and they roundly said sorry, Charlie, right, and he just
sat there silently, Yeah, that's right, and walked into a wall. Yeah.
His facial expression said it all though. So I think

(09:20):
what in nineteen fifty three, thirteen years later, California law said, actually,
we're not going to decide this by jury like that.
If if we take a scientific test and it shows
that someone's not the father, then they're not the father, right,
We're just gonna leave it at that. And then after
California passed that law, other states said, you know, it's
not a bad idea altogether. So we're gonna do that too,

(09:41):
and then the whole thing, just like we were saying,
all of it just went to the wayside when they
figured out genetic testing first in the eighties, but then
by the nineties it had been developed enough and the
tests had become cheap enough that it was very much
widespread and used routinely and had completely supplanted blood typing
as the test paternity so much so, and it's gotten

(10:02):
so cheap that Maury Povich has an ongoing thing on
his moriy show, the Daytime Talk Show, where um yeah,
he routinely tests and then reveals on air the results
of paternity tests for guests and like plays it up.
There's all sorts of drama, and apparently they have mugs
and t shirts with the catchphrase you are not the
father emblazoned on its high drama. And every every day

(10:26):
Connie Chung gets up and looks herself in the mirror
and she's like, I've got dignity enough for the both
of us. I always forget they're married. Yeah, because the
things like the coffee mugs, I say you are not
the father, It kind of distances the two in your mind.
You got Povich that's right. So obviously it's like you said,

(10:49):
it got so cheap that you can get these tests
now for around fifteen bucks or less, which is a
great deal. But then of course you gotta pay the
lab fees. That's where they get you with that on
exactly over a hundred dollars to to get that lab tested.
Because you can you can go to your local drug store,
but that's not going to tell you anything. It's not
like a pregnancy test. No, No, you still have to

(11:12):
have it read by a t leave reader. That's right. Um,
I think that's it, right, Chuck. Yeah, I've never taken
a paternity test, nor have I hooray, hooray chuck um.
If you want to know more about fraternity testing in
the history of it, go check out this article by
Dave Rouse on how stuff Works. And since I said that,

(11:32):
that means it's the end of the short stuff Short
stuff because Stuff you Should Know is a production of
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