February 13, 2020 • 26 mins
Some of life's fundamental questions include, 'who am I?' and 'where do I come from?'. As at-home DNA test kits become more and more popular, those philosophical musings have become big business. But what happens when the results are more than you bargained for? On this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Katie sits down with podcast host and author Dani Shapiro, who shares her shocking story about finding out, in her 50s, that the beloved man who raised her was not her biological father. With direct-to-consumer DNA testing expected to reach 100 million people in just a few years, Dani’s experience is far from unique — millions of people are about to come face-to-face with some hard truths about their histories. So what are the hugely profitable companies behind these kits doing to support customers who receive life-altering news? Katie speaks to one woman who took matters into her own hands after the company who made her test wouldn’t even get on the phone with her, turning her DNA results into a global support network for people like her.
For more about Dani’s book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, click here or visit PenguinRandomHouse.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic and welcome to next question.
Who Am I? That's considered life's most fundamental question, and
it's quickly followed by where do I come from? Sure
both are somewhat philosophical, but in the age of rampant
home DNA test kids, those questions have become something more
(00:21):
big business. More than twenty six million people around the
world have turned to home ancestry or DNA tests hoping
to find out who they really are. The simple test
connected her with the mom she had never met, a
reunion for a mom and her son after nearly three
decades apart. Her sisters, born fifteen months apart and adopted
(00:42):
at birth, never knew each other existed until these DNA
tests incredibly popular. But what happens when the news is
more than we bargained for? Disturbing results, emotional fallout, and
even privacy issues. So today my next question, what really
makes us who we are? I think our sense of
(01:04):
identity in the very beginning comes from the stories that
were told about ourselves from the time that we can
understand anything that's Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets, an
intimate podcast that explores the power of untold Stories. Danny's
also a prolific author, and the podcast was actually inspired
(01:25):
by her latest book, Inheritance, a memoir of genealogy, paternity,
and love. And the story that I was told was
that I was the youngest grandchild of this illustrious grandfather
and grandmother. Central to Danny's identity was her Judaism. She
spoke Hebrew and also her bond with her father, the
(01:45):
head of a distinguished Orthodox family, And there was this
family history that was something to be very proud of. Um.
And yet there was this sense that I had as
a child of I don't fit in, I don't long
and I don't know why UM. And when you're a
child and you have that feeling and you have nothing
(02:06):
to connect it to the instinct, I think our impulse
is to turn that against yourself. You know, there must
be something wrong with me, because I don't feel like
I belong and I should belong. Danny not only felt other,
she looked other two. I looked like you know, Heidi
had wandered, wandered over from the Alps into the Stuttle.
(02:27):
You know, it was like, really, when you looked at
a picture of me with all of my cousins. It
was like, who doesn't belong in this picture? And it
was me. But I managed to feel or to tell
myself that this was some sort of just strange genetic
quirk of faith that I just came out looking so
completely different. There's a moment that I write about in
(02:50):
my book where a friend of my parents who is
an elderly or you know, a Holocaust survivor, was over
at our house one day for Sabbath lunch and she
patted me on the head said, this is actually Jared
Kushner's grandmother. Um. She patted me on the head, Mrs Kushner,
and she said, we could have used you in the camp.
We could have used you in the ghetto, a little blondie.
You could have gotten the spread from the Nazis. So
(03:12):
that was literally the story of my childhood. And then
when Danny was fifty four, she randomly decided to take
a DNA test through ancestry dot com. My husband was
taking his own DNA test recreationally, you know, really his
his kind of like he smokes marijuana a little bit
(03:34):
like that probably was even less um purpose. Um, his
parents were elderly. I think he was doing it really
to kind of connect with his dad, and he just
asked me if I wanted to do one too. And
I'm haunted by this today because I so easily could
have said no. It was no big deal to me.
(03:57):
I thought I knew everything about where I came from,
but instead something it was inexpensive. It was no big deal.
He was doing it, and I said sure and so
and that's that's why there was no purpose or suspicion
or anything. You got the results back and it showed
you were fifty two percent Eastern European Ashkenazi, but the
(04:20):
rest was a mixture of French, Irish, English and German. Initially,
did you say they got my results mixed up with
somebody else? I completely did. I. Um, I initially thought that,
and I thought that for a while. Actually made my
husband call ancestry dot com and get a supervisor on
the phone, which is something that happens a great deal
(04:41):
in those companies these days. Um. And he was told
that those kinds of mistakes are never made, which I
do think is true. UM. But yeah, no, I thought
this is a mistake. And then you talked to your
half sister, explain how I know she's a good bit
older than you. Um, and this was your father's daughter
from a previous marriage. Yes, so she's fifteen years older
(05:04):
than I am. And I had recalled that she had
mentioned at one point early on in the DNA testing
world that she was an early adopter of it, and
she had she had done it. So I reached out
to her, actually really at my husband's very strong suggestion,
because I was really just kind of sticking my fingers
in my ears and going, la la, la, la la,
there must be a reasonable explanation here. But so she
(05:26):
sent her KIT number. It's what it's called her results.
And there is a site called jet match where you
can compare to kit numbers to see what your most
recent common ancestor is, in other words, what what your
level of genetic relationship is. And when that came back,
(05:47):
and um, it was in this kind of foreign language
that I didn't understand. My husband did. Um. It showed
that we were not related in any way, shape or farm. Correct.
We were not sisters, were not half sisters. We are
most recent common ancestor was many generations earlier, which all
people have. You and I would have it with your
Jewish mother, you know, we we all would we all
(06:07):
would have it. So you said, holy shit, I said,
holy sh it. Um, I knew that it meant that
if if we weren't sisters, that my father was either
not my father or not her father. I knew it
meant he wasn't my father. Everything the pieces of the
puzzle clicked into place so quickly that there was just
(06:30):
this sense of of course, of course, like all of them,
from Mrs Kushner to the way that I felt that
sense of otherness. Even within my shock, there was also
this sort of backward looking sense of oh, my god,
this makes perfect sense, so a bit of relief in
a way. I didn't feel relief instantly. I felt um devastated.
(06:53):
I adored my dad. And I also knew very quickly
that it meant that I'm that my biological father. It
must have been a sperm donor. I knew it wasn't
that my mother had an affair. Why did you think that?
Because I would have thought, oh, maybe it was the
Swedish milkman. Yes, yeah, that would have been a completely
(07:15):
reasonable If you're looking at these results, the first thought
that most people would have would be my mother must
have had an affair. I had just enough clues, which
is miraculous to me when I think about it now.
I had just enough clues to be able to piece
it together. Danny knew that her parents had struggled to
(07:36):
get pregnant, and that they had sought help at a
fertility institute in Philadelphia, where her mom was artificially inseminated.
But what Danny would come to find out after getting
her DNA results is that the sperm that was used
was not from her dad. It was from a donor.
It sounds crazy now, but back then, when infertility was
(07:57):
considered private and shameful, it was common practice to mix
the father sperm with donor sperm. This allowed for at
least the possibility of biological parenthood. Couples were told this
as a treatment, and it will help boost your chances.
There was always this sense that it was the child
(08:18):
would never know anything. It was cloaked in secrecy. Parents
who underwent any kind of UM donor you know, uh
donor procedure would be told go home, never tell anyone,
don't tell your own parents, don't tell your siblings, don't
tell your friends. The child will never know. It's better
(08:40):
for everyone that way, and there was every reason to
believe that would be the case. No one at the
time could have imagined that fifty years later, finding out
the truth would be as easy as sending your spit
to a lab and getting the results in a matter
of weeks. Once Danny found out her shocking results, it
(09:00):
took her only thirty six hours of googling before she
was looking at YouTube videos of the man who was
her biological father. It will stand, I think forever is
the most surreal moment of my life. Um, the first
so he's he's a retired physician and a medical ethicist,
which of course is another bizarre chapter. I mean, you
(09:24):
can't make can I curse on this? You can't make
this ship up? You can't. I mean we already said
holy ship, So why not a few more excell um?
And he he lectures. He lives in the Pacific Northwest,
and he lectures quite often, and so on this YouTube
video he was giving a lecture on medical ethics. And
(09:45):
what I noticed, and I notice is too subtle a
word for what I sort of it's kind of like
went into my blood stream, was that the way that
he was gesturing with his hands, um, is how I
ester with my hands. I'm doing it right now. It's
how I speak when i'm speaking, especially when I'm speaking
in public. And it was also extremely familiar to me.
(10:09):
I lecture a lot, I stand behind lecterns, I run
a Q and A. He was standing behind a lectern.
He was running a Q and A, and I do
look very very much like him. But that's not what
I was noticing. I wasn't seeing myself in this seventy
eight year old man, but I was seeing a quality
of familiarity that I realized I had never seen before
(10:29):
in my life. I mean, there was no question that
this was that I came from him, and yet he
was a complete stranger. So do you remember emotionally it
must have been so complicated what you were experiencing as
you watched him. Take us back to that moment. I
was shaking from head to toe. Um, I felt ice cold.
(10:52):
Um the room. I was in a hotel room in
San Francisco, and the room felt like it was tilting in,
like literally the ground was shifting. Um. I remember the
feeling of walking into the bathroom for the first time
after I had seen his face, and looking at my
face in the mirror and suddenly seeing my face, the
(11:13):
face that I had been looking for all those years
as a little girl, always having the sense that there
was something I wasn't seeing. I saw it there. It
was um. It wasn't comforting, it was um deeply disturbing.
I mean, I walked around in a state of um
kind of dizziness and breathlessness for weeks. I would say,
(11:41):
I mean the roots of my family tree that I
had understood and that I've been confident about. I mean
confident in the sense that we don't we don't think
about what you know, we we we are who we are,
we're told we come from who we come from, if
we are, and and then that's that, and we just,
you know, never really consider it ever again. And suddenly
(12:03):
now there was this whole new world, There was this
whole new story, and this was this was within me.
I was the story. Danny wanted to meet her biological father,
but she had to convince them. It was a delicate
dance to get there. And I think ultimately one of
(12:26):
the ways that we got there is that we were
each respectful of each other. I was persistent, but I
was also very respectful, very conscious that I sensed he
was concerned about his privacy. I think he worried that
if there was me, there might be twenty others behind me.
So my biological father, again a medical ethicist, had given
(12:50):
I think a great deal of thought to this after
he realized that he had a biological child in the world.
He had never told his wife a fifty years that
he had been a donor. It was insignificant, you know,
it was. It just hadn't needed some money, needed extra money,
and you know, there's the added bonus of I'm doing
I'm doing a good thing, I'm helping a family. But
(13:12):
it was promoted as kind of it's not a bigger
deal than giving blood basically, which we of course know
it's very, very different. So he did agree to meet
me after a bit of a back and forth, and
we met for lunch at a restaurant in New Jersey.
He and his wife were traveling east and my husband
(13:33):
and I. So he did tell his wife he had
he told me. He told his wife instantly after getting
the email, and he also told his kids. It's they
they have a really lovely, very open family where there
aren't a lot of secrets, and they you know, had
a family meeting and talked about it. So we went,
(13:54):
we went to lunch, and we had this four and
a half hour lunch sitting in this darkening restaurant in
New Jersey. UM, and I think the biggest takeaway, I mean,
I had many takeaways. It was again surreal to see
yourself in a stranger. UM. We see ourselves and the
parents who raise us all the time, but we take
it for granted. And suddenly there's this person who I
(14:16):
don't know, but I'm seeing absolutely like gestures and traits
and I'm seeing where I come from. But the biggest
takeaway was afterwards, and it was in the days afterwards.
It was the first time that I started to feel
reconnected with my dad. I started to feel like, no,
(14:39):
this man that I just had lunch with, he's not
my dad, he's not my father. I do come from him.
The language that came to me afterwards was It's like,
he's the country that I'm from. And I've never set
foot in that country, and I haven't climbed its mountains,
and I haven't eaten its food, and I haven't breathed
its air. But it's my country and I come from it,
(14:59):
and and the people who we love and my father
loved me into being my father. I think about every
day my father. As I'm talking to you, I have
chills up and down my arms that I've decided means
that he's up there listening. Um, it's a profound soul connection.
But I actually needed to meet the man that I
(15:22):
come from genetically and biologically to have that feeling, to
return to that feeling when we come back. How One
woman turned her own d n A surprise into an
expansive support network for others who were shocked by their results.
(15:55):
In two thousand seventeen, Catherine St. Clair also decided on
a whim to take a d n A test. She
was at work when she checked her results and was
shocked to find out her brother was in fact only
her half sibling. I put my head down on the desk,
and the emotional part of me was going, oh my god,
oh my god, Oh my god, oh my god, oh
(16:15):
my god. And the logical part of me was trying
to calm myself down, saying, you're still the same person.
Nothing has changed. You're the same person you were when
you woke up this morning. This is just new information.
You're okay, Um, But but the emotional part of me
was totally freaking out. Within weeks, Catherine created a discreet
and vite only Facebook group called d n A NPE
(16:39):
Friends NPE meaning not parent expected. When I first created
this group, I was expecting that I would probably find
four or five more people like me and we could
help each other. And I set a lofty goal. Wouldn't
it be wonderful if we could find as many as twelve?
I had no idea how normal this was. I felt
(17:02):
like a freak. I felt like I was going to
be viewed as a bug, and I hated that feelings.
But it was actually really comforting to see people coming
in droves. Our group right now is pushing, and that's
just for our main group of n P SUM. We
actually have over a hundred groups. We have a support
(17:25):
group just for the mothers. We have a support group
just for the fathers UM. We have regional groups so
that people can plan to get together and have meet
and greets, because we found that to be a very
comforting healing experience to have physical gatherings where everyone can
hug each other and talk. It's amazing. It's miraculous to
me the amount of healing that's happening and we're still
(17:46):
bringing people in, probably about a hundred and fifty two
hundred a month. When Catherine found out that her biological
father wasn't the man who raised her, she couldn't believe
how little the company did to help her in this
very difficult time. She couldn't even get a representative on
the phone. The best she could do was message someone
through her computer using the live chat feature on the
(18:08):
company's website. When I was doing the chat with this woman,
it would have been better if it had been a
phone call. And with that phone call, they said, Okay,
we're going to send you this packet of information. We
take this phone number down right now. This is a
hotline that you can call. Here is a Facebook group
that you can join where you can get emotional support. UM.
(18:29):
Here's here's a website that offers links to um mental
health professionals in your area. UM. I feel like that
they should have more of an obligation to provide those
kind of tools and resources to these people. And they're
about to be even more people like Katherine and Danny.
Considering the fact that by two this global DNA testing
(18:55):
market will see as many as one hundred million people,
that's a three heard of the US population by the way,
and more people, of course, means big Bucks. In two years,
revenues are expected to double, topping three hundred and forty
million dollars. I believe that if an organization is making
(19:17):
a significant financial profit off of a product that is
opening up these Pandora's boxes, they should feel an ethical responsibility. Legally, no,
they don't have illegal responsibility, but ethically they should feel
a responsibility to provide whatever tools or resources are needed
(19:41):
to their clients to help them through this. When we
come back, we'll ask one of those organizations if they
can and are doing better by their customers. One of
(20:06):
the biggest players in the at home DNA testing space
is twenty three and Me. Recently through a genetic testing service,
twenty three and Me they found out about each other.
They found each other after they both decided to try
twenty three and me, and it wouldn't have been possible
without a DNA test from twenty three and Me. I
was really curious about all this ancestry hype, so I
(20:29):
ordered an at home kit from twenty three and Me.
Spit into a tube okay, kind of pink because of
my lipstick. I hope that doesn't screw it up, and
then I sent it off to some strangers in Silicon
Valley to be analyzed. Okay, I'm ready to seal it
up and send it off and find out who I
(20:51):
am and where I came from. So the Ancestry Composition
Report analyze, this is your d NA UM and then
we base your results on your genetic similarity to the
forty five reference populations that we have. That's Julianna Centron,
a customer care representative at twenty three, and me who
(21:14):
helped me understand my results, which were not all that surprising.
I'm basically half Northwestern European, mostly British and Irish with
a little French and German thrown in, and half Ashkenazi
jew which makes sense since my dad was Presbyterian but
my mom was Jewish, but I did learn something about
(21:36):
the Jewish half. Most people associate this with being a
religion um but human geneticists have actually found that um
Askenazi Jews are a genetically similar group, and so because
they're a close knit population and genetically share long stretches
of DNA, we're able to actually identify ash Nazi Jewish
(21:58):
ancestry separate it from other European ancestries UM, you know,
such as Eastern European or German UM because of those
distinct genetic markers. But what if I had uncovered a
huge family secret hiding in my DNA? Could I expect
any support from twenty three and Me? Julianna says, I'd
(22:19):
be able to get a trained customer care representative on
the phone. But more than that, the company launched just
last year a support page that sounds a lot like
the one Catherine sank Clair laid out, and it was
developed to help customers or any of their connections navigate
these relationships that they learned through twenty three and Me.
(22:39):
We worked closely with genetic counselors to gain insight into
what their patients were asking for and needed, and we
developed this resource UM, you know, for those that are
looking for more information. It actually links to customer stories
UM and these are real customers that have learned about
unexpected relatives. I think it makes it so that, you know,
(23:00):
customers finding out this type of information don't feel alone
and realize that there are other people out there that
you know, are kind of going through the same thing.
Another thing that we offer, um you know, is additional
resources within that page, things like better Help and talk Space.
They're not companies that were affiliated with but we do
link to them, um you know on our website through
(23:22):
the report. Connecting customers to professional counseling sites like better
Help and talk Space seems like a step in the
right direction, especially when some studies estimate as many as
ten percent of people who take at home DNA tests
will find out a parent isn't their biological parent. That
(23:43):
means millions of families are about to come face to
face with some difficult truths, but for many, learning those
truths is still worth the initial trauma. Danny Shapiro, this
whole experience ants obviously changed you, would you say for
the better without question. It's the feeling was initially of
(24:10):
I don't know how to withstand this. Um. I just
felt like who am I? Who am I? I'm not
who I thought I was, And it moved over time
to this place that was one of great liberation because
the truth had been withheld from me and I had
(24:32):
sensed that. I think it's what made me a writer.
I think, whether my novels or my memoirs, all my
novels thematically were in one way or another about family secrets.
They all were about the corrosive power of them. Why
was I writing about this? I didn't know. It just
was kind of territory. I kept returning to. It's like
my superpower almost. That's what it feels like to me. Now.
(24:54):
It's really made me quite fearless in the world, and
it's all so given me a sense of purpose. If
you've found some shocking news from an at home DNA
test and you're looking for support, check out Catherine Saint
(25:17):
Clair's foundation mpe Fellowship dot org. You can also listen
to Danny Shapiro's podcast Family Secrets, which just launched its
third season. Do you hear how others have dealt with
the trauma and power of their own revelations? It's really riveting.
(25:39):
And that does it for this week's edition of Next Question.
Keep up with all of our episodes on Apple podcast,
the I Heart Radio app, and please subscribe wherever you
listen to podcasts. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a little
news guidance, you can get my morning newsletter wake Up
Call every morning in your inbox. Just go to Katie
Couric dot com and sign up and of course you
(26:02):
can find me all over Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other
social media platforms. Until next time and my Next Question,
I'm Katie Currik. Next Question with Katie Kurik is the
production of I Heart Radio and Katie curreic Media. The
executive producers are Katie Currik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is
(26:26):
Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements.
Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, mixing
by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more
information on today's episode, go to Katie Currek dot com
and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Kurk.
(26:51):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
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your favorite shows.
Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic and welcome to next question.
Who Am I? That's considered life's most fundamental question, and
it's quickly followed by where do I come from? Sure
both are somewhat philosophical, but in the age of rampant
home DNA test kids, those questions have become something more
(00:21):
big business. More than twenty six million people around the
world have turned to home ancestry or DNA tests hoping
to find out who they really are. The simple test
connected her with the mom she had never met, a
reunion for a mom and her son after nearly three
decades apart. Her sisters, born fifteen months apart and adopted
(00:42):
at birth, never knew each other existed until these DNA
tests incredibly popular. But what happens when the news is
more than we bargained for? Disturbing results, emotional fallout, and
even privacy issues. So today my next question, what really
makes us who we are? I think our sense of
(01:04):
identity in the very beginning comes from the stories that
were told about ourselves from the time that we can
understand anything that's Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets, an
intimate podcast that explores the power of untold Stories. Danny's
also a prolific author, and the podcast was actually inspired
(01:25):
by her latest book, Inheritance, a memoir of genealogy, paternity,
and love. And the story that I was told was
that I was the youngest grandchild of this illustrious grandfather
and grandmother. Central to Danny's identity was her Judaism. She
spoke Hebrew and also her bond with her father, the
(01:45):
head of a distinguished Orthodox family, And there was this
family history that was something to be very proud of. Um.
And yet there was this sense that I had as
a child of I don't fit in, I don't long
and I don't know why UM. And when you're a
child and you have that feeling and you have nothing
(02:06):
to connect it to the instinct, I think our impulse
is to turn that against yourself. You know, there must
be something wrong with me, because I don't feel like
I belong and I should belong. Danny not only felt other,
she looked other two. I looked like you know, Heidi
had wandered, wandered over from the Alps into the Stuttle.
(02:27):
You know, it was like, really, when you looked at
a picture of me with all of my cousins. It
was like, who doesn't belong in this picture? And it
was me. But I managed to feel or to tell
myself that this was some sort of just strange genetic
quirk of faith that I just came out looking so
completely different. There's a moment that I write about in
(02:50):
my book where a friend of my parents who is
an elderly or you know, a Holocaust survivor, was over
at our house one day for Sabbath lunch and she
patted me on the head said, this is actually Jared
Kushner's grandmother. Um. She patted me on the head, Mrs Kushner,
and she said, we could have used you in the camp.
We could have used you in the ghetto, a little blondie.
You could have gotten the spread from the Nazis. So
(03:12):
that was literally the story of my childhood. And then
when Danny was fifty four, she randomly decided to take
a DNA test through ancestry dot com. My husband was
taking his own DNA test recreationally, you know, really his
his kind of like he smokes marijuana a little bit
(03:34):
like that probably was even less um purpose. Um, his
parents were elderly. I think he was doing it really
to kind of connect with his dad, and he just
asked me if I wanted to do one too. And
I'm haunted by this today because I so easily could
have said no. It was no big deal to me.
(03:57):
I thought I knew everything about where I came from,
but instead something it was inexpensive. It was no big deal.
He was doing it, and I said sure and so
and that's that's why there was no purpose or suspicion
or anything. You got the results back and it showed
you were fifty two percent Eastern European Ashkenazi, but the
(04:20):
rest was a mixture of French, Irish, English and German. Initially,
did you say they got my results mixed up with
somebody else? I completely did. I. Um, I initially thought that,
and I thought that for a while. Actually made my
husband call ancestry dot com and get a supervisor on
the phone, which is something that happens a great deal
(04:41):
in those companies these days. Um. And he was told
that those kinds of mistakes are never made, which I
do think is true. UM. But yeah, no, I thought
this is a mistake. And then you talked to your
half sister, explain how I know she's a good bit
older than you. Um, and this was your father's daughter
from a previous marriage. Yes, so she's fifteen years older
(05:04):
than I am. And I had recalled that she had
mentioned at one point early on in the DNA testing
world that she was an early adopter of it, and
she had she had done it. So I reached out
to her, actually really at my husband's very strong suggestion,
because I was really just kind of sticking my fingers
in my ears and going, la la, la, la la,
there must be a reasonable explanation here. But so she
(05:26):
sent her KIT number. It's what it's called her results.
And there is a site called jet match where you
can compare to kit numbers to see what your most
recent common ancestor is, in other words, what what your
level of genetic relationship is. And when that came back,
(05:47):
and um, it was in this kind of foreign language
that I didn't understand. My husband did. Um. It showed
that we were not related in any way, shape or farm. Correct.
We were not sisters, were not half sisters. We are
most recent common ancestor was many generations earlier, which all
people have. You and I would have it with your
Jewish mother, you know, we we all would we all
(06:07):
would have it. So you said, holy shit, I said,
holy sh it. Um, I knew that it meant that
if if we weren't sisters, that my father was either
not my father or not her father. I knew it
meant he wasn't my father. Everything the pieces of the
puzzle clicked into place so quickly that there was just
(06:30):
this sense of of course, of course, like all of them,
from Mrs Kushner to the way that I felt that
sense of otherness. Even within my shock, there was also
this sort of backward looking sense of oh, my god,
this makes perfect sense, so a bit of relief in
a way. I didn't feel relief instantly. I felt um devastated.
(06:53):
I adored my dad. And I also knew very quickly
that it meant that I'm that my biological father. It
must have been a sperm donor. I knew it wasn't
that my mother had an affair. Why did you think that?
Because I would have thought, oh, maybe it was the
Swedish milkman. Yes, yeah, that would have been a completely
(07:15):
reasonable If you're looking at these results, the first thought
that most people would have would be my mother must
have had an affair. I had just enough clues, which
is miraculous to me when I think about it now.
I had just enough clues to be able to piece
it together. Danny knew that her parents had struggled to
(07:36):
get pregnant, and that they had sought help at a
fertility institute in Philadelphia, where her mom was artificially inseminated.
But what Danny would come to find out after getting
her DNA results is that the sperm that was used
was not from her dad. It was from a donor.
It sounds crazy now, but back then, when infertility was
(07:57):
considered private and shameful, it was common practice to mix
the father sperm with donor sperm. This allowed for at
least the possibility of biological parenthood. Couples were told this
as a treatment, and it will help boost your chances.
There was always this sense that it was the child
(08:18):
would never know anything. It was cloaked in secrecy. Parents
who underwent any kind of UM donor you know, uh
donor procedure would be told go home, never tell anyone,
don't tell your own parents, don't tell your siblings, don't
tell your friends. The child will never know. It's better
(08:40):
for everyone that way, and there was every reason to
believe that would be the case. No one at the
time could have imagined that fifty years later, finding out
the truth would be as easy as sending your spit
to a lab and getting the results in a matter
of weeks. Once Danny found out her shocking results, it
(09:00):
took her only thirty six hours of googling before she
was looking at YouTube videos of the man who was
her biological father. It will stand, I think forever is
the most surreal moment of my life. Um, the first
so he's he's a retired physician and a medical ethicist,
which of course is another bizarre chapter. I mean, you
(09:24):
can't make can I curse on this? You can't make
this ship up? You can't. I mean we already said
holy ship, So why not a few more excell um?
And he he lectures. He lives in the Pacific Northwest,
and he lectures quite often, and so on this YouTube
video he was giving a lecture on medical ethics. And
(09:45):
what I noticed, and I notice is too subtle a
word for what I sort of it's kind of like
went into my blood stream, was that the way that
he was gesturing with his hands, um, is how I
ester with my hands. I'm doing it right now. It's
how I speak when i'm speaking, especially when I'm speaking
in public. And it was also extremely familiar to me.
(10:09):
I lecture a lot, I stand behind lecterns, I run
a Q and A. He was standing behind a lectern.
He was running a Q and A, and I do
look very very much like him. But that's not what
I was noticing. I wasn't seeing myself in this seventy
eight year old man, but I was seeing a quality
of familiarity that I realized I had never seen before
(10:29):
in my life. I mean, there was no question that
this was that I came from him, and yet he
was a complete stranger. So do you remember emotionally it
must have been so complicated what you were experiencing as
you watched him. Take us back to that moment. I
was shaking from head to toe. Um, I felt ice cold.
(10:52):
Um the room. I was in a hotel room in
San Francisco, and the room felt like it was tilting in,
like literally the ground was shifting. Um. I remember the
feeling of walking into the bathroom for the first time
after I had seen his face, and looking at my
face in the mirror and suddenly seeing my face, the
(11:13):
face that I had been looking for all those years
as a little girl, always having the sense that there
was something I wasn't seeing. I saw it there. It
was um. It wasn't comforting, it was um deeply disturbing.
I mean, I walked around in a state of um
kind of dizziness and breathlessness for weeks. I would say,
(11:41):
I mean the roots of my family tree that I
had understood and that I've been confident about. I mean
confident in the sense that we don't we don't think
about what you know, we we we are who we are,
we're told we come from who we come from, if
we are, and and then that's that, and we just,
you know, never really consider it ever again. And suddenly
(12:03):
now there was this whole new world, There was this
whole new story, and this was this was within me.
I was the story. Danny wanted to meet her biological father,
but she had to convince them. It was a delicate
dance to get there. And I think ultimately one of
(12:26):
the ways that we got there is that we were
each respectful of each other. I was persistent, but I
was also very respectful, very conscious that I sensed he
was concerned about his privacy. I think he worried that
if there was me, there might be twenty others behind me.
So my biological father, again a medical ethicist, had given
(12:50):
I think a great deal of thought to this after
he realized that he had a biological child in the world.
He had never told his wife a fifty years that
he had been a donor. It was insignificant, you know,
it was. It just hadn't needed some money, needed extra money,
and you know, there's the added bonus of I'm doing
I'm doing a good thing, I'm helping a family. But
(13:12):
it was promoted as kind of it's not a bigger
deal than giving blood basically, which we of course know
it's very, very different. So he did agree to meet
me after a bit of a back and forth, and
we met for lunch at a restaurant in New Jersey.
He and his wife were traveling east and my husband
(13:33):
and I. So he did tell his wife he had
he told me. He told his wife instantly after getting
the email, and he also told his kids. It's they
they have a really lovely, very open family where there
aren't a lot of secrets, and they you know, had
a family meeting and talked about it. So we went,
(13:54):
we went to lunch, and we had this four and
a half hour lunch sitting in this darkening restaurant in
New Jersey. UM, and I think the biggest takeaway, I mean,
I had many takeaways. It was again surreal to see
yourself in a stranger. UM. We see ourselves and the
parents who raise us all the time, but we take
it for granted. And suddenly there's this person who I
(14:16):
don't know, but I'm seeing absolutely like gestures and traits
and I'm seeing where I come from. But the biggest
takeaway was afterwards, and it was in the days afterwards.
It was the first time that I started to feel
reconnected with my dad. I started to feel like, no,
(14:39):
this man that I just had lunch with, he's not
my dad, he's not my father. I do come from him.
The language that came to me afterwards was It's like,
he's the country that I'm from. And I've never set
foot in that country, and I haven't climbed its mountains,
and I haven't eaten its food, and I haven't breathed
its air. But it's my country and I come from it,
(14:59):
and and the people who we love and my father
loved me into being my father. I think about every
day my father. As I'm talking to you, I have
chills up and down my arms that I've decided means
that he's up there listening. Um, it's a profound soul connection.
But I actually needed to meet the man that I
(15:22):
come from genetically and biologically to have that feeling, to
return to that feeling when we come back. How One
woman turned her own d n A surprise into an
expansive support network for others who were shocked by their results.
(15:55):
In two thousand seventeen, Catherine St. Clair also decided on
a whim to take a d n A test. She
was at work when she checked her results and was
shocked to find out her brother was in fact only
her half sibling. I put my head down on the desk,
and the emotional part of me was going, oh my god,
oh my god, Oh my god, oh my god, oh
(16:15):
my god. And the logical part of me was trying
to calm myself down, saying, you're still the same person.
Nothing has changed. You're the same person you were when
you woke up this morning. This is just new information.
You're okay, Um, But but the emotional part of me
was totally freaking out. Within weeks, Catherine created a discreet
and vite only Facebook group called d n A NPE
(16:39):
Friends NPE meaning not parent expected. When I first created
this group, I was expecting that I would probably find
four or five more people like me and we could
help each other. And I set a lofty goal. Wouldn't
it be wonderful if we could find as many as twelve?
I had no idea how normal this was. I felt
(17:02):
like a freak. I felt like I was going to
be viewed as a bug, and I hated that feelings.
But it was actually really comforting to see people coming
in droves. Our group right now is pushing, and that's
just for our main group of n P SUM. We
actually have over a hundred groups. We have a support
(17:25):
group just for the mothers. We have a support group
just for the fathers UM. We have regional groups so
that people can plan to get together and have meet
and greets, because we found that to be a very
comforting healing experience to have physical gatherings where everyone can
hug each other and talk. It's amazing. It's miraculous to
me the amount of healing that's happening and we're still
(17:46):
bringing people in, probably about a hundred and fifty two
hundred a month. When Catherine found out that her biological
father wasn't the man who raised her, she couldn't believe
how little the company did to help her in this
very difficult time. She couldn't even get a representative on
the phone. The best she could do was message someone
through her computer using the live chat feature on the
(18:08):
company's website. When I was doing the chat with this woman,
it would have been better if it had been a
phone call. And with that phone call, they said, Okay,
we're going to send you this packet of information. We
take this phone number down right now. This is a
hotline that you can call. Here is a Facebook group
that you can join where you can get emotional support. UM.
(18:29):
Here's here's a website that offers links to um mental
health professionals in your area. UM. I feel like that
they should have more of an obligation to provide those
kind of tools and resources to these people. And they're
about to be even more people like Katherine and Danny.
Considering the fact that by two this global DNA testing
(18:55):
market will see as many as one hundred million people,
that's a three heard of the US population by the way,
and more people, of course, means big Bucks. In two years,
revenues are expected to double, topping three hundred and forty
million dollars. I believe that if an organization is making
(19:17):
a significant financial profit off of a product that is
opening up these Pandora's boxes, they should feel an ethical responsibility. Legally, no,
they don't have illegal responsibility, but ethically they should feel
a responsibility to provide whatever tools or resources are needed
(19:41):
to their clients to help them through this. When we
come back, we'll ask one of those organizations if they
can and are doing better by their customers. One of
(20:06):
the biggest players in the at home DNA testing space
is twenty three and Me. Recently through a genetic testing service,
twenty three and Me they found out about each other.
They found each other after they both decided to try
twenty three and me, and it wouldn't have been possible
without a DNA test from twenty three and Me. I
was really curious about all this ancestry hype, so I
(20:29):
ordered an at home kit from twenty three and Me.
Spit into a tube okay, kind of pink because of
my lipstick. I hope that doesn't screw it up, and
then I sent it off to some strangers in Silicon
Valley to be analyzed. Okay, I'm ready to seal it
up and send it off and find out who I
(20:51):
am and where I came from. So the Ancestry Composition
Report analyze, this is your d NA UM and then
we base your results on your genetic similarity to the
forty five reference populations that we have. That's Julianna Centron,
a customer care representative at twenty three, and me who
(21:14):
helped me understand my results, which were not all that surprising.
I'm basically half Northwestern European, mostly British and Irish with
a little French and German thrown in, and half Ashkenazi
jew which makes sense since my dad was Presbyterian but
my mom was Jewish, but I did learn something about
(21:36):
the Jewish half. Most people associate this with being a
religion um but human geneticists have actually found that um
Askenazi Jews are a genetically similar group, and so because
they're a close knit population and genetically share long stretches
of DNA, we're able to actually identify ash Nazi Jewish
(21:58):
ancestry separate it from other European ancestries UM, you know,
such as Eastern European or German UM because of those
distinct genetic markers. But what if I had uncovered a
huge family secret hiding in my DNA? Could I expect
any support from twenty three and Me? Julianna says, I'd
(22:19):
be able to get a trained customer care representative on
the phone. But more than that, the company launched just
last year a support page that sounds a lot like
the one Catherine sank Clair laid out, and it was
developed to help customers or any of their connections navigate
these relationships that they learned through twenty three and Me.
(22:39):
We worked closely with genetic counselors to gain insight into
what their patients were asking for and needed, and we
developed this resource UM, you know, for those that are
looking for more information. It actually links to customer stories
UM and these are real customers that have learned about
unexpected relatives. I think it makes it so that, you know,
(23:00):
customers finding out this type of information don't feel alone
and realize that there are other people out there that
you know, are kind of going through the same thing.
Another thing that we offer, um you know, is additional
resources within that page, things like better Help and talk Space.
They're not companies that were affiliated with but we do
link to them, um you know on our website through
(23:22):
the report. Connecting customers to professional counseling sites like better
Help and talk Space seems like a step in the
right direction, especially when some studies estimate as many as
ten percent of people who take at home DNA tests
will find out a parent isn't their biological parent. That
(23:43):
means millions of families are about to come face to
face with some difficult truths, but for many, learning those
truths is still worth the initial trauma. Danny Shapiro, this
whole experience ants obviously changed you, would you say for
the better without question. It's the feeling was initially of
(24:10):
I don't know how to withstand this. Um. I just
felt like who am I? Who am I? I'm not
who I thought I was, And it moved over time
to this place that was one of great liberation because
the truth had been withheld from me and I had
(24:32):
sensed that. I think it's what made me a writer.
I think, whether my novels or my memoirs, all my
novels thematically were in one way or another about family secrets.
They all were about the corrosive power of them. Why
was I writing about this? I didn't know. It just
was kind of territory. I kept returning to. It's like
my superpower almost. That's what it feels like to me. Now.
(24:54):
It's really made me quite fearless in the world, and
it's all so given me a sense of purpose. If
you've found some shocking news from an at home DNA
test and you're looking for support, check out Catherine Saint
(25:17):
Clair's foundation mpe Fellowship dot org. You can also listen
to Danny Shapiro's podcast Family Secrets, which just launched its
third season. Do you hear how others have dealt with
the trauma and power of their own revelations? It's really riveting.
(25:39):
And that does it for this week's edition of Next Question.
Keep up with all of our episodes on Apple podcast,
the I Heart Radio app, and please subscribe wherever you
listen to podcasts. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a little
news guidance, you can get my morning newsletter wake Up
Call every morning in your inbox. Just go to Katie
Couric dot com and sign up and of course you
(26:02):
can find me all over Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other
social media platforms. Until next time and my Next Question,
I'm Katie Currik. Next Question with Katie Kurik is the
production of I Heart Radio and Katie curreic Media. The
executive producers are Katie Currik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is
(26:26):
Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements.
Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, mixing
by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more
information on today's episode, go to Katie Currek dot com
and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Kurk.
(26:51):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
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your favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
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