Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Speaker 1: Vogelbaum here. According to legend, the twelfth century priest Saint
Speaker 1: Anthony was once approached by a distraught woman whose jealous
Speaker 1: husband was convinced that their newborn baby wasn't his and
Speaker 1: had threatened to kill them both. When Anthony visited the family,
Speaker 1: he turned to the infant and said, tell me, child,
Speaker 1: who is your father. Miraculously, the baby pointed toward the
Speaker 1: jealous husband calmly replied that is my father, and they
Speaker 1: all lived happily ever after. So yes, a questions and
Speaker 1: drama about paternity go a long way back before daytime
Speaker 1: talk shows like Maury, though as far as we know,
Speaker 1: Saint Anthony never sold mugs or t shirts emblazoned with
Speaker 1: the catchphrase you are not the father. Until the advent
Speaker 1: of accurate DNA testing in the nineteen eighties, there was
Speaker 1: no way to be one hundred percent certain of who
Speaker 1: a child's biological father was, but that didn't stop people
Speaker 1: from trying. Nineteenth and twentieth century scientists and pseudoscientists were
Speaker 1: obsessed with unlocking the mystery of paternity and tried just
Speaker 1: about everything to discover the holy grail of heredity. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: newspapers fueled the paternity test frenzy by closely covering sordid
Speaker 1: stories of cuckolded husbands, lecherous celebrities, and their disputed progeny.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen twenties, for example, there was a rash
Speaker 1: of anxiety in the United States over babies allegedly being
Speaker 1: swapped in hospital maternity wards. Judges were put in the
Speaker 1: Solomon like position of having to decide who these babies
Speaker 1: legitimate parents were, and people were desperate for an objective
Speaker 1: test that could solve paternity suits once and for all.
Speaker 1: Some researchers insisted that the ridges on the roof of
Speaker 1: the mouth contained patterns that were passed from father to child.
Speaker 1: Others relied on the racist pseudoscience of eugenics to create
Speaker 1: a list of physical traits like nose size, ear shape,
Speaker 1: and hair texture that they claimed passed from generation to generation.
Speaker 1: But the man who really captured the popular scientific imagination
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties was doctor Albert Abrams and his acillophore.
Speaker 1: Abrams had developed theories about the human body's electrical system,
Speaker 1: which he called the electronic reactions of Abrams or Ra,
Speaker 1: convinced like many others, that the key to unlocking heredity
Speaker 1: was in the blood, he invented a preposterous looking instrument
Speaker 1: called an acillophore that purported to measure the precise electronic
Speaker 1: vibrations in drops of blood based on heredity of Irish
Speaker 1: blood vibrated at fifteen olms of Jewish blood at seven oms,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Despite these suspect and racialized science behind the
Speaker 1: ausillophor one, Judge Thomas Graham of the Superior Court of
Speaker 1: San Francisco hired Abrams to determine the outcome of a
Speaker 1: high profile paternity suit involving a man named Paul Vittori
Speaker 1: who refused to pay child support for an infant daughter
Speaker 1: that he claimed wasn't his. Abram's magical machine found that
Speaker 1: Vittori was indeed the father, instantly making the eccentric doctor
Speaker 1: one of the most in demand paternity experts in the world.
Speaker 1: For the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: Spoke with Nara Millinitch back in twenty nineteen. She's a
Speaker 1: history professor at Barnard College an author of the book Paternity,
Speaker 1: The Elusive Quest for the Father. She said, if we
Speaker 1: can agree that an electronic blood test is crazy and
Speaker 1: that this invention is ludicrous. Why did it get so
Speaker 1: much press and why did a California judge think this
Speaker 1: was useful technology? Milanitch believes the answer to why like
Speaker 1: abrams got so much traction is because a frustrated legal
Speaker 1: system wanted scientific panacea for solving the paternity problem. Also,
Speaker 1: American society in the nineteen twenties was grappling with anxieties
Speaker 1: over rapidly changing gender roles in a new culture of
Speaker 1: feminine sexual independence. These tests, as inaccurate as they actually were,
Speaker 1: offered the air of assurance. But what's even more remarkable
Speaker 1: is what happened next, because in the nineteen thirties, scientists
Speaker 1: discovered that human blood really did contain some definitive clues
Speaker 1: to a person's parentage. It wasn't electronic vibrations, but blood grouping,
Speaker 1: or what we now know as blood typing a b
Speaker 1: ABO and positive and negative versions of each A. Blood
Speaker 1: grouping follows some immutable rules. For example, if a baby
Speaker 1: has Type A B blood and his mother has Type
Speaker 1: A blood, then the father must have bee or baby blood. Finally,
Speaker 1: judges could use actual science to determine if a man
Speaker 1: could realistically be a child's father, but even science, it
Speaker 1: turns out, has limitations. In the nineteen forties, famed entertainer
Speaker 1: and womanizer Charlie Chaplin was taken to court in a
Speaker 1: paternity case brought by his former protege Joan Berry. Barry
Speaker 1: was twenty three years old and Chaplain fifty four at
Speaker 1: the time, and she alleged that he was the father
Speaker 1: of her newborn baby, named Carol Anne. The court case,
Speaker 1: deliriously covered in the papers, featured the first high profile
Speaker 1: use of blood group testing in a paternity suit, and
Speaker 1: when the results came in, they conclusively showed that Chaplain
Speaker 1: could not be the father of Carol Anne. The case
Speaker 1: closed right, science wins the day. Not so fast. The jury,
Speaker 1: composed of eleven women and one man, found that Chaplain
Speaker 1: was indeed Carol Anne's father, if not biologically, then by
Speaker 1: the merit of his close relationship with her mother and
Speaker 1: his infamous history of marrying and quickly discarding much younger women.
Speaker 1: Despite the real progress made in paternity science, the problem
Speaker 1: of paternity hadn't gotten less complicated. Milinich said. The problem
Speaker 1: with the Chaplain's suit wasn't with the test. It was
Speaker 1: that people have different definitions of the father, the one
Speaker 1: that's biological and one that's social. We've asked science to
Speaker 1: solve something that isn't scientific. Going back to ancient Rome,
Speaker 1: a husband was legally considered the father of his wife's children,
Speaker 1: no matter their paternity. This legal principle is still the
Speaker 1: law in many US jurisdictions. A husband may still owe
Speaker 1: child support to a child he raised, even if a
Speaker 1: paternity test says he's not the real dad. However, California
Speaker 1: law was changed in nineteen fifty three to basically say
Speaker 1: that if a test showed that a man was the
Speaker 1: father of a child, then the matter would be considered resolved,
Speaker 1: and other states have followed suit. DNA paternity tests, which
Speaker 1: went mainstream in the nineteen nineties, have taken all of
Speaker 1: the guests work out of determining the identity of a
Speaker 1: biological father. They're now something like ninety nine point nine
Speaker 1: nine percent accurate if done right, and can be bought
Speaker 1: for around one hundred bucks at your local drug store
Speaker 1: or online, or even conducted in a mobile DNA testing van. But,
Speaker 1: as Milinich argued in her book, even the perfect paternity
Speaker 1: test leaves a lot of questions unanswered. She said, who,
Speaker 1: as a society do we want fathers to be? That's
Speaker 1: not something a geneticist can solve. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article Who's Your Daddy? The History of paternity
Speaker 1: testing on how stuffworks dot com, written by Dave Ruse.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with
Speaker 1: how stuffworks dot com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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