Speaker 1: So the way I found out that I was donor
Speaker 1: conceived was when I got the results from twenty three
Speaker 1: and me I matched with somebody who was my half brother.
Speaker 1: To my surprise, I found out that I am not
Speaker 1: my dad's daughter. He's not my biological father. I took
Speaker 1: a DNA test and I I don't know who I
Speaker 1: am anymore. What if a few drops of saliva held
Speaker 1: the power to completely shatter your identity? As the consumer
Speaker 1: DNA testing industry has boomed, thousands of people have found
Speaker 1: out that these tests reveal much more than say, a
Speaker 1: Scottish or Chinese heritage. They also have the power to
Speaker 1: unravel decades of closely kept family secrets. Welcome back to Prognosis.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Michelle fay Cortes. I am so excited
Speaker 1: for this season, where will explore how data is transforming healthcare.
Speaker 1: Often the explosion of information is really helpful. It can
Speaker 1: also feel pretty invasive, and sometimes it could create an
Speaker 1: existential crisis. This week, we're taking a close look at
Speaker 1: what happens when a half a teaspoon of spit sets
Speaker 1: off a chain reaction, forcing you to reevaluate your identity
Speaker 1: where you belong. In this world. Here's Bloomberg Health reporter
Speaker 1: Kristen V. Brown with the story of one woman who
Speaker 1: took a DNA test that changed her life and what
Speaker 1: that means for the rest of us. It's a cold,
Speaker 1: sunny day in enham Claw, Washington, a city of twelve
Speaker 1: thousand that rests on a plateau at the foot of
Speaker 1: Mount Rainier formed by a volcanic eruption five thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: The wind is howling, as it usually does here. There
Speaker 1: is fresh snow on the mountaintop. I'm here to meet
Speaker 1: Caroline Bernard. Caroline raises sheep on a farm in nim Claw.
Speaker 1: The sheep, she'd warn me, don't exactly clean up after themselves. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think she said. She's in lifted back Caroline. Oh hi, Wow,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of pop. Hi Hi, I did and
Speaker 1: I Oh my godly, guys, I guess I got the
Speaker 1: water in your Caroline took a DNA test last fall
Speaker 1: that sent her whole world spinning. I was visiting her
Speaker 1: because I wanted to understand what it was like to
Speaker 1: have a piece of data change everything about who you
Speaker 1: thought you were. When I first started covering DNA testing
Speaker 1: a few years ago, Occasionally I would hear stories of
Speaker 1: people who found an unexpected parent re sibling through a
Speaker 1: DNA test. Recently, it's felt like once a week ever
Speaker 1: reading somebody's story of how d they brought them a
Speaker 1: new family member. Then in December, I wrote a story
Speaker 1: about how customer service people at three and Me we're
Speaker 1: having to do the jobs of therapists consoling people who
Speaker 1: took a test and uncovered a surprise. The day the
Speaker 1: story ran, I got twenty emails from people with DNA
Speaker 1: surprised stories of their own. The next day I got
Speaker 1: a few dozen more, and the emails kept coming. I
Speaker 1: was starting to feel like these individual stories were part
Speaker 1: of something much bigger. It felt like DNA testing was
Speaker 1: reshaping the very notion of family. Caroline was one of
Speaker 1: the people who emailed me. She had an especially intriguing story.
Speaker 1: I was also pretty excited about the sheep. Caroline had
Speaker 1: asked me to bring cheetahs, apparently a favored sheep's neck.
Speaker 1: This is from last year. Hi, Oh my god, they
Speaker 1: get so big. And that is Garth Brooks. Cards God
Speaker 1: Brooks does he have a great boy. He has a
Speaker 1: very deep voice, but he is kind of a chunky
Speaker 1: unit so he's just as handsome as can be. And
Speaker 1: then this is a when teaswater, and then this is
Speaker 1: William and you can see Caroline had taken a d
Speaker 1: n A test from Ancestry and found out that the
Speaker 1: father who raised her wasn't actually her biological dad. I
Speaker 1: was talking to my friend and I really wanted to
Speaker 1: find out about our heritage and about you know, where
Speaker 1: we came from and the ethnicities, and just find other
Speaker 1: people that were related to right. And I've always known
Speaker 1: that something wasn't right. And I explained that to my mom,
Speaker 1: and of course she was just like, no way, But
Speaker 1: I've always known that something wasn't right. And um, so
Speaker 1: sent away for this DNA kit and I let us
Speaker 1: sit on my on my dresser for like six months,
Speaker 1: and my daughter finally comes over and she says, Mom,
Speaker 1: just take the stinking thing. Just do it. And so
Speaker 1: I did it and she stuck it in the mail.
Speaker 1: When Caroline got her results back a few weeks later,
Speaker 1: she was having dinner with a friend and an old
Speaker 1: greasy spoon diner after a long day helping her friend.
Speaker 1: She or Sheep, and Ancestry, for whatever reason, texted me
Speaker 1: on a Friday night in the evening and said, your
Speaker 1: DNA results are in. And I looked at my friend
Speaker 1: and this was the friend who had had been talking
Speaker 1: about DNA with and she goes, well, look at him.
Speaker 1: And so I opened it up and I'm expecting to
Speaker 1: see Swedish and there wasn't a drop of Swedish anywhere
Speaker 1: in there. And I was a little perplexed and how
Speaker 1: something's not right? And then I um clicked on the
Speaker 1: matches and then I saw that the man who I
Speaker 1: grew up with as my father was not my father.
Speaker 1: It was another man. His name was Gary, and he
Speaker 1: said right on the top, he is your biological father.
Speaker 1: There is such a disconnect between the type of information
Speaker 1: that these tests were designed to deliver and what people
Speaker 1: actually wind up finding out. If you get a medical
Speaker 1: test at your doctor's office and the results are troubling,
Speaker 1: the doctor calls you in to explain what everything means.
Speaker 1: But ancestry DNA test is only designed to tell you
Speaker 1: such seemingly benign information, like how Sweedish you are, So
Speaker 1: you can just be sitting at dinner and get this
Speaker 1: casual text revealing that your father isn't your father. There
Speaker 1: is something really callous about that. I didn't expect that.
Speaker 1: I did not expect to see Gary Tackett as your father.
Speaker 1: That was the last thing I expected to see. And
Speaker 1: then I saw all of these siblings that were underneath there.
Speaker 1: And my friend Kelly is she's very familiar with DNA,
Speaker 1: and she says, Oh, that's a sibling. That's a sibling.
Speaker 1: That's a sibling because of the amount of um match
Speaker 1: what is that called the the sent of forms or
Speaker 1: something sent to Morgan, the amount of sin of Morgan.
Speaker 1: She said that that's a sibling, and um, it was
Speaker 1: not anything that I could have predicted or comprehended at
Speaker 1: the moment time. It was very um surreal. Caroline has had,
Speaker 1: by her own account, a tough life. She got into
Speaker 1: sheep farming to help her cope with post traumatic stress
Speaker 1: disorder after serving as a military nurse. Even though she's
Speaker 1: a farmer, she keeps nocturnal hours, arriving at the farm
Speaker 1: in the afternoon and working until midnight, habit she developed
Speaker 1: while in an abusive relationship. She isn't close with her
Speaker 1: family and always felt she didn't quite fit in, but
Speaker 1: never did she expect her dad wasn't the man she
Speaker 1: grew up with. But more than anything, I was just confused.
Speaker 1: I was confused, I was overwhelmed, I was surprised, and UM,
Speaker 1: and I think pissed, you know, kind of like being blindsided.
Speaker 1: And then I had a two hour drive home, so
Speaker 1: I was able to digest pretty much all of it.
Speaker 1: And then I called my daughter on the drive home
Speaker 1: and talked to her about it, and UM. Then she
Speaker 1: decided that she was going to call my mom. And
Speaker 1: she called my mom and called me back and said,
Speaker 1: Mom wants to talk to you at ten o'clock tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1: Will you call her? And at that point in time,
Speaker 1: I knew that there was something I hadn't been told.
Speaker 1: Her biological father's name was Gary Tackett, or at least
Speaker 1: that was the name he had been born with at
Speaker 1: different times, he has gone by many different names. Caroline
Speaker 1: googled him and began to piece together a portrait of
Speaker 1: his life from news clippings, public records, and YouTube. Gary
Speaker 1: parlayed a career as a crop duster in Arkansas into
Speaker 1: a gig smuggling marijuana and cocaine from Central America into
Speaker 1: the United States. By all accounts, Scary was charming and
Speaker 1: an excellent pilot, able to fly in and out of
Speaker 1: tight spaces with ease thanks to his crop testing experience
Speaker 1: and to evade government surveillance. Skill he picked up as
Speaker 1: a pilot in Vietnam in the nineteen eighties, he secretly
Speaker 1: flew weapons to Nicaraguan rebels for the CIA, flying back
Speaker 1: to the US with planeloads of drugs and a scandal
Speaker 1: that would later become known as the Iran Contra affair.
Speaker 1: Caroline watched footage of him testifying before Congress about the scandal.
Speaker 1: In by then he was going by Gary Betsner. It
Speaker 1: was the first time she'd heard her father speak. Here's
Speaker 1: Gary talking to then Senator John Kerry Bell. Mr Batsner,
Speaker 1: what would you describe to us this first drug venture
Speaker 1: you went on. You've never flown down there before. How
Speaker 1: did you know where to go? Well, I'm a pilot,
Speaker 1: and um, I've had considerable navigation experience, so it was
Speaker 1: readily simple for me to do. I Caroline's mom was
Speaker 1: already divorced with a son when she met Gary. Around
Speaker 1: the same time, she was also dating the man who
Speaker 1: Caroline grew up with knowing as her father. Her mom
Speaker 1: says she ended things with Gary after he pressed an
Speaker 1: old fashioned bottle opener up to her neck and threatened
Speaker 1: to kill her. Gary has denied this account to Caroline.
Speaker 1: Either way, when her mom realized she was pregnant, she
Speaker 1: told her future husband, the man that raised Caroline, thought
Speaker 1: the baby was his. If she had said anything, she
Speaker 1: would end up being a divorce woman and nwood mother,
Speaker 1: and her life would have been destroyed. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: just the way it was back then, and um, she
Speaker 1: did what she did to protect her kids. Abortion wasn't
Speaker 1: an option. As a rural sheep farmer from a one
Speaker 1: stoplight town, it was hard for Caroline to imagine someone
Speaker 1: so infamous was her father. He had lived this adventurous life,
Speaker 1: making millions, smuggling drugs and romancing countless women in his travels.
Speaker 1: He was a evicted criminal. He was a hippie too,
Speaker 1: and at one point had followed an Indian guru once.
Speaker 1: He even faked his own death and moved to Hawaii
Speaker 1: with his then wife and two of his children. One
Speaker 1: of his other daughters, Polly, told me, she only found
Speaker 1: out her dad was still alive when she read about
Speaker 1: his congressional testimony in the local paper. Caroline isn't interested
Speaker 1: in relationship with her new found father, though he has
Speaker 1: reached out to her several times under different aliases via Facebook.
Speaker 1: We also tried to reach out to Gary for an interview.
Speaker 1: He never responded and told Caroline he would only talk
Speaker 1: to a reporter if she would speak to him. I
Speaker 1: watched that senate testimony and I'm he's a narcissist and
Speaker 1: there's nothing for him to offer my life and what
Speaker 1: he did to my mom and what he did all
Speaker 1: his other other women. I want nothing to do with him.
Speaker 1: But Caroline has connected with a few of her nine
Speaker 1: new siblings. The night she got her ancestor results, Caroline
Speaker 1: also received a message from Carla, an actress. HI looks
Speaker 1: like we're close relatives. Are you adopted? Um? My mom's
Speaker 1: name was Caroline from Bellingham, Washington. She died a cancer
Speaker 1: in eight d and I never met her. You're only
Speaker 1: eight year months older than me. What is your mom's
Speaker 1: maiden name? I live in Kingston. I ferry your away
Speaker 1: from you. We could meet and talk, she wrote back.
Speaker 1: I tried to call you, it said your number is
Speaker 1: not in service. I stayed up late. I'm on Pacific
Speaker 1: standard time. I would love to talk to you before.
Speaker 1: I talked to my mother in the morning, and that
Speaker 1: was a phone call at ten. Now I know that
Speaker 1: they've been lying to me in my entire life. I'm
Speaker 1: flum mixed, and I feel like my entire life was
Speaker 1: a lie. Carla grew up in Puerto Rico and only
Speaker 1: found out she was adopted much later. As an adult.
Speaker 1: When DNA testing came around, she tried it out, searching
Speaker 1: for some sense of identity. The test linked her to
Speaker 1: a paternal niece and nephew, who led her to Gary.
Speaker 1: Carla asked Gary to take a d A test. Eventually,
Speaker 1: ancestry would also identify Gary as the father of three
Speaker 1: other children who had no idea Gary was their father,
Speaker 1: including most recently Caroline, as well as six others who
Speaker 1: grew up knowing Gary as their dad. The first time
Speaker 1: Carline Caroline met at an olive garden and Washington, they
Speaker 1: talked for hours as if they were old friends. Another sister, Angela,
Speaker 1: seemed to share her sense of humor. They now have
Speaker 1: near daily conversations, and a brother, Christopher, looked on cannily
Speaker 1: like her. For Caroline, a new family was beginning to form.
Speaker 1: We had one day we were sending each other pictures
Speaker 1: of our feet because we all have the same toes.
Speaker 1: We all had the same goofy toes where our big
Speaker 1: toe is the longest and then the rest of the
Speaker 1: toes gets smaller as they go down. So we were
Speaker 1: taking pictures of our toes, and we were taking pictures
Speaker 1: of our hands, and we all the same pinkie and um,
Speaker 1: you know, we all have the same droopy eyelid. It's
Speaker 1: just and my daughter is the spitting image of Gary.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, sitting in her barn, sheltered from the wind,
Speaker 1: amidst the sheep, a llama, chickens, and cats. Caroline should
Speaker 1: be photos how much her two sons look like Carla's
Speaker 1: the goofy selfies she and Angela like to trade. For Caroline,
Speaker 1: who had felt she never fit in. Here were people
Speaker 1: she had never met that seemed to look like her
Speaker 1: and laugh at the same kind of jokes. I wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning, it's like my reality so different
Speaker 1: than what it was. It used to be that the
Speaker 1: prototypical American family was a man and his wife, a
Speaker 1: couple of kids, maybe a dog. Then, as divorced became
Speaker 1: more common, half siblings, step siblings, and stepparents became part
Speaker 1: of the mix. Same sex marriage legalization, too, has diversified
Speaker 1: what families look like. What does it mean for the
Speaker 1: family unit When thousands of people are logging into ancestry
Speaker 1: and twenty three and me to discover families they never
Speaker 1: knew they had, I tracked down Cecy Moore, a genetic genealogist.
Speaker 1: These days, CC is most famous for her work using
Speaker 1: genealogy to hunt serial killers, but Cec got to start
Speaker 1: pioneering away for adoptees to use DNA to find their
Speaker 1: birth parents. So many people are finding these surprises. And
Speaker 1: often when someone says, oh, my gosh, I took a
Speaker 1: DNA test and I found a half sibling, the person
Speaker 1: they're telling will say, oh, well, guess what it happened
Speaker 1: to me too, Or it happened to my cousin, or
Speaker 1: it happened to someone I'm close to. So it's becoming
Speaker 1: so common that it's not out of the realm of
Speaker 1: most people's experience, like it happened to them or it
Speaker 1: happened to someone they know very well. Cecy said she's
Speaker 1: seen cases or people have moved to be closer to
Speaker 1: their newfound genetic families. Or taken in DNA relatives that
Speaker 1: were homeless or in need of support. I think the
Speaker 1: concept of family already expanded greatly, and this is just
Speaker 1: one more step in that direction. Now we have quote
Speaker 1: unquote DNA cousins, DNA relatives, people that we have found
Speaker 1: strictly through DNA that haven't been part of our history
Speaker 1: or our life story that but perhaps may play an
Speaker 1: important role in the future. Of course, people don't always
Speaker 1: embrace their new found families with open arms, but Czi
Speaker 1: thinks stories like Caroline's have made people more open to
Speaker 1: connecting or fussing up to long held secrets. She's heard
Speaker 1: from sperm donors who now want to connect with their
Speaker 1: donor children and mothers who abandoned babies and decades later
Speaker 1: decided to reach out to their kids. People are realizing
Speaker 1: they can't keep secrets anymore because of consumer DNA testing,
Speaker 1: because of genetic genealogy techniques to uncover these secrets. So
Speaker 1: I do think it's going to have a very profound
Speaker 1: and wide effect across our society. More than fifteen million
Speaker 1: people have taken DNA to through just ancestry and twenty
Speaker 1: three and me alone, a number that has only grown
Speaker 1: since the last time each company publicly released statistics. So
Speaker 1: many people have had experiences like Caroline's that an array
Speaker 1: of support networks for people with so called non expected
Speaker 1: parental events have cropped up on Facebook. The biggest among them,
Speaker 1: d NA and PE Friends, has grown to more than
Speaker 1: five thousand members. Four thousand of those people joined in
Speaker 1: just the last seven months. The group recently began the
Speaker 1: process to register as a nonprofit advocating for emotional support
Speaker 1: for the thousands of people who take DNA tests and
Speaker 1: find out their family isn't exactly the family they expected.
Speaker 1: Katherine st. Clair, the founder of DNA and PE Friends,
Speaker 1: told me even she was surprised by how quickly the
Speaker 1: group has grown. I thought that this situation was very
Speaker 1: unique and very unusual. I mean, I figured that there's
Speaker 1: probably thousands of people out there, but I means thousands
Speaker 1: per millions, not thousands per hundred thousands. Instead, she said,
Speaker 1: some recent estimates have suggested that people like herself and
Speaker 1: Caroline may account for as much as ten percent of
Speaker 1: the population. I think that's too conservative. I think the
Speaker 1: conservative estimate is um but still, if you look at
Speaker 1: it as ten percent, even if it is just ten percent.
Speaker 1: Ten percent of the world is left handed, so that
Speaker 1: means this is just as common as being left handed.
Speaker 1: Like CC Katherine told me, she thinks DNA testing marks
Speaker 1: the beginning of a shift that will allow people to
Speaker 1: be more open and honest about the complexities of love
Speaker 1: and family. We put our parents upon this pedestal. We
Speaker 1: grow up thinking our parents never made a mistake. We
Speaker 1: grew up thinking that they never did anything stupid, they
Speaker 1: never made bad decisions. Nobody wants to admit that to
Speaker 1: their children because they are afraid that their kids are
Speaker 1: going to go out and make bad decisions too. So
Speaker 1: when something like DNA shatters the image we have of
Speaker 1: our parents, it completely changes the way we see our
Speaker 1: families and ourselves. We are she said, heading toward a
Speaker 1: new norm. And I think that this needs to be emphasized.
Speaker 1: If you're going to take a DNA tist, don't take
Speaker 1: it with the wondering. If you're going to have unexpected findings,
Speaker 1: take it expecting unexpected findings, because every single family in
Speaker 1: the world is going to either have an MPE or
Speaker 1: an unexpected half sibling, or an unexpected aunt or uncle,
Speaker 1: or an unexpected niece or nephew, it's there. But what
Speaker 1: does it really mean to find out that your family
Speaker 1: isn't really who you thought they were? After all, that
Speaker 1: doesn't change who raised you or the experiences you've had.
Speaker 1: Here's Caroline again. I always thought I was more like
Speaker 1: my dad, and and I think, you know, there's the
Speaker 1: whole nurture versus nature kind of thing, and I don't know.
Speaker 1: And when you get blindsided like that and your whole
Speaker 1: foundation has taken out from underneath you, it's a little perplexing.
Speaker 1: It's a little perplexing. Caroline thinks this has actually been
Speaker 1: hardest on the man she considers her dad, the dad
Speaker 1: that raised her. Caroline may have lost her genetic connection
Speaker 1: to him, but she also gained a whole new family.
Speaker 1: For her father, there was no new family to balance
Speaker 1: out the loss. I talked to a few of Caroline's
Speaker 1: new sisters and Gary's brother too. All of them seemed
Speaker 1: to embrace their new found family. Even for the siblings
Speaker 1: who grew up knowing Gary as their father, the expanded
Speaker 1: family has changed their lives. There has been tension at
Speaker 1: times and jealousy as Gary has embraced some of his
Speaker 1: new children despite tattered relationships with some of his old ones.
Speaker 1: Early on, one of Caroline's new sisters joked to her
Speaker 1: that instead of the Brady Bunch, she had stumbled into
Speaker 1: the Jerry's Bring Our Show. But there have also been
Speaker 1: joyful reunions and family group text threads and new bonds
Speaker 1: that seem as deep as any childhood once. Here's Gary's
Speaker 1: brother Larry, who the siblings called the funcle or the
Speaker 1: fun Uncle. I feel related to them. I'm very interested
Speaker 1: in their stories, in their lives. Um you know, I
Speaker 1: was raised by a stepfather, my parents divorced from a
Speaker 1: young I have a lot of compassion for a situation
Speaker 1: like that. Later this year, some of Caroline's new family
Speaker 1: is planning to visit her in Washington. She said, it's
Speaker 1: weird how easy it has been to get to know them.
Speaker 1: It often feels like talking to an old friend, when
Speaker 1: the family she grew up with often feel like strangers.
Speaker 1: She is a little in common with, and it's actually
Speaker 1: helped her strained relationship with her parents, allowing them to
Speaker 1: talk more openly. She says she's glad to know the truth,
Speaker 1: to have learned something new about herself and where she
Speaker 1: came from. That our roots are not Swedish and Jewish
Speaker 1: but Southern that other people share her same weird toes.
Speaker 1: How has it changed my life? It's changed my life
Speaker 1: or a positive. I have a family and um I
Speaker 1: didn't have that, you know, six months ago I had
Speaker 1: the family I grew up with, but it was dysfunctional
Speaker 1: and broken. And this is probably still dysfunctional and broken,
Speaker 1: but it's bigger. But she is also still a sheep
Speaker 1: farmer who keeps nocturnal hours and knows all of her
Speaker 1: eighties sheep by name, A woman who grew up with
Speaker 1: two parents and a half brother in the country on
Speaker 1: the Canadian border, and a divorce mom to three kids.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't change who I am.
Speaker 1: And that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Do you have a story about help here in the
Speaker 1: US or around the world. We want to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can email me m Cortes at Bloomberg dot net
Speaker 1: or find me on Twitter at bay Cortes. If you
Speaker 1: were a fan of this episode, please take a moment
Speaker 1: to rate and review us. It helps new listeners find
Speaker 1: the show. This episode was produced by Liz Smith. Our
Speaker 1: story editor was rich Shine. Thanks also to help team
Speaker 1: leader Drew Armstrong and Francesco Levie, whose head of podcasts
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg. We'll see you in two weeks on April
Speaker 1: eleventh for our next episode,