Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. According to legend, the twelfth
Speaker 1: century priest Saint Anthony was once approached by a distraught
Speaker 1: woman whose jealous husband was convinced that their newborn baby
Speaker 1: wasn't his, who had Britain to kill them both. When
Speaker 1: Anthony visited the family, he turned to the infant and said,
Speaker 1: tell me, child, who is your father. Miraculously, the baby
Speaker 1: pointed towards the jealous husband calmly replied that is my father,
Speaker 1: and they lived happily ever after. You only need to
Speaker 1: turn on daytime TV for a couple of minutes to
Speaker 1: know that not all paternity tests deliver such welcome news.
Speaker 1: The daytime talk show Maury is so famous for its
Speaker 1: high drama paternity test plot lines that it sells mugs
Speaker 1: and t shirts emblazoned with the catchphrase you are not
Speaker 1: the father. While maternity has always been taken for granted
Speaker 1: for most of history, paternity was an open question. Until
Speaker 1: the advent of super accurate DNA testing in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: there was no way to be scientifically certain who a
Speaker 1: baby's biological father was, but that didn't stop people from trying.
Speaker 1: But we spoke with Nara Milanich, history professor at Barnard
Speaker 1: College and author of the new book Paternity, The Elusive
Speaker 1: Quest for the Father. She says that nineteenth and twentieth
Speaker 1: century scientists and pseudoscientists were obsessed with unlocking the mystery
Speaker 1: of paternity and tried just about everything to discover the
Speaker 1: holy grail of heredity. Meanwhile, newspapers of the time fueled
Speaker 1: the paternity test frenzy by closely covering sordid stories of
Speaker 1: cuckolded husbands and lecturist celebrities and their disputed progeny. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, for example, there was a rash of
Speaker 1: anxiety in the United States over babies allegedly being swapped
Speaker 1: in hospital maternity wards. Judges were put in the Solomon
Speaker 1: like position of having to decide who these babies legitimate
Speaker 1: parents were, and they were desperate for an objective test
Speaker 1: that could solve paternity suits once and for all. Some
Speaker 1: researchers insisted that the ridges on the roof of the
Speaker 1: mouth contained patterns that were passed on from father to child.
Speaker 1: Others relied on the race by pseudoscience of eugenics to
Speaker 1: create a list of physical traits like no size, ear shape,
Speaker 1: and hair texture that supposedly invariably passed from generation to generation.
Speaker 1: But the man who really captured the popular scientific imagination
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties was Dr Albert Abrams and his
Speaker 1: A syllophorre. Abrams developed a set of theories about the
Speaker 1: human body's electrical system, which he called the Electronic Reactions
Speaker 1: of Abrams or e. R A. Convinced like many others,
Speaker 1: that the key to unlocking heredity was in the blood,
Speaker 1: he invented an instrument called and a syllaphore that purported
Speaker 1: to measure the precise electronic vibrations in drops of blood.
Speaker 1: He said Irish blood vibrated at fifteen ohms, for example,
Speaker 1: and Jewish blood at seven ohms. Despite the suspect and
Speaker 1: racialized science behind the syllaphorre, Judge Thomas Graham of the
Speaker 1: Superior Court of San Francisco hired Abrams to determine the
Speaker 1: outcome of a high profile paternity suit involving one Paul
Speaker 1: of a Tory who refused to pay child support for
Speaker 1: an infant daughter he claimed was not his. Abram's machine
Speaker 1: found that the Tori was in deed the father, and
Speaker 1: the case instantly made the eccentric doctor one of the
Speaker 1: most in demand paternity experts in the world. Paternity quacks
Speaker 1: like Abraham's got so much traction, Melaniche believes because a
Speaker 1: frustrated legal system wanted a scientific panacea for solving the
Speaker 1: paternity problem. Also, American society in the nineteen twenties was
Speaker 1: grappling with anxieties over rapidly changing gender roles and the
Speaker 1: newly public sexual independence of women. These tests, as inaccurate
Speaker 1: as they actually were, offered the air of calm assurance.
Speaker 1: But what's even more remarkable is that in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: scientists discovered that human blood really did contain some definitive
Speaker 1: clues to a person's parentage. It wasn't electronic vibrations, but
Speaker 1: blood grouping, or what we now know as blood typing
Speaker 1: A B, A, B, O, etcetera. Blood grouping follows some
Speaker 1: immutable rules. For example, if a baby has type A
Speaker 1: B blood and his mother has type A blood, then
Speaker 1: the father must have B or A B blood. Finally,
Speaker 1: judges use actual science to determine if a man could
Speaker 1: realistically be a child's father. But even science, of course,
Speaker 1: has limitations. In the early nineteen forties, famed entertainer and
Speaker 1: womanizer Charlie Chaplin was taken to court in a paternity
Speaker 1: case brought by his former protege, Joan Barry. Barry was
Speaker 1: twenty three and Chaplain fifty four, and she alleged that
Speaker 1: he was the father of her newborn baby, Carol Anne.
Speaker 1: The court case, deliriously covered in the papers, featured the
Speaker 1: first high profile use of blood group testing in a
Speaker 1: paternity suit, and when the results came in, they conclusively
Speaker 1: showed that Chaplain could not be the father of Carol Anne.
Speaker 1: Case closed right Not so fast, the jury found that
Speaker 1: Chaplin was indeed Carol Anne's father, if not biologically, then
Speaker 1: by 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 had somehow managed to get more complicated. Melanich said,
Speaker 1: the problem with the Chaplain suit wasn't with the test.
Speaker 1: It was that people have different definitions of the father,
Speaker 1: one that's biological and one that's social. We've asked science
Speaker 1: to solve something that isn't scientific. In ancient Rome, a
Speaker 1: husband was legally considered the father of his wife's children
Speaker 1: that no matter their paternity. This legal principle is still
Speaker 1: law in many U s. Jurisdictions. A husband may still
Speaker 1: owe child support to a child he raised, even if
Speaker 1: a paternity test says he's not the real dad. A
Speaker 1: decade after the Chaplain case, in nineteen fifty three, California
Speaker 1: law was changed to basically say that if a paternity
Speaker 1: test showed that a man was not the father of
Speaker 1: a child, then the matter would be considered resolved. Other
Speaker 1: states followed suit. Meanwhile, DNA paternity tests, which went mainstream
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, have taken all the guests work
Speaker 1: out of determining the identity of the biological father. Milanich
Speaker 1: says that they are ninety nine point nine nine percent
Speaker 1: accurate if done right, and can now be bought for
Speaker 1: around fourteen dollars at your local drug store or online,
Speaker 1: a plus a one thirty lab fee for running the test.
Speaker 1: There are even mobile DNA test sting bands where the
Speaker 1: full testing can be conducted. But, as Melanich argues in
Speaker 1: her book, even the perfect paternity test leaves a lot
Speaker 1: of questions unanswered. Quote, who, as a society do we
Speaker 1: want fathers to be? That's not something a geneticist consult.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots
Speaker 1: of other topics that can be defined in multiple ways
Speaker 1: based on science and culture, visit our home planet, how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com, and for more podcasts from my
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