Johnny Soporno
Senior Don Juan
Canada's premier newspaper, the Original Globe & Mail Newspaper published this article about 6 years ago.
Mommy's Little Secret
As we gather to mark the festive season, here's one juicy morsel mom won't be dishing up: that guy you call your dad may not be. DNA testing has revolutionized medical science, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, but it also has uncovered the myth of female monogamy. Now doctors are wondering how to break the news to men?!
By CAROLYN ABRAHAM, Saturday, December 14, 2002 – Page F1
They came to the hospital together, a husband, a wife and the little daughter they feared had been cursed by inheritance. Since birth, she had struggled to breathe, and all the signs pointed to cystic fibrosis.
If the girl truly had the incurable disease that clogs the lungs, she had to have received two copies of a CF gene, one from each parent. Tests at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto confirmed the family's worst fears -- and then some.
The girl was indeed afflicted. Her mom carried one of the culprit genes. But her dad, the doctors discovered, was quite a different story. His DNA showed no sign of a CF gene, which means he is not a carrier and he is not her dad.
Hospital staff have felt bound to keep the secret from him. But when they told the mom, it came as no surprise; it rarely does.
"It is probably true in a lot of families, that daddy is not who you think it is," says Steve Scherer, a senior scientist in department of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children.
As families gather this festive season, here is a spicy fact that mothers might be loath to dish out at the holiday table: It's now widely accepted among those who work in genetics that roughly 10 per cent of us are not fathered by the man we believe to be dad.
Geneticists have stumbled upon this phenomenon in the course of conducting large population studies and hunting for genes that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis. They find full siblings to be half-siblings, fathers who are genetic strangers to more than one of their children and uncles who are much closer to their nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Lumped under the heading of "pedigree errors," these so-called mis-paternities, false paternities and non-paternities are all science jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else's block.
The proverbial postman seems to be ringing twice in everyone's neighbourhood. Non-paternity is believed to cut across all socio-economic classes and many cultures. Factor it into genealogical attempts to trace ancestry and it can snap entire branches from a family tree. Considered in light of long-held views about sexual behaviour, it exposes the myth of female monogamy and utterly shakes the assumption that women are biologically driven to single-mate bliss.
The widespread use of DNA analysis has presented science and society with all sorts of new ethical problems, and now it's pulling this naked truth out of the closet and into the courtroom. Men who call themselves "Duped Dads" are looking for legal redress to protect themselves against paternity fraud, raising questions about the definition of fatherhood. Several U.S. states are considering legislation that could exempt non-biological fathers from having to pay child support.
Even the most learned among us are grappling with the implications. Last month, the 10-per-cent non-paternity rate was cited during a science seminar for judges in Halifax.
"The judges were just shocked; they really couldn't get over how many people this would affect," Dr. Scherer said. "They kept saying things about all those poor people who might be misled -- never realizing that one of them might actually be among them!"
The notion of a woman carrying the child of someone other than her partner is older than the Christmas story itself. No geneticist believes non-paternity to be purely the product of modern immorality; they have been tripping over the infidelities of earlier generations for decades.
Cheryl Shuman, director of genetic counselling at the Hospital for Sick Children, said that 15 years ago, when genetic tests were less powerful, researchers had to draw blood from a child, his or her parents and both sets of grandparents. "Sometimes we'd get a call from the grandmother, and she'd say, 'Listen, my son, or my daughter, doesn't know that their father is not their real father. . . .' "
In the interests of maintaining family peace, Ms. Shuman said, the tests would be dismissed as "uninformative."
Over the years, the hospital has relied on the advice of lawyers and ethicists to develop policies for handling the situation. For example, its consent form now warns what a genetic test can reveal. Parents "will sometimes giggle in the waiting room when they read the paragraph about non-paternity," Ms. Shuman said. "But then we get the phone call later, forewarning us as to what we might find."
When a test disqualifies a father, "most women do express some surprise, but then there is a resignation, or an acceptance that they were kind of half anticipating this was going to happen. But then all this is followed very quickly by panic and questions as to whether or not we will betray their confidentiality."
If the case involves an expectant mother, Ms. Shuman explained, the hospital's legal obligation is clear: The developing baby is considered part of the mother and the results of the tests therefore belong to her.
After birth, the course of action is less clear, she said, but lawyers advise that the child is to be considered the patient, whose needs trump those of the parents. Since telling the father could trigger a breakup and leave the child without proper support, the hospital keeps the secret. Sometimes it can be a whopper.
In one family with four daughters, the DNA analysis was so surprising that counsellors asked the mother to explain. "It turned out that the daughters had three different fathers," said Peter Ray, a scientist at the hospital. "We cannot make any conclusions based on the family structures as they are presented to us."
In the research world, when scientists come across a father in a mismatched family, they toss the sample. If pedigree errors are not caught, Dr. Scherer said, they can wreak statistical havoc with a study: "People have made careers designing software to catch these kinds of things."
Sample mix-ups can skew results, as can an extremely rare condition discovered in 1989 in which a child inherits two copies of the same chromosome from one parent, obscuring the contribution of the other. But as the number of gene hunts and diagnostic tests has grown and grown, the leading cause of these anomalies has proved to be mistaken fatherhood.
Some peg the range at 5 to 10 per cent; others, such as Jeanette Papp of the University of California at Los Angeles, feel that 15 per cent is reasonable for the Western world, even if there is no hard evidence. "It's hard to do studies on these things for ethical reasons," says Dr. Papp, director of genotyping and sequencing in UCLA's department of human genetics. "I mean, how do you tell people what you're really looking for?"
A British survey conducted between 1988 and 1996 by Robin Baker, a former professor at the University of Manchester, confirmed the 10-per-cent figure. That seems high to skeptics such as Dalhousie University geneticist Paul Neumann, although even he admitted that "my colleague, who's a woman, tells me women have no trouble believing it. . . . It's the men who can't."
Bernard ****ens, a specialist in health law and policy at the University of Toronto, said that in another British example, the non-paternity rate was three times that.
In the early 1970s, a schoolteacher in southern England assigned a class science project in which his students were to find out the blood types of their parents. The students were then to use this information to deduce their own blood types (because a gene from each parent determines your blood type, in most instances only a certain number of combinations are possible). Instead, 30 per cent of the students discovered their dads were not their biologically fathers.
"The classroom was, of course, not the ideal place to find out this information," said Prof. ****ens, who is often consulted on ethical issues by geneticists at the Hospital for Sick Children.
He feels, as do many researchers, that culture can determine whether false paternity is very high or very low. For example, in Muslim Egypt, the integrity of lineage is so important that neither sperm or egg donation nor adoption is permitted, let alone sexual indiscretion.
But false paternity causes obvious problems for anyone who values a clear pedigree and makes it a statistical impossibility to trace the true identity of our ancestors back more than a few generations.
Robert Moyzis, a molecular geneticist at the University of California at Irvine, recently had to break this news to a friend who had spent considerable energy and resources compiling a family history that stretched back 1,000 years. "I had to plug the numbers into a computer model and prove it to him. The chances that he was related to the ancestor he thought were zero."
(...continued)
Mommy's Little Secret
As we gather to mark the festive season, here's one juicy morsel mom won't be dishing up: that guy you call your dad may not be. DNA testing has revolutionized medical science, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, but it also has uncovered the myth of female monogamy. Now doctors are wondering how to break the news to men?!
By CAROLYN ABRAHAM, Saturday, December 14, 2002 – Page F1
They came to the hospital together, a husband, a wife and the little daughter they feared had been cursed by inheritance. Since birth, she had struggled to breathe, and all the signs pointed to cystic fibrosis.
If the girl truly had the incurable disease that clogs the lungs, she had to have received two copies of a CF gene, one from each parent. Tests at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto confirmed the family's worst fears -- and then some.
The girl was indeed afflicted. Her mom carried one of the culprit genes. But her dad, the doctors discovered, was quite a different story. His DNA showed no sign of a CF gene, which means he is not a carrier and he is not her dad.
Hospital staff have felt bound to keep the secret from him. But when they told the mom, it came as no surprise; it rarely does.
"It is probably true in a lot of families, that daddy is not who you think it is," says Steve Scherer, a senior scientist in department of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children.
As families gather this festive season, here is a spicy fact that mothers might be loath to dish out at the holiday table: It's now widely accepted among those who work in genetics that roughly 10 per cent of us are not fathered by the man we believe to be dad.
Geneticists have stumbled upon this phenomenon in the course of conducting large population studies and hunting for genes that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis. They find full siblings to be half-siblings, fathers who are genetic strangers to more than one of their children and uncles who are much closer to their nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Lumped under the heading of "pedigree errors," these so-called mis-paternities, false paternities and non-paternities are all science jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else's block.
The proverbial postman seems to be ringing twice in everyone's neighbourhood. Non-paternity is believed to cut across all socio-economic classes and many cultures. Factor it into genealogical attempts to trace ancestry and it can snap entire branches from a family tree. Considered in light of long-held views about sexual behaviour, it exposes the myth of female monogamy and utterly shakes the assumption that women are biologically driven to single-mate bliss.
The widespread use of DNA analysis has presented science and society with all sorts of new ethical problems, and now it's pulling this naked truth out of the closet and into the courtroom. Men who call themselves "Duped Dads" are looking for legal redress to protect themselves against paternity fraud, raising questions about the definition of fatherhood. Several U.S. states are considering legislation that could exempt non-biological fathers from having to pay child support.
Even the most learned among us are grappling with the implications. Last month, the 10-per-cent non-paternity rate was cited during a science seminar for judges in Halifax.
"The judges were just shocked; they really couldn't get over how many people this would affect," Dr. Scherer said. "They kept saying things about all those poor people who might be misled -- never realizing that one of them might actually be among them!"
The notion of a woman carrying the child of someone other than her partner is older than the Christmas story itself. No geneticist believes non-paternity to be purely the product of modern immorality; they have been tripping over the infidelities of earlier generations for decades.
Cheryl Shuman, director of genetic counselling at the Hospital for Sick Children, said that 15 years ago, when genetic tests were less powerful, researchers had to draw blood from a child, his or her parents and both sets of grandparents. "Sometimes we'd get a call from the grandmother, and she'd say, 'Listen, my son, or my daughter, doesn't know that their father is not their real father. . . .' "
In the interests of maintaining family peace, Ms. Shuman said, the tests would be dismissed as "uninformative."
Over the years, the hospital has relied on the advice of lawyers and ethicists to develop policies for handling the situation. For example, its consent form now warns what a genetic test can reveal. Parents "will sometimes giggle in the waiting room when they read the paragraph about non-paternity," Ms. Shuman said. "But then we get the phone call later, forewarning us as to what we might find."
When a test disqualifies a father, "most women do express some surprise, but then there is a resignation, or an acceptance that they were kind of half anticipating this was going to happen. But then all this is followed very quickly by panic and questions as to whether or not we will betray their confidentiality."
If the case involves an expectant mother, Ms. Shuman explained, the hospital's legal obligation is clear: The developing baby is considered part of the mother and the results of the tests therefore belong to her.
After birth, the course of action is less clear, she said, but lawyers advise that the child is to be considered the patient, whose needs trump those of the parents. Since telling the father could trigger a breakup and leave the child without proper support, the hospital keeps the secret. Sometimes it can be a whopper.
In one family with four daughters, the DNA analysis was so surprising that counsellors asked the mother to explain. "It turned out that the daughters had three different fathers," said Peter Ray, a scientist at the hospital. "We cannot make any conclusions based on the family structures as they are presented to us."
In the research world, when scientists come across a father in a mismatched family, they toss the sample. If pedigree errors are not caught, Dr. Scherer said, they can wreak statistical havoc with a study: "People have made careers designing software to catch these kinds of things."
Sample mix-ups can skew results, as can an extremely rare condition discovered in 1989 in which a child inherits two copies of the same chromosome from one parent, obscuring the contribution of the other. But as the number of gene hunts and diagnostic tests has grown and grown, the leading cause of these anomalies has proved to be mistaken fatherhood.
Some peg the range at 5 to 10 per cent; others, such as Jeanette Papp of the University of California at Los Angeles, feel that 15 per cent is reasonable for the Western world, even if there is no hard evidence. "It's hard to do studies on these things for ethical reasons," says Dr. Papp, director of genotyping and sequencing in UCLA's department of human genetics. "I mean, how do you tell people what you're really looking for?"
A British survey conducted between 1988 and 1996 by Robin Baker, a former professor at the University of Manchester, confirmed the 10-per-cent figure. That seems high to skeptics such as Dalhousie University geneticist Paul Neumann, although even he admitted that "my colleague, who's a woman, tells me women have no trouble believing it. . . . It's the men who can't."
Bernard ****ens, a specialist in health law and policy at the University of Toronto, said that in another British example, the non-paternity rate was three times that.
In the early 1970s, a schoolteacher in southern England assigned a class science project in which his students were to find out the blood types of their parents. The students were then to use this information to deduce their own blood types (because a gene from each parent determines your blood type, in most instances only a certain number of combinations are possible). Instead, 30 per cent of the students discovered their dads were not their biologically fathers.
"The classroom was, of course, not the ideal place to find out this information," said Prof. ****ens, who is often consulted on ethical issues by geneticists at the Hospital for Sick Children.
He feels, as do many researchers, that culture can determine whether false paternity is very high or very low. For example, in Muslim Egypt, the integrity of lineage is so important that neither sperm or egg donation nor adoption is permitted, let alone sexual indiscretion.
But false paternity causes obvious problems for anyone who values a clear pedigree and makes it a statistical impossibility to trace the true identity of our ancestors back more than a few generations.
Robert Moyzis, a molecular geneticist at the University of California at Irvine, recently had to break this news to a friend who had spent considerable energy and resources compiling a family history that stretched back 1,000 years. "I had to plug the numbers into a computer model and prove it to him. The chances that he was related to the ancestor he thought were zero."
(...continued)
