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