Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff 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, who had Britain 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 towards the jealous husband calmly replied that is my father,
and they lived happily ever after. You only need to turn on daytime TV for a couple of minutes to know that not all paternity tests deliver such welcome news. The daytime talk show Maury is so famous for its high drama paternity test plot lines that it sells mugs and t shirts emblazoned with the catchphrase you are not the father. While maternity has always been taken for granted
for most of history, paternity was an open question. Until the advent of super accurate DNA testing in the nineteen eighties, there was no way to be scientifically certain who a baby's biological father was, but that didn't stop people from trying. But we spoke with Nara Milanich, history professor at Barnard College and author of the new book Paternity, The Elusive
Quest for the Father. She says that 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 of the time fueled the paternity test frenzy by closely covering sordid stories of
cuckolded husbands and lecturist 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 they 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 on from father to child. Others relied on the race by pseudoscience of eugenics to create a list of physical traits like no size, ear shape, and hair texture that supposedly invariably passed from generation to generation. But the man who really captured the popular scientific imagination in the nineteen twenties was Dr Albert Abrams and his
A syllophorre. Abrams developed a set of theories about the human body's electrical system, which he called the Electronic Reactions of Abrams or e. R A. Convinced like many others, that the key to unlocking heredity was in the blood, he invented an instrument called and a syllaphore that purported to measure the precise electronic vibrations in drops of blood. He said Irish blood vibrated at fifteen ohms, for example,
and Jewish blood at seven ohms. Despite the suspect and racialized science behind the syllaphorre, Judge Thomas Graham of the Superior Court of San Francisco hired Abrams to determine the outcome of a high profile paternity suit involving one Paul of a Tory who refused to pay child support for an infant daughter he claimed was not his. Abram's machine found that the Tori was in deed the father, and the case instantly made the eccentric doctor one of the
most in demand paternity experts in the world. Paternity quacks like Abraham's got so much traction, Melaniche believes because a frustrated legal system wanted a scientific panacea for solving the paternity problem. Also, American society in the nineteen twenties was grappling with anxieties over rapidly changing gender roles and the newly public sexual independence of women. These tests, as inaccurate as they actually were, offered the air of calm assurance.
But what's even more remarkable is that 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, A, B, O, etcetera. 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 B or A B blood. Finally, judges use actual science to determine if a man could realistically be a child's father. But even science, of course, has limitations. In the early nineteen forties, famed entertainer and womanizer Charlie Chaplin was taken to court in a paternity case brought by his former protege, Joan Barry. Barry was twenty three and Chaplain fifty four, and she alleged that he was the father of her newborn baby, 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. Case closed right Not so fast, the jury found that Chaplin was indeed Carol Anne's father, if not biologically, then by 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 had somehow managed to get more complicated. Melanich said, the problem with the Chaplain suit wasn't with the test. It was that people have different definitions of the father, one that's biological and one that's social. We've asked science to solve something that isn't scientific. In ancient Rome, a husband was legally considered the father of his wife's children
that no matter their paternity. This legal principle is still law in many U s. 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. A decade after the Chaplain case, in nineteen fifty three, California law was changed to basically say that if a paternity test showed that a man was not the father of a child, then the matter would be considered resolved. Other
states followed suit. Meanwhile, DNA paternity tests, which went mainstream in the nineteen nineties, have taken all the guests work out of determining the identity of the biological father. Milanich says that they are ninety nine point nine nine percent accurate if done right, and can now be bought for around fourteen dollars at your local drug store or online, a plus a one thirty lab fee for running the test. There are even mobile DNA test sting bands where the
full testing can be conducted. But, as Melanich argues in her book, even the perfect paternity test leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Quote, who, as a society do we want fathers to be? That's not something a geneticist consult. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other topics that can be defined in multiple ways based on science and culture, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com, and for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit thy heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.