Lily Wood is forty-three years old but considers April 9, 2019, to be her \u201crebirth day.\u201d That was the date she received her results from Ancestry, the direct-to-consumer DNA-testing company. A self-described biohacker, Wood had been curious to see whether she had a genetic predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s. \u201cI wanted to get ahead of things,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
It was actually her second time testing. The first time, Wood had used 23andMe, but the results had seemed off to her. \u201cThe ethnicity was wrong,\u201d she said, before correcting herself. \u201cI thought it was wrong.\u201d Her heritage, as she\u2019d always understood it, was French on her father\u2019s side and Norwegian on her mother\u2019s. And yet the 23andMe customers who had come up as genetically close matches had Italian names. Wood, who lives in Minneapolis, where she grew up, called her sister, who speculated that a strand of hair belonging to a lab technician had gotten into the vial. Her sister advised her to try Ancestry. When the new results came in, Wood learned that there was a man in the company\u2019s database with whom she shared fourteen hundred centimorgans, a measure of genetic overlap that typically denotes a half sibling. But this man was a stranger to her\u2014and the site said that he had Sicilian ancestry.<\/p>\n
Wood drove to her mother\u2019s house, a few miles away. When she arrived, her mother, Vicki, was sitting at the kitchen table with her husband, Wood\u2019s stepfather. At the mention of the close match\u2019s surname, Vicki\u2019s face turned bright red. She replied that it was the name of her old boss at FedEx. Wood was nonplussed. \u201cI was, like, \u2018What are you saying right now? Are you\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. ? What?\u2019\u00a0\u201d she recalled. Wood\u2019s stepfather looked at his wife and said, \u201cYou never thought this was going to come back and bite you, did you?\u201d Vicki then filled in a few details. She had gotten pregnant after sleeping with a higher-up on a business trip in Memphis while married to her first husband, Wood\u2019s presumed father.<\/p>\n
The next week was emotionally confusing for Wood. Money had been tight when she was growing up; the man she now calls her \u201cbirth-certificate father\u201d had driven a cab, and she\u2019d swept the floors at a local private school in exchange for tuition. Suddenly, here she was, Googling her biological father, a longtime executive at the shipping company, and finding pictures of what appeared to be him and his children riding horses at their ranch in Wyoming. She felt like her world was \u201cshattering,\u201d she told me, but no one around her registered the news that way. She remembered being asked, in the family group chat, what side dish she was bringing for Easter dinner. \u201cWe\u2019re a sweep-it-under-the-rug sort of family,\u201d she said. But, as Wood saw it, this wasn\u2019t exactly her family anymore. She confronted her mother, telling her that she did not seem very remorseful. Her sister thought their mother might interpret this as sex-shaming. Wood protested. \u201cI don\u2019t care who she slept with or if the marriage was closed, open, whatever,\u201d she said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t about sex. This is about the lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wood tracked down her biological father and introduced herself. His initial response was encouraging. He said that he remembered her mother. \u201cWe will help bring clarity to this,\u201d he assured her, and told her he\u2019d be in touch soon. A week later, she heard from him again, but the tone had shifted. By then, she had reached out to the man Ancestry had indicated was a half sibling. Her biological father chastised her. \u201cHis words were like \u2018We don\u2019t do shock and awe in my family\u2019\u2014as if I\u2019m this, like, Jerry Springer\u2013Maury Povich person.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Wood did ultimately get into the paternity-surprise media business. Six weeks after her rebirth day, she purchased a mike and, using her living room as a studio, launched a podcast devoted to interviews with people who, like her, had found out through commercial DNA testing that they had been misinformed about their biological parentage. Wood named her podcast \u201cNPE Stories.\u201d The term N.P.E. is often credited to a 2000 study conducted by a pair of geneticists at Oxford who examined whether male Britons with the last name Sykes could be traced to a single shared ancestor through their Y chromosomes. But they kept coming across men named Sykes who didn\u2019t even share their father\u2019s Y chromosome. They called these subjects, diplomatically, \u201cnon-paternity events.\u201d In 2017, the acronym became a more entrenched online community when a woman named Catherine St Clair created a Facebook group, eventually called N.P.E. Fellowship, for people who had discovered misattributed parentage through commercial DNA tests. She rebranded N.P.E. to stand for the less technical \u201cnot parent expected,\u201d and welcomed late-discovery adoptees (L.D.A.s) and donor-conceived persons (D.C.P.s) to join the family fray.<\/p>\n
When Wood started her show, there was already a podcast of N.P.E. tell-alls called \u201cCutOff Genes.\u201d Soon came others: \u201cEverything\u2019s Relative,\u201d \u201cFamily Twist,\u201d \u201cSex, Lies & the Truth.\u201d Before long, anyone with a Spotify account could listen to hundreds of hours of adults trying to make sense of their parents\u2019 sex lives. (Episodes about people who found out that their parents had been swingers in the seventies practically formed their own subgenre.) A man named Jonathon told the hosts of \u201cSex, Lies & the Truth\u201d that, after being contacted by a daughter he never knew he had, he was upset with her mother at first, but then he reflected that thirty years earlier he had been a \u201cweed-smoking hippie\u201d while she had also been involved with a man training to be an engineer. \u201cIn that race, I was Seabiscuit,\u201d he said. Not all episodes are so convivial. Many N.P.E.s look back on their childhoods and\u2014cataloguing every slight, every time they felt different\u2014wonder, Was that why?<\/p>\n
Paternity has historically been tricky to pin down. \u201cMommy\u2019s baby, daddy\u2019s maybe,\u201d as the saying goes. But now the milkman\u2019s kid can buy a DNA test from Target. (Occasionally, people learn that their mother used an egg donor, but paternity surprises are more common.) Since the first commercial DNA test d\u00e9buted, in 2000, the market has exploded. A 2025 YouGov poll found that one in five Americans has taken a direct-to-consumer DNA test. A few years ago, a research team at Baylor College of Medicine surveyed more than twenty-three thousand customers of these kits and learned that three per cent of them had discovered that a person whom they\u2019d believed to be their biological parent wasn\u2019t. (That number is in line with a 2005 study from a university in Liverpool which found a 3.7-per-cent median rate of misattributed paternity in the general population.) If the ratio holds, that means around two million Americans who have taken one of these tests are N.P.E.s.<\/p>\n
A cottage industry has sprung up to service them. There are therapists who specialize in treating N.P.E.s, and \u201cDNA detectives\u201d who can track down relatives who haven\u2019t taken tests by triangulating the results of those who have. There are coaches who guide parents in breaking the news about their child\u2019s origins. Brianne Kirkpatrick Williams, of Watershed DNA, is a genetic counsellor who advertises on her website that she spent years delivering bad news to expectant parents, which makes her uniquely qualified to aid clients who want to inform their grown children that they were donor-conceived, say, or to let their spouses know that they were \u201ccontacted by a previously unknown biological child.\u201d She charges eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a four-session \u201cPrepare to Share\u201d package.<\/p>\n
I became interested in doing a story on N.P.E.s after a friend\u2019s ex-boyfriend found out in his thirties that he was one. Hunter (not his real name) was a state-level politician who ran a campaign on his working-class roots, only to find out that his mother had had an affair with a well-off scientist. Hunter had known his biological father his whole life as a family friend; sometimes this man dropped off hand-me-downs that his sons\u2014Hunter\u2019s half brothers\u2014had outgrown. Hunter told me that he had joined Facebook groups devoted to N.P.E.s but promptly left them. \u201cIt was too much,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It turns out that anger at your mother and a hobbyist\u2019s understanding of genetics is a potent, and potentially politicized, combination. Some factions are trying to transform N.P.E.s from an identity group into an interest one. A guest on Wood\u2019s podcast, for example, an N.P.E. named Richard, who is a clinician by profession, argued that people could be entitled to sue their mother for keeping the identity of their father secret, on the grounds of \u201cparental alienation.\u201d Severance, a magazine that covers N.P.E.s, was launched in 2019 by a Pennsylvanian writer named B.\u00a0K. Jackson; it takes its name from a belief that N.P.E.s have been \u201csevered\u201d from their biological families. Alongside extramarital affairs, the magazine lists \u201cadoption, kidnapping, undisclosed step-parent adoption, paternity fraud, donor-assisted conception\u201d and \u201cnonconsensual sex\u201d as causes of severance. Such rhetoric, which places gamete donation next to criminal acts, has alarmed many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, as has the legal-advocacy work of a Seattle-based organization founded by an N.P.E. called Right to Know. The group wants to mandate the inclusion of donor and surrogate names on birth certificates, which currently reflect legal, not genetic, parentage. Some in the L.G.B.T.Q. community fear that this will, by default, force them to report more information than opposite-sex couples are required to. In making its case, Right to Know can at times rely on nascent, controversial theories within the world of genomics, which many scientists caution overstate the impact of genes on our health and personalities.<\/p>\n
In myth, if a hero wants to achieve greatness\u2014to slay a multiheaded Hydra, to part the Red Sea, to bring balance to the Force\u2014he is almost required to have a dramatic paternity reveal. But now millions of mere mortals are having to contend with the same epic dilemmas: What\u2019s the appropriate amount of anger over an extramarital affair? Will our roots always tug at us, even if we don\u2019t know they\u2019re ours? Who or what, exactly, determines our destiny?<\/p>\n
In 1999, the producers of \u201cMaury\u201d came to their host, Maury Povich, with an idea to boost ratings. \u201cThese soap operas\u2014they take six months to reveal someone\u2019s secret father,\u201d Povich remembered them saying. \u201cWe can do that in fifteen minutes, on air.\u201d The show became known for its flamboyant paternity-test reveals, and for men, suddenly off the hook for child support, doing celebratory dances. Povich told me, \u201cPeople come up to me all the time on the street. They like to grab their pregnant wife and get me to say, \u2018You are the father.\u2019\u00a0\u201d His show was controversial; scholars have accused it of reinforcing stereotypes about Black women\u2019s promiscuity, but nonetheless it became a cultural touchstone. In a 2015 \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d \u201cWeekend Update\u201d segment about Black History Month, Michael Che joked about Povich: \u201cHe set more Black men free than Abraham Lincoln.\u201d Povich\u2019s show was also an unlikely educational resource. In the nineties, DNA was the stuff of science fiction\u2014I first heard about it in \u201cJurassic Park\u201d\u2014but here it was something real, with real-life consequences.<\/p>\n
The scholar Nara\u00a0B. Milanich, in her book \u201cPaternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,\u201d observes that, in the past, \u201cbiological paternity was considered an ineffable enigma of nature, not just unknown but indeed unknowable.\u201d For much of the twentieth century, the closest thing to a paternity test was the ABO blood-type test, invented in 1924 by a German doctor named Fritz Schiff. But that test could only exclude a possible father, not positively identify one. Then, in 1984, a British geneticist named Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting, which allowed scientists to take a sample of hair, skin, or saliva and single out a sequence of nucleotides specific to one person. But such testing was intended for professionals in a lab. That all changed when a retired business owner in Texas had some extra time on his hands.<\/p>\n
People had always asked Bennett Greenspan whether he was related to the economist Alan Greenspan. \u201cI had no answer,\u201d he said. He had never met Alan Greenspan and had never heard that he was a distant relation. Most of us in his position would simply have replied no, but Greenspan, now seventy-three, had been fascinated by genealogy since he was a child. He once brought an empty chart to a shiva, where he mined his elderly Eastern European relatives for intel. He always felt that there were \u201cpaper-trail roadblocks\u201d stopping him from getting a full picture of his family tree.<\/p>\n
In 1997, Greenspan read an article in the Times about a group of geneticists who had tested the Y chromosomes of Jewish men who believed themselves to be part of an ancient priestly tradition called the cohanim. He called Michael Hammer, one of the researchers quoted in the story, who ran a lab at the University of Arizona, and asked to buy a DNA test; Greenspan figured that, if science could try to trace Jewish men alive today to Aaron and Mt. Sinai, there might be hope for his family tree. Hammer told him that his DNA tests were for anthropological purposes only. Greenspan countered with a technique he had learned from sales, which was to let an awkward silence emerge. Hammer fell for it, interjecting, \u201cSomeone should start a company for this, because I get calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time.\u201d Hammer and the University of Arizona agreed to let Greenspan run direct-to-consumer tests out of their lab for a fee, and, in 2000, FamilyTreeDNA, the first home DNA-testing kit, was born. Greenspan remembered getting calls from confused customers: \u201cThese brothers called and they go, \u2018We think your test is wrong\u2014we two match, but our little brother doesn\u2019t.\u2019 I said, \u2018Come on.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lily Wood is forty-three years old but considers April 9, 2019, to be her \u201crebirth day.\u201d That was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[125465,267,22724,18753,22723,70,72982,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-355878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-annals-of-inquiry","9":"tag-genetics","10":"tag-inverted","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115053515856409104","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}