Finding Dad with a DNA Database
posted by Daniel Solove
An interesting story from the N.Y. Daily News by Corky Siemaszko, with a soundbite from me:
Using his own spit and the Internet, a tech-savvy teenager tracked down the anonymous sperm donor who is his biological dad. . . .
“It shows that anybody can be a high-tech sleuth in this age,” said Daniel Solove, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and author of “The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age.” . . .
Sometime last year, the boy sent a swab of saliva and $280 to www.FamilyTreeDna.com, a DNA database that traces family trees – and is popular with descendants of Holocaust survivors looking for lost kin. . . .
Nine months later, the teen was contacted by two men who had registered with the site and whose Y chromosomes appeared to be close matches to that of the teen. Y chromosomes are passed down from fathers to sons.
Their surnames were the same, but spelled differently. So the teen went to another Web site, www.Omnitrace.com, where he plugged in the few details he got from the fertility clinic about his dad — date and place of birth, his college degree. A few keystrokes later, he knew which one was his dad. . . .
More details on how the boy tracked down his sperm-donator father are included in this article from The Times (UK):
Though the biological father had never supplied his DNA to the site, his Y chromosome profile, shared by his son and closely matched by the two other men, suggested they must be related. The similarities in Y chromosomes between the teenager and the two men revealed a 50 per cent chance that all three had the same father, grandfather or great-grandfather.
According to New Scientist, which is publishing the report this week, both men who contacted the teenager had the same surname, although with different spellings.
Using this information, he then used a second website, www.omnitrace.com, to compare the surname with the few details of his biological father given by the fertility clinic, which include date and place of birth, and his college degree. The search brought up a match for his father.
November 5, 2005 at 12:20 am
Posted in: Privacy
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Responses (2)
Emergent Chaos - November 5, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Data Destroying Anonymity
New Scientist reports “Anonymous sperm donor traced on internet:” LATE last year, a 15-year-old boy rubbed a swab along the inside of his cheek, popped it into a vial and sent it off to an online genealogy DNA-testing service. But…
Qbi's Weblog - November 6, 2005 at 12:52 pm
Vater finden
Stellt euch vor, ihr seid das Produkt einer k
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