In myth, if a hero wants to achieve greatness—to slay a multiheaded Hydra, to part the Red Sea, to bring balance to the Force—he 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’s the appropriate amount of anger over an extramarital affair? Will our roots always tug at us, even if we don’t know they’re ours? Who or what, exactly, determines our destiny?
In 1999, the producers of “Maury” came to their host, Maury Povich, with an idea to boost ratings. “These soap operas—they take six months to reveal someone’s secret father,” Povich remembered them saying. “We can do that in fifteen minutes, on air.” 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, “People come up to me all the time on the street. They like to grab their pregnant wife and get me to say, ‘You are the father.’ ” His show was controversial; scholars have accused it of reinforcing stereotypes about Black women’s promiscuity, but nonetheless it became a cultural touchstone. In a 2015 “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” segment about Black History Month, Michael Che joked about Povich: “He set more Black men free than Abraham Lincoln.” Povich’s show was also an unlikely educational resource. In the nineties, DNA was the stuff of science fiction—I first heard about it in “Jurassic Park”—but here it was something real, with real-life consequences.
The scholar Nara B. Milanich, in her book “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,” observes that, in the past, “biological paternity was considered an ineffable enigma of nature, not just unknown but indeed unknowable.” 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.