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After his daughter was born with the 'wrong' eye and hair color, a dad demanded a DNA test

Was he right to be skeptical?

via Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels and Anna Shvets/Pexels

Can he be the father?

The presumed father of a newborn baby was skeptical of his paternity after the baby girl was born with blonde hair and blue eyes. He and his wife of two years have brown hair and brown eyes, so he thought there was no chance it was his child.

The wife reassured her husband that they could have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby and that, quite often, a baby’s hair and eye color can change over time.

But the husband “freaked out at this and refused to listen,” the wife wrote in a viral post on Reddit’s AITA page. Instead, he “demanded a paternity test and threatened to divorce me if I didn’t comply, so I did.”

The man was so confident that after the baby was born, he moved into his mother’s house while he awaited the results of the DNA test. The wife stayed home with the baby and was helped through the first few weeks by her sister.

To make things worse, the wife’s mother-in-law began to make threats. “My MIL called and informed me that if the paternity test revealed that the child wasn’t his, she would do anything within her power to make sure that I was ‘taken to the cleaners’ during the divorce,” the mom shared on Reddit.

Finally, three weeks after the child was born, the DNA test results arrived and the husband came home to read them with his wife. “I was on the couch in the living room, so he sat next to me and we started to read the results,” she wrote. “They showed that he was the father and my husband had this shocked, kinda mortified look on his face with his eyes wide as he stared at it.”

dad dna test, paternity test, you are the father

A man is shocked to learn that he is the father.

via Mikhail Nilov/Pexels

The wife said, “I told you so,” and laughed in his face. In the post, the wife also notes she has “zero history” of cheating.

Although it is rare for two people with brown eyes and brown hair to have a blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby, it is entirely possible. According to Verywell Health, there is a 19% chance that a couple with brown eyes can have a blue-eyed baby. And, as the wife noted earlier, a baby’s eye color can change over its first year of life.

Further, two people with brown hair can have a blonde-haired child if both parents carry the recessive gene for blonde hair. The blonde hair may darken over time as well.

dna, dna strand, dna test

A strand of DNA

via Warren Umoh/Pexels

If the father had done a quick Google search on the topic, he would have quickly realized that there was a very strong case that he was the father and the drama could have stopped before any damage was done to the marriage.

The positive part of this story is that the wife’s post on Reddit earned her a ton of support from people who thought her husband’s antics were utterly inappropriate. The support probably also helped to put her husband's wild antics into perspective while she determined their future. The wife felt bad about laughing at her husband, but most people thought it was appropriate, given her husband's behavior.

“Not only doesn’t he have a basic grasp of genetics, he threw a tantrum and left you immediately after having the baby to struggle alone for almost a month,” CrystalQueen3000 commented. “He’s lucky all you did was laugh in his face.”

A lot of commenters thought that the woman should leave her husband for accusing her of cheating and leaving her alone with the child.

“Honestly, if my husband left me for weeks after giving birth due to a faint assumption like this, I would be done. I can't be together with someone who abandoned me when I needed them desperately,” Matakakiba wrote.


This article originally appeared on 1.5.24

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How one man’s DNA results influenced his work as a culinary historian and a food writer.

What do food and family heritage have in common? Well, for Michael Twitty, a lot.

True
AncestryDNA

What did you have for dinner last night?

Do you think your great-grandmother — or great-great-grandmother — ate the same thing for dinner? Chances are, you probably haven't given much thought to why your meal is what it is — or whether your great-grandparents ever ate the same thing.

All images via Michael Twitty, used with permission.

But ever since he was a child, culinary historian Michael Twitty has thought about these kinds of questions.So when Twitty became curious about his own ancestral roots, food was always going to be a part of his research journey.

When he combined these two passions — culinary history and genealogy — it led him on an incredible trip exploring the food and history of the old South, one that would change how he saw his family's role in history and culture forever.

Twitty decided to embark on a journey to learn the truth about his heritage by taking an AncestryDNA test.

"For African-Americans, the desire to know what makes up your conglomerate blackness is deep," Twitty says."It's in every one of us, and we take that journey very seriously. We want to know who we are and where we come from ... because of slavery."

Not only did he want to know where his family came from but also whether some of the stories passed down in his family were true — including the stories about his white ancestors, the people who had once held his family in bondage.

"We had an incredible oral history that said a lot of things about who we were," he says, "and quite frankly, we couldn't always prove those things."

For example, he had been told that his ancestor was a captain, and his family believed they knew his name and the story of how his great-great-great-grandmother was born, but there was no way to prove it, no birth certificate to name him as the father, because she was born a slave.

Twitty not only wanted answers, he wanted to understand what it was like to live his ancestors' life. So, he embarked on a journey from Maryland to Texas and back again.

During that time, he immersed himself in old records, bills of sale, and other historical documents on Ancestry.com.

He also visited restored plantations, farms, and battlefields.

He met with a 101-year-old man who had lived through the Jim Crow years, he spoke with Civil War re-enactors, and he spent a lot of time eating and cooking alongside black, white, Native American, Latino, and Asian chefs to understand their role in the shaping of southern history and culture.

To better understand his ancestor’s experience, he picked cotton for 16 hours, primed tobacco, plucked Carolina rice, cut sugar cane, and sucked on red clay.

He also took an AncestryDNA test to get to his genetic roots.

The results revealed that his origins were 69% African and 28% European. His ancestors had come from such places as Ghana, Senegal, Congo, and Nigeria while his European ancestors were largely from Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula.

Michael Twitty's AncestryDNA results.

He encouraged others in his family to take the tests too — including his grandfather, an uncle, and his cousins — and because his AncestryDNA results allowed him to compare his DNA against a large population of others who had also taken the test, he was able to slowly piece together a much clearer picture of who his family was, where they came from, and how they moved around the United States.  

In fact, with the help of his AncestryDNA results and records from Ancestry.com, he was able to identify and name at least a dozen new ancestors, black and white, going back two centuries — helping him prove that a lot of those old family stories were, in fact, true.

"When you can actually take your genealogy — your genetic genealogy — and see that yes, indeed, you are a part of these historical practices, migrations, journeys. When history is a narrative … all of the sudden, you're real," Twitty says. "You're real in a way that a book can't tell you that you're real."

This trip also showed him how much his family's story overlapped with the history of today's "southern cuisine."

The forced migration of domestic slaves transformed food in the region because cooks brought their tastes for certain food with them. And his family was a part of that story.

For example, he says, "soul food was a cuisine, a memory cuisine brought by people who were migrating to other parts of the country from the South, but it was based on that survival cuisine that we made in the old South that kept us going for generations."

Twitty's quest to learn more about himself and his roots had a dramatic effect on his work as a culinary historian and food writer.

It changed how he saw the role of food both in his family and in the old South as a whole — and it changed how he felt about history. Knowing who his ancestors were, seeing the records of their lives, learning where they were from, and discovering the role that they played in the history of food and the South brought that history alive for him in a way nothing else could.

This led him to write a book called "The Cooking Gene," which will be available this August.

"I wanted to take our entire country on a journey, and I wanted to use that information from the ancestry test to backup my claims," Twitty says.

"This is where soul food comes from in Africa — look at my genes. My genes show that yes, it did come from Nigeria and Senegal and Congo and Ghana and other places. That story is in our blood — it's in our bones."

Twitty believes others might find themselves creatively inspired by their results too. "Your AncestryDNA results can be a new way into whatever your creative passion [is]," he says."A memoir or cookbook is just one outlet, it could be a quilt, a garden, a social media group, a novel, you might travel ... your results are an infinite invitation."

Heroes

Game-changing genetic editing just let one teenager 'dodge' sickle cell disease.

Chalk up another big potential win for science – it just helped one kid avoid some of the devastating effects of sickle cell disease.

Sickle cell disease is a chronic, genetic blood disorder that affects about 100,000 Americans. It can affect anyone, although it disproportionately occurs in African-Americans. It’s manageable with medicine and proper care, but can still be dangerous and extremely painful. It's a lifelong condition.

Or, maybe not. Because that last part — about it being a lifelong condition – might be changing.

A French teenager may have just dodged most of the effects of the disorder thanks to gene editing.

A worker preparing cells for gene editing research. Ben Birchall/PA via AP.

That's according to a March 2, 2017, report in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Sickle cell is caused by a single genetic typo in the gene that produces hemoglobin — an important blood protein. That typo can cause normally disc-shaped red blood cells to warp into sickle-shaped crescents.

On the right are normal-shaped red blood cells. On the left is one deformed into the classic sickle shape. Image from Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia.

These can get trapped in small blood vessels, causing painful, sometimes dangerous blood clots.

The researchers behind the study used gene editing to install a typo-free copy of the gene into the DNA of some of the boy's cells.

A modified virus shepherded a copy of the normal hemoglobin gene into the boy's bone marrow stem cells (which produce red blood cells).

Now, more than two years later, about half of the boy’s red blood cells are carrying that normal protein.

"It’s not a cure, but it doesn’t matter," explained Philippe Leboulch, who helped invent the therapy, because the results were enough for the patient to avoid most of the effects of sickle cell.

Other gene therapy studies for sickle cell are also underway in Los Angeles and California.

The treatment is still preliminary work, but if it holds out in the long run, it could be a huge win for a lot of people.

In Indianapolis, a newborn's blood is taken to test for inherited diseases such as sickle cell. Photo from AP Photo/Michael Conroy.

"It could be a game changer," Oxford geneticist Deborah Gill told New Scientist. "The fact the team has a patient with real clinical benefit, and biological markers to prove it, is a very big deal."

In the past, researchers have had success fighting sickle cell with stem cell transplants, but finding a compatible donor can be difficult for many patients. Gene therapy, however, only needs one person — the patient.

Of course, there's still a ways to go before this could be widely available. But if it works out, this technique could help over 100,000 Americans live without the chronic pain of sickle cell. Which is the very definition of "a very big deal."

Heroes

Want to understand better how human traits are passed on? Just study the fruit fly.

True
NC State

Getting fruit flies drunk might sound silly, but it's an important part of Dr. Trudy Mackay's research.

Enter Mackay's lab at NC State University, and you'll find multiple columns stretching from floor to ceiling with alcohol vapor running through them. If you look real close, you'll see the fruit flies in these "inebriometers" partying hard — getting hyperactive, falling all over the place, and then eventually just passing out drunk.

The thing is, that's exactly how a human would react to alcohol. So does this make fruit flies more human? Obviously not. But it does illustrate one of the many traits and characteristics that we have in common with the humble (and occasionally tipsy) fruit fly.

When Mackay read a study in 2000 that said 70-75% of human genes have equivalents in the fruit fly, she knew there was more to be learned about humans.

In fact, the research she gathers from fruit flies can usually translate to humans. And in some cases, what'll make a fruit fly sick will make a human sick as well — meaning we can potentially learn a lot about serious diseases from observing fruit flies.

Dr. Trudy Mackay. All screenshots via NC State/YouTube.

In the case of the alcohol sensitivity, Mackay and her team identified a gene in the flies called "malic enzyme" that was strongly affected by the alcohol. Then when they surveyed humans on their drinking habits, they found that those who consume alcohol had similar results in the same corresponding gene. It's a huge step in understanding how alcohol affects us, but what's key is finding other variants like malic enzyme and observing how they interact with each other.

"This is where we’re going in the future," adds Mackay. "What we would like to know is how the variants combine together to affect risk."

So why test fruit flies in the lab and not, you know, a lab rat?

"They're actually an odd but very good model of human complex traits," Mackay says. "In fact, many of the pathways that we know are involved in cancer, heart disease, other human complex diseases actually have names from flies — where they were first discovered."

Mackay also notes that there are a couple of advantages to using the flies instead of the more common lab mammals. "One is their very short lifespan," she says. Fruit flies don't live all that long, so it's easier to see how the traits they observe are passed from one generation to the next. It also makes it easier to study just that — lifespan.

"The other is that we have community resources that have been built up over many, many decades," adds Mackay. "A whole host of technological advances that we can use to study traits that are relevant to human health."

In fact, one of the most important resources around is one that she created. The Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP), a collection of 200 different genetic fruit fly lines, allows other scientists to conduct their own research and compare their trait results with the catalog Mackay has provided. That helped earn Mackay the esteemed Wolf Prize in Agriculture, an award that's known to be an indicator of Nobel Prize winners.

There's still a lot of work left to be done, but that only pushes Mackay even more.

Yes, it's pretty awesome that we have a lot in common with fruit flies. But in the grand scheme of things, it's about so much more than that. "What I think is most important are the general principles of complex trait inheritance that we’ve discovered that I very much think is applied to the same general principles in humans," Mackay notes.

That's why Mackay continues to apply her research to understanding a number of different causes — whether it's glaucoma, aggression, or stress resistance in humans. At the end of the day, it's all about gathering as much information as possible to put the pieces together.

"You can think of it as, the studies we've done up to now is giving us a parts list," Mackay says. "And what we need to do is figure out how those parts go together."

It's a long (and unpredictable) road ahead, but it's one that Mackay would gladly go down anytime. When asked about what inspires her to keep pushing the field forward, Mackay didn't even hesitate.

"The same as any scientist," she says. "Curiosity about the natural world."

Feeling curious yourself? Check out the video below to learn more about Dr. Trudy Mackay's groundbreaking work:

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