As I age, I have more and more of those eerie moments when I look in the mirror or from above at myself talking and see and hear my dad. But is he really my dad?
Recently one of my students said, “I’m adopted, and I’ve come to that point in my life when I want to find out who I really am. So I’ve started to look for my natural parents.”
Who are we, really? Our religious and cultural messages say we are defined in large part by who our parents, especially are fathers, are. The Bible spends significant energy on “begats” linking one father to the next, building a large and powerful social web of connectedness: vitally, Jesus comes from “the line of King David.” To this day, the descendants of fathers of the powerful tribes of the ancient priests, the Cohens and Levis, are the honored first to read from the Torah every Jewish Sabbath. Inheritance of titles, money, status—all from dad.
But a strange and profound part of our biology: we know from day one who mom is, however, beyond the mirror test and intuition, the dad question is up for grabs. Until recently.
First came the dramatic paternity test results in court, daytime talk-shows, revelations of Thomas Jefferson’s romances with his slaves. Now, the $20 in-home paternity test (+$120 for analysis) is available over the counter from Sorenson Genomics at your local drugstore. And it’s selling like hotcakes. According to the Web site, complete with the iconic 1-800 number and attractive female operator with headset, the IDENTIGENE test is “Fast. Accurate. Confidential.”
It’s not the speed, accuracy, nor confidentiality that worry me so much (although plenty of problems lurk therein). It’s more the information itself, its power, and in what context it is received.
Personally, I’m not too interested in the test for myself. I know who my dad is, and don’t care much about what the DNA says. Besides, new research I’ve written about elsewhere in this column reveals that experience (which my dad obviously provided me a lot of) directly affects who we are and how our DNA is expressed, regardless of that DNA’s origin. What does concern me is the type and power of DNA knowledge, and how gaining access to it at home, alone, could be a problem.
As my student discussing his “real” self and Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee in The DNA Mystique effectively demonstrate, in our culture DNA knowledge is a different kind of knowledge with a different, almost religious, kind of power. Much heavier in some ways than, say, the results of a pregnancy test. That guy in the daytime TV talk show, who gets down on his knees with unrestrained happiness and relief after the DNA test tells him he’s the “real” father, is not all shtick.
Check out this DNA-driven scene from Henry Louis Gates’ PBS show African-American Lives 2. Gates tells comedian Chris Rock that after twenty-one years as a slave, Rock’s great-great-grandfather signed up with the US colored troops to fight in the Civil War. In tears, Rock says, “This whole thing is mind-blowing. I knew nothing of this… It’s weird, if I had known this… I only became a comedian by accident… I assumed I’d pick up things for white people for the rest of my life. If I had known this, it would’ve taken away the inevitability that I was gonna be nothin’.” Powerful stuff quickly moving beyond simple data from a genetics lab and reaching into the realms of self and identity.
Another problem is exemplified by that old urban myth that’s been floating around the science education community for years: the elementary schoolteacher is teaching basic genetics using eye color and has his kids build a chart showing their own eye color, their siblings’, and their parents’. Then the kid discovers that her eye color isn’t quite what it should be based on the genetics. Oops.
The fact is that like most other so-called monogamous animals, humans ain’t.
Do you want to find out at home, sitting there in the kitchen over a Pop-Tart, that the man you thought was your biological father isn’t—you sitting there in a science-social-spiritual vacuum? Folks might not even know exactly what DNA is, how the test was done, much less how this new knowledge fits into their reality or their parents’. This vacuum is partially a physical one, being by yourself without any spiritual or medical support, and partially a sad reflection of the fact that most of us have learned all of our science (even in the formal classroom) in a social-spiritual vacuum, as a set of disconnected facts and not as the integral part of life and society they are. It’s the vacuum that fills the vast gap between the accelerating science and technology we are accumulating and ethical and spiritual, even practical, strategies for dealing with it.
One of the tens of thousands of people estimated to employ the test by the end of the year spoke positively of the experience in a recent MSNBC story, saying, “I think it’s a lot more ethical for you to find out the truth.”
Yes. As long as you want to know the truth and as long as you understand what kind of truth it is. Look in the mirror first.
