This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found.
The hidden camera conversation unfolded in the midst of a months-long CBC News investigation into a years-long pattern of erroneous results produced by Viaguard’s non-invasive prenatal paternity testing.
During the hidden camera encounter, he presented himself as a seasoned scientific expert who’s seen it all, and, in a matter-of-fact tone, said he knows mistaken prenatal paternity results could inflict lasting damage on lives.
Dr. Mohammad Akbari, director of research at the molecular genetics laboratory at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, said the type of test Viaguard claimed to use depends heavily on having enough of a mother’s blood to be able to extract the fetus’s DNA.
Associate Prof. Ma’n Zawati, research director for McGill University’s Centre of Genomics and Policy in Montreal, says private commercial DNA laboratories don’t need licences to operate and sell services.
The federal government should step in and fill gaps to protect consumers from a proliferation of companies selling DNA tests and fixes that could have serious impacts on the health and welfare of individuals and society, said Zawati.
The original article contains 2,131 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wow, that’s pretty bad, since people tend to assume paternity tests are infallible. I’m surprised they aren’t more regulated in Canada. (Are they more regulated in the USA?)
Also I can see how a poor test would give false negatives, but how would there be false positives unless someone at the company was just making things up?
since people tend to assume paternity tests are infallible
This specific instance is particularly egregious, but…
They shouldn’t be doing this regardless. Most medical tests have a false positive rate, and I suspect nearly all paternity tests do as well. When interpreting medical results having a decent understanding of Bayesian statistics is very useful. If you don’t, you should be asking your doctor to help you interpret results.
Pretty sure that’s exactly what Tennenbaum was doing. Rather than admit, “the test didn’t produce a result,” he’d just make it up. Asking for information about period cycles and intercourse sounds like he was using that information to try to guess, with no more accuracy than the mother could have done by herself. They weren’t even collecting enough blood for an accurate test, if he even really ran them. I bet it comes down to a combination of greed and hubris.
Or regulate at all…
Associate Prof. Ma’n Zawati, research director for McGill University’s Centre of Genomics and Policy in Montreal, says private commercial DNA laboratories don’t need licences to operate and sell services.
😲 That’s some pretty serious caveat emptor there! I’m not giving my dna so any random weasel in a suit.
But i was told that gov’t regulations are bad and stifle innovation!!!
Generally, how DNA tests work is by selecting points in the DNA and comparing the two samples. The more points you compare, the more likely you have a true match. If you don’t compare enough points, or pick places in the DNA that are unlikely to have much variability across the population, you’ll get all matches on those points and say it’s a match. For paternity testing, you’re looking for ~50% matches.
Though, in this case, it does look like they were just making stuff up:
Richot said she was coached to ask women seeking prenatal paternity test kits about times in their menstrual cycles and the dates they had intercourse with different men — information that is useless for a DNA test.
Staff put the dates into an online ovulation calendar to narrow down the possible biological father, she said. Richot then entered the information into a form that went to Tenenbaum for signoff.
“[Tenenbaum] would always make a comment like: ‘It’s definitely this one [the biological father]. It’s this one, it’s got to be this one,’” said Richot.