Blood in Court

The scientific laws of inheritance, which had their genesis in the Moravian sweet pea garden of pious Monk Gregor Mendel, are more & more often appealed to when sordid cases reach U. S. courts. Last week, in the Scientific Monthly, Dr. Alexander S. Wiener described the newest and safest tools of the courtroom geneticist.

Experts in the obscure ways of heredity can often determine the fathers of illegitimate babies, decide whether a divorce-minded husband is the father of his wife's child, expose impostors who claim in heritances. As an index of heredity, facial resemblance is now deemed very unreliable. Eye color has scientific support but leaves too much room for reasonable judicial doubts. Fingerprints are only vaguely significant. Geneticists are fond of earlobe characteristics but do not yet understand their distribution patterns. Dr. Wiener declared that the most practical means of determining parentage can be found in the inheritance patterns of the four human blood groups. "It is a simple matter," says Dr. Wiener, "to ascertain what groups can occur in the children when the groups of the parents are known." Typical cases:

> After a baby mix-up in a Chicago hospital in 1930, the right babies were restored to their puzzled parents through blood-group tests.

> Sued for nonsupport, a husband denied he had fathered his wife's child. Blood-group tests showed that his wife was not even the child's mother. Investigation then showed that she 1) had been married six times before, 2) could not have a child, 3) had adopted the child to defraud her latest husband.

Today only five States (N. Y., Wis., N. J., Ohio, Maine) compel litigants to undergo blood tests when appropriate.

Wider use of blood tests is hindered by a lack of expert serologists and the fact that bumbling technicians have sometimes made errors. But expert Dr. Wiener in Manhattan recently settled a Colorado paternity case with blood chilled and shipped to him by plane. Dr. Wiener advised rich oldsters who anticipate inheritance squabbles to attach a blood-group analysis to their wills.

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