Genes and Money

By S.C. Gwynne/Houston

Not long after her 19-year-old son was murdered two years ago, Joyce McField of Broadview, Ill., was contacted by a woman who said she was pregnant with his child. McField was inclined to believe her, and when the baby girl was born, she became a doting grandmother. Now and then, however, she wondered if the girl was really her granddaughter. So one day she took a sample of her dead son's blood that the police had kept as evidence and hired a Houston company called Identigene to conduct a DNA paternity test. "I just wanted there to be no question marks," says McField. The tests showed that the little girl was not her son's; McField has since severed relations with both the woman and the child.

McField is one of a rapidly growing number of people who, in the post-O.J., post-Monica world, are taking advantage of the rapidly falling costs of DNA-testing technology to settle lingering paternity questions. And where there's a new science and a growing need, there's sure to be a company that comes along to fill it. In the DNA-testing industry, Identigene is it.

Though an estimated 200,000 DNA profiles are run each year by states trying to document child-support or welfare payments, folks with paternity issues rarely have the wherewithal to order up a test on their own. About five years ago, however, that started to change. It was then that Caroline Caskey, 32, a French-literature major turned business student, thought to combine cutting-edge DNA analysis with old-fashioned, hawk-the-product marketing. A few years earlier, a lab headed by her father Thomas Caskey patented something called the "short tandem repeat," a shortcut method of sampling DNA. Caskey saw the new technique for the cash cow it could be and founded Identigene, advertising her father's technique as a simple and--at $475 a test--affordable way to establish paternity. Launching an ad blitz that included direct mail, TV talk shows and billboards in 30 U.S. cities, Caskey made sure she got her company in front of consumers.

Consumers responded. Identigene's business has doubled in each of the past five years. This year the company expects to field 67,000 telephone inquiries and conduct 10,000 DNA tests, compared with 650 tests in 1995. It now has offices in Japan, Korea, Brazil and the Czech Republic.

The business is not without controversy, however, most of it centered on tricky questions of privacy. Short tandem repeat technology is so sensitive that it can identify DNA from little more than the saliva residue on a soda can. "A moral principle in genetic testing is that it should always be done with the consent of the individual," says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "No one wants someone snooping into his DNA."

But such niceties carry little weight for people desperate to establish something as consequential as paternity, and Caskey plans to keep cashing in on that need. Identigene is preparing to offer an even cheaper, $150 test that will profile newborns' DNA to reassure anxious parents that they're leaving the hospital with their own child. "It's potentially a much bigger market than paternity testing," says Caskey. And a bigger payoff too.