Science Friday - Paternity, Musical Proteins, Microbiome In Runners. June 28, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

These days, a scientific paternity test is easily acquired, and its results are seen as almost indisputable. But what about the days before so-called foolproof DNA analysis? For most of human history, people considered the identity of a child’s father to be more or less “unknowable.” Then in the 20th century, when a flurry of events sparked the idea that science could help clarify the question of fatherhood, and an era of “modern paternity” was born. The new science of paternity, which includes blood typing and fingerprinting, has helped establish family relationships and made inheritance and custody disputes easier for the courts. But it’s also made the definition of fatherhood a lot more murky in the process. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They make up everything from cells and enzymes to skin, bones, and hair, to spider silk and conch shells. But it’s notoriously difficult to understand the complex shapes and structures that give proteins their unique identities. So at MIT, researchers are unraveling the mysteries of proteins using a more intuitive language—music. They’re translating proteins into music, composing orchestras of amino acids and concerts of enzymes, in hopes of better understanding proteins—and making new ones. Though the ads tell you it’s gotta be the shoes, a new study suggests that elite runners might get an extra performance boost from the microbiome. Researchers looking at the collection of microbes found in the digestive tracts of marathon runners and other elite athletes say they’ve found a group of microbes that may aid in promoting athletic endurance. The group of microbes, Veillonella, consume lactate generated during exercise and produce proprionate, which appears to enhance performance. Adding the species Veillonella atypica to the guts of mice allowed the mice to perform better on a treadmill test. And infusing the proprionate metabolite back into a mouse’s intestines seemed to create some of the same effects as the bacteria themselves.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for listening. I wanted to give a quick thank you to everyone who donated in celebration of Cephalopod Week and helped build our online sea of support. We can't do this stuff, particularly not these fun things like Cephalopod Week, without your help. So thank you. And if you missed out, just a reminder that you can make a donation at any time to support SciFri by visiting our website. We're a nonprofit, and we rely on donations from our fans and listeners.

So go to ScienceFriety.com slash give to donate. Once again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash give. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, the fascinating history of paternity science. But first, proteins. You know, they are the building blocks of life. They make up cells, enzymes, skin, bones, hair, spider, myselka, conch shells, anything, you know, is alive. But it's not. notoriously difficult to understand the complex shapes and structures that give proteins their unique identities. So, at MIT, researchers are unraveling the mysteries of proteins using a more intuitive language, the language of music. They're translating proteins into music

like this, composing orchestras of amino acids, concerts of enzymes, in hopes of better understanding proteins and making new ones. Marcus Bueller's research in creating this music appeared in the journal ACS Nano this week. He's a material scientist and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hello, Ira. Thanks for having me. What made you look at a protein and say, you know what? I see music. Well, proteins, as you mentioned, form these amazingly different kinds of materials.

And what's common in proteins and all the different materials you've mentioned is that they form hierarchical structures that go from the molecular all the way to the macro scale. So they form little sheets or helices which assemble into bundles, which assemble into fibers and so on and so on until we go to the macro scale. And in music, we see something very similar. If you think about the sound of an instrument, the timbre of an instrument is really created by an overre of many different sign waves, which are modulated in time. And then you can play with an instrument. You can play a melody. Usually you can play multiple melodies together.

You can play chords, and you can play longest sequences, and you can sort of build up a musical piece or understand music from a similar perspective and that is hierarchical, built up from small building blocks and forms complex, large-scale systems, just like proteins. So, okay, I want to, say I want to translate a protein into music. Give me the steps that are involved. What's the first step?

Sure. So first we realized to do this, it's not as straightforward as one might imagine if we want to do this physically sound or chemically sound. So we realized in this process, so in addition to conceptually realizing the similarity between proteins and music, and there might be some connection, the key to understanding this translation or doing this translation was really that we realized that matter at the nanoscale is always moving and vibrating. So if you take a microscope, first of all, actually, if you open your chemistry textbook, you're going to find a picture of a molecule in there and it's static, right? It doesn't move. But if you were to take a real microscope and you look at a molecule, you see that the chemical bonds are always moving and vibrating. And so what we did is we computed these vibrations using quantum

mechanics, which are the physical laws or chemical laws that govern mechanics or behavior of systems at that scale. And we then could compute a spectrum of vibrations, each molecule. We detected that each of the building blocks of proteins, which are the amino acids, has a unique frequency spectrum, which we could then make audible using a

concept of transposition, and that way we can begin to hear how these proteins sound like. Let's listen to them. Let's play one of these protein songs. This one is called Concert of Silk and Ameloid. Wow. I'm hearing it be... Let me play it under it

while we're talking. We're does that rhythm come from? Yeah, so what we did in this in this piece is, so every protein that you might find, and there are millions and millions and millions of proteins out there in nature has a particular sound if you do

this translation in that way. And what we did in this piece, we actually combined the soundings and rhythms we detected from a silk protein and an amyloid protein, and combined them in a piece of music where we basically have the human brain composing

out of this basis of sounds that are created by nature through these natural vibrations of these individual amino acids and the proteins as a whole. And what you heard is really a collection of sounds that solely come from these very, very basic quantum mechanical vibrations. All right, let's listen to, this is fascinating. Let's listen to simple amino acid beat and melody. All right, what are we hearing? Tell us.

What we hearing here is a little different. So what we did in the previous piece, we had the actual real protein, a basis and created songs or compositions from that. In this piece that we just heard, we only took the basic soundings of amino acids as a basis and actually made up our own proteins, if you wish, from these sounds and composed within this the tones available. And they're actually, because there are 20 unique amino acids in nature and biology, we have 20 unique sounds that we can play with. So the scale we're playing with here isn't the C major or C minor scale or anything like this. It's

actually a 20-note amino acid scale that's unique to these materials. And that's what we played with in creating this composition that we just heard. Now, I understand that after you translate the proteins into music, you let computers, meaning artificial intelligence systems, listen to the music. What's the point there? Right. So as we translated proteins, we translated hundreds and thousands of these different proteins. We listened to them, created our own compositions. One of the really difficult things is to understand

how do we actually relate what the sound is like with the function of a protein or how the protein will fold, or whether a protein is a disease protein or a healthy protein or how it assembles. And even though the human ear is very good and actually is very good in detecting patterns,

we're not very good in detecting and understanding this new type of a sound and this new type of functionality that's expressed through music in these sonifications. So we decided to feed all these sonifications these sounds to a computer, to an AI, an artificial neural network. And instead of using the human brain and detecting what this protein sound really means, asking, having a computer learned from all the data,

what these proteins look like and how they function. And I understand that there's a practical application that you are thinking about it. You're doing some research on communicating with, spiders with the sound. Yeah, right. Tell us about that. Yeah, so in general, what the artificial neural network, the AI can do very well is detecting patterns and learn languages. And in the proteins, we have, through these sonifications, learn the language of what determines how a protein will fold,

whether it's a disease protein or healthy protein and so on. And we're applying a similar way of learning from sounds to other systems. This is work we're doing with collaborator Thomas Sarasino, an artist in Berlin, who's visiting resident artist at Kast at MIT. And Tomaz and I have started working on this idea of thinking about spiders as sound creators. Spiders actually a very obvious choice for thinking about the connection of sound material and living organisms because they use sound in detecting how they're building the web. They're detecting other spiders in the web. They're detecting prey in the web.

And what we're trying to do there is to really take these different sounds that the spider hears and creates by actually vibrating the web. The spider uses the web as an instrument, if you wish, for communication. And we don't understand this language. So we are doing the same, similar idea that we're doing for the proteins here at the macro scale in the case of a spider. And trying to learn what is the spider trying to tell us with these different sounds. And for us humans to understand this and actually then feeding these sounds back to the. the spider web and trying to, this is the vision for this work that we're trying to achieve, is to come up with a way of communicating with a spider.

So one of the interesting things, one of the things I'm very interested in in general is how do we communicate across scales, how do we make quantum mechanics audible, like in the case of proteins, how do we communicate across species? How can we as humans communicate with spiders? And how can we translate insights from different fields like music into material science and forth and so forth? So in the spider case, the real direct application is that we're trying to be able to communicate with the spider and see how the spider responds. And if this works, it would be very exciting.

It would be the first time we have a Google Translate, if you wish, app for communication between different species. Do you have any reason to believe that the spider knows how to listen to what you would be sending you? Yes, well, the spider. The spider relies very heavily on signals, on vibrational signals in its communication, because it's essentially blind. So when a spider builds the web or detects prey or detects other spiders, or any kind of activity in the web or communicating, mating and so on, the spider will actually use vibrational signal.

So it's very sensitive to vibrations. So we think that when we start to speak that language by actuating the web and pretending to be a spider but actually using the right kind of frequencies, the right kind of spectra, the kind of language, we might be able to do that. I'm worried, I'm not worried, I'm wondering, I'm wondering about your passion with music. And you use as an engineer in physics and designing these materials, where does it come from? Well, yeah, I think I'm very interested in the translation of insights between different domains. And we have realized the, as we said in the beginning, these systems across different manifestations have very similar construction.

principles basically. No, no, that's, that's, no, I know I asked you the question, but I don't think you might not have heard me, might not have asked her. You, when you discover that proteins can be made to play music, you must have some sort of musical background, right, that you understand music. You must have, have, were you ever a rock musician or something in your, in your childhood? No, no, no, I wasn't know, but I've always been very interested in music and sound and compositions. And so it's actually a natural connection between the different things I've been doing in my professional career. And this will be just an extension of it. Yes, correct.

So this is, you know, when we talk about putting arts in STEM, this really would be your STEAM project. Right, correct. Well, I think, yeah, I mean, a lot of these different areas are quite connected. And I think you mentioned STEM, a STEAM, a STEAM outreach. I think it's a terrific example of how we can teach about, make connections about something everybody is about, which is sound and music and a piano and explaining how the piano that nature uses to create complex proteins

and function has only 20 keys. And with these very simple 20 keys, these amino acids, nature builds amazing machinery, amazing materials. And that's something very similar as humans have actually created complex systems out of universe, building blocks, music, right, for thousands of years, ever since humans, have been around. They've been creating the systems.

Well, you've explained it very well, and we want to follow you on your communications with the spiders. You stay in touch, okay, Mark? Thanks so much. You're welcome. Thanks, much, Ira. Good luck to you. Marcus Bueller is a material scientist and professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the link between runners and the microbiome. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Imagine this. The conclusion of the

a big race. Maybe it's a major marathon or the Olympic 10,000 meters. The winner has asked what contributed to her success. So she takes a moment to think, and she thanks her family, her trainer, and her microbiome. Hmm, sound a little bit far-fetched. Well, new research published this week in the journal Nature Medicine suggests that a kind of gut bacteria may help elite runners. Mice, given the bacteria, performed better on a treadmill test than mice without it. And mice, given a chemical produced by the bacteria, also performed better. So will we be seeing a probiotic shake added to the carb loading before the big race? Joining me to talk about it is Alicostic.

He's an assistant professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Med School and Jocelyn Diabetes Center in Boston, and one of the authors of that study. Welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me on. You're welcome. You studied the microbiome in some of these elite runners. How did you do that? Well, it took a lot of work,

and mostly the dedication of the first author in the study, Jonathan Scheiman, who rented a zip car, and for two weeks straight, went house-to-house, picking up fecal samples from our cohort of marathon runners. How did he pull that short straw to do that? I got to do all the analysis. He got to do all of the fun field work. Okay.

So the reason for that is that there were microbes, you believe, different in these elite runners than regular people. Well, yeah, at the outset, we really didn't know what to expect. I think, from my perspective, I do a lot of work in the microbiome in various diseases, with a lot of focus on diabetes. And we were interested in, is there anything unique in the microbiome of supremely healthy people

and what better place to look than our runners in the Boston Marathon? So that's what prompted the question. I think at the outset, I don't like to have hypotheses. I like to create data sets and kind of really analyze them, figure out what is unique that stands out and let the data kind of guide me.

So you found that they had more of one kind of bacteria than the normal, normal folks, people who are not marathon runner? That's correct. So what we found was a single genus of bacteria called Vianella, which isn't so well studied, but it was not only at higher abundance in the runners after the marathon, but even before the marathon, the runners had a higher basal level of that organism compared to sedentary controls.

And why would they have that? Well, so that's the answer to that question. We only kind of found out towards the end of the study the reason why it was basely higher in the runners. But it has to do with a unique property of this organism, at least relative to most human gut bacteria. Vinella uses lactate or lactic acid as its preferred carbon source and energy source. So it likes to eat lactic acid. Isn't that the stuff that muscles give off when you exercise? Yeah, that's exactly right.

So this is a substance that you can think of is kind of a metabolic byproduct of exercise that the muscles are producing. And so is the idea here that if they have an excess or they have more of this vialella that they are eating the lactic acid and so they can perform better without getting tired? Right, exactly. And that was our hypothesis going into it, that maybe is it possible that enough of the lactate is getting into the gut and that this organism is serving as a lactate sink and removing lactate from the system.

Although the more we talk to experts in the field, exercise physiology, the more we came to understand that this whole hypothesis that lactate causes burn and causes fatigue in the muscles is not so well accepted. So it seemed to us it had to be through some other mechanism. So what do you think that is? Well, what we were able to show in our metagenomic analysis and we looked at not just which bacteria were present in the runners and the gut microbiome of these runners, but every single gene that they carry, what we found was that that gene that metabolizes lactate

was very highly abundant, but an entire pathway of genes downstream of that enzyme was also highly abundant. And this pathway, this metabolic pathway, converts lactate into a key short-chain fatty acid, propionate. And so that got us thinking, maybe it's not really the removal of lactate, but rather it's what lactate is being converted into propionate. So could you investigate that? Yeah, and so we had some ideas about why propionate could be important. So one, it's known to be an important anti-inflammatory molecule. Also, it's a bioenergetic substrate that epithelial cells in the intestine tend to prefer.

In addition to that, there's some literature out there showing that it increases cardiorespiratory fitness, This increases cardiac output and even has some direct central nervous system functions. And so because we saw this as a major end product produced by this bacteria, what we did was test whether that molecule on its own could be sufficient to reproduce the kind of beneficial effects that we saw in our mouse studies with the whole vinyl. And could it? And it could. And it could. And so the kind of difficult thing about these experiments is that you couldn't just take propionate orally. So that's not really a viable route because it gets metabolized rapidly by the liver.

And so you need to introduce propionate right where it's produced by the gut microbiome. And that is right in the colon. And so we had to do intracial installations of propionate in these mice prior to getting them on the treadmill. But similar to colonization with whole vionella, we saw this increase of about 13% in the ability of the mice to run until exhaustion. So you're saying it's not quite practical. You're not going to be able to swallow this propionate because it's not going to get where it's supposed to. Yet getting it to where it's supposed to may not be a pleasant experience for people, how shall I say? Is there a middle ground

How to get it to where you'd like to have it The way you want to have it? Yes, definitely And the answer is the microbes I mean because they're right there At the right place, at the right time producing the substance. So at the right place because they live in the colon And at the right time,

because when the colon starts getting this rapid influx of lactate Produced by the muscles, but that we show eventually crosses the epithelial barrier into the gut where it's accessible by the bacteria, the vinyl is right there to convert that into a propionate. So you have this perfect little enzymatic process that the bacteria are conducting to give you that shot of propionate when you need it. So is there a way to eat, ingest or whatever, get the bacteria you need in a health food

store and a probiotic somehow? No. So vinyl is currently not a probiotic. there is an effort right now to try to demonstrate safety for this organism and also do manufacturing on this organism. There's a lot of troubles you need to be done there. But it is a common member of the human gut microbiome and something that is present in a lot of athletes, definitely most marathon runners that we saw.

And then, you know, can you imagine then why is it, going back to the original? question, why is it that Vianella is at higher abundance basally in marathon runners versus sedentary individuals? Okay, I'll bite. Give me the answer. Well, it's because of this positive feedback loop.

So what we think is happening. So the marathon runners are constantly training, constantly producing lactate. This is creating a unique niche for this organism, now to thrive in the gut of athletes. And so the more that they exercise, the more of their Vianla abundance goes up,

And in return, Vinella is giving them a little bit of a boost in producing propionate. So it's forming this kind of positive feedback loop. And what seems to be an important symbiosis between the human and the microbiome. So once they stop their exercising, if they stop marophoning, then the gut bacteria is going away. We haven't shown that, but that's what we would guess, yes. And so you think that anybody, could achieve this if they just get the right level of intensity in their exercise?

I think a lot of people can. The main question is how do you get seated with Vianella in the first place? And definitely, some people have it, some people don't. Even the athletes, some of the top athletes we looked at were absent for Vinyl. So that's why we think trying to create it into a probiotic is going to be something very useful. Keep your eye on at the drugstore shelf for the probiotics. Are you working on that at all? Creating it into a probiotic? Yes, this work has spun out into a company, Fit Biomics,

and the goal of Fit Biomics is to do that safety testing and that manufacturing to produce this probiotic. Well, I'm not surprised. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Kostick, for taking time to be with us today. I appreciate it. Thank you. Alex Kostick, Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Med School there in Boston. These days, a scientific paternity test is easily acquired, and its results are almost indisputable.

But what about the days before, so-called foolproof DNA analysis? For most of human history, people considered the identity of a child's father to be more or less unknowable. Until the early 20th century, when a flurry of events sparked the idea that science could help clarify the question of fatherhood and an era of modern paternity was born. The new science of paternity, including blood typing and fingerprinting, has helped establish family relationships and made inheritance and custody disputes easier for the courts. But it has also made the definition of fatherhood a lot more murky in the process. And that's what we're going to be talking about.

If you have a question or comment about the definition of paternity, how it's changed over the course of human history, Give us a call. Our number, 844-8255, or you can tweet us at SciFry. And joining me now to share the fascinating history of paternity science. And moreover, some of the big questions it has yet to answer, is Anaira Milanish. She's Professor of History at Barnard, College at Columbia University, author of the new book, Paternity, the elusive quest for the father out now.

Dr. Melanish, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. Very fascinating, but I had no idea of the long history of this. Yeah, this is a history that really hasn't been explored, I think. Yeah, and you have explored it. Let's get into this. Our current version of the paternity test, it's rooted in DNA analysis and the scientific method. But beforehand, what did people do in the 19th century to identify a baby's father?

Yeah, so we may think of DNA. I mean, DNA is so familiar. It's such a familiar part of our social and cultural landscape today. that it's easy to forget that it's really only in the 1980s that we had a foolproof scientific test of the father. And it's really only in the 1990s that we see the commercialization of these technologies so that they really become a part of our kind of social and cultural world. But that doesn't mean that people didn't know who fathers were in the past. They had alternative methods for knowing them. So while there was a whole discourse about how biological paternity was not just unknown but unknowable,

prior to the 20th century. So you have French jurists in the 19th century saying things like paternity is as mysterious as the source of the Nile. That is to say it is something that we don't know and indeed can't know. Nature has shrouded it in a veil. But there were alternative ways of knowing paternity, social and legal definitions of paternity. And so there are really two definitions that prevailed. The first was the definition of paternity in marriage. and that said that marriage makes the father.

So if a married woman gives birth, her husband is automatically considered to be the father of her child. Kaboom. Kaboom. Very easy. That's it. What happens in the case of women who aren't married? Who is the father of their child? Well, in that case, paternity is defined through a series of social behaviors and reputation, or in the old Roman formulation, nomin tractus phama.

Name, treatment, reputation. So in other words, the father was the man who gave the child his name. The father was the man who was seen leaving the woman's house at suspicious hours of the night, reputation, right? The father was the man who treated the child in public as his own by giving baby booties as a gift or paying the wet nurse or the midwife. So these were all social behaviors. Am I, Riflato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Narra Milanish, author of Paternity, the elusive quest for the father. Continue.

It's a fascinating history there. Sure. So, in other words, we could say that paternity rather than being is not something an identity that flows directly from the act of procreation. It is rather a social relationship that really comes into being as a result of a father's behavior and his intent and his will. That's a very different definition of paternity. that because the law says that you especially now, right, with all these sperm donors or whatever,

you could be a, you could father a hundred people, but you're not considered the legal father, right? There has to be the intent, as you write in your book, that you want to be the father and will take care of the child. That's exactly right. So even in the era of DNA, where we have this foolproof, you know, 99.99% certainty tests, scientific tests that can tell us who the biological progenitor is. That doesn't mean that we have embraced a biological definition of paternity, and sperm donors are a great example. Very few people would consider a sperm donor to be the father, legally and socially speaking, of a, you know, the child or children that are born of his donation, shall we say. And about a minute we have left before the break.

See how fast we can answer this. We can go over the break. Why did we suddenly become so obsessed with paternity in the early 20th century? What was going on there? Yeah, so I think there's a confluence of both scientific and political events that explain why people get so interested in paternity really starting in the 1920s. On the one hand is the science. People are, of course, this is the heyday of hereditary science, right? People are obsessed with eugenics and racial science and the idea that heredity can be harnessed for the good of human societies.

So paternity science is very much coming out of that hereditary moment. So in part, this is a story about scientific developments. But it's also a story about how social and political issues spur the interest in paternity. New ideas about gender and family and welfare and childhood also help explain why paternity and knowing the father becomes an issue of intense interest in this period. And there are very famous cases that come up that we'll talk about after the break. It's a fascinating story talking with Nara Malanish, author, of paternity, the elusive quest for the father. Our number 8447-8255. Also, you can tweet us at Cy Fry. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. Casey just joined us. You're

listening to Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about paternity, the elusive quest for the father. It's a new book written by Nara Milana. She is here with me talking about the modern era of paternity testing and how it arose out of past eras. And we've started. We were talking about why it became so popular at the turn of the 20th century. What was going on? Right. So as I was saying, there are certain social and political trends that helped to explain why people became so interested in knowing who the father is as a biological and scientific matter.

And that has to do with new ideas about gender and childhood that arise in, say, the 1920s in the post-World War I era. So on the one hand, we have new women's rights movements and new roles for women. and there's an increasing propensity to question old ideas about gender. So if we think about, you know, the 19th century trope of the fallen woman, the Victorian fallen woman, right? The unmarried woman who bears a child out of wedlock and must, you know, bear the stigma of that transgression all on her own. By the 1920s, that idea seems a little archaic and people start to think, hey, you know, maybe men also should be responsible for their children. So in part, this is a story about gender, new ideas about gender.

But you also mentioned many times in the book that it's also an idea about race. That's exactly right. So one of the things that I didn't expect when I was doing this research, I knew that this would be a story about gender and the family and childhood. I didn't anticipate the extent to which the history of paternity testing would be so intertwined with the history of race. And that has to do with how the science grows out of eugenic science and racial science and is very much in dialogue with the science. And it also has to do with how paternity and race are both understood as these kind of essential natural essences that can be concealed or made secret or hidden. And that they can be in turn revealed somewhere on the body through scientific experts. So there's a kind of parallel in the way people have thought about paternity on the one hand and race on the other.

I think most contemporary people, when we look back, let's say, toward World War II in Nazi Germany, think about race and paternity as the Nazis defining who was a Jew by your paternity, right? That's exactly right. So one of the things that I found is that Nazis were, we of course know that Nazis were obsessed with race and racial definition. I found that they were obsessed with paternity. And the reason is, has to do with the definition of race in Nazi racial ideology. So the way that you know who is a Jew or an Aryan, according to the Nazis, is you've got to know who their parents are, right? And their grandparents, right?

It's a genealogical definition. So that made the Nazis very interested in genealogical proof, the ability to prove who a father in particular is, right? So they were very concerned with scenarios. of adoption and illegitimacy in which paternity might somehow be obscured. They wanted to always know who the true biological father was because that was necessary knowledge to know the race, the so-called race of the individual. Right.

And in fact, you're right that after 1938, paternity suits flooded civil courts from Munich, Vienna to Hamburg. Women came forward to repudiate the paternity of Jewish husbands. Children filed suits that challenged the paternity of Jewish. fathers. The rachs victims took advantage of the logic of racial paternity to save themselves and their family members. That's right. So Jews really took advantage of this noxious racial ideology to save themselves. So you see this rash of paternity suits in which people, women come forward and children come forward to disavow the paternity of their husbands or

fathers and thereby reclassify themselves racially and to, you know, to save their own own lives and that of their children. Let's go to the phones. 8447-248255. Allison and Denver, welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. I go ahead. Yeah, I'm a schoolteacher, and I've seen a huge rise in the number of blended families where who the father is, who the legal father is, doesn't really matter so much as who's choosing to raise a child. And in my family, we have, you know, has like, you know, three different fathers based on, you know, different, a variety of backgrounds of the paternity versus the person who raised him. And we're choosing to raise our daughter with a relationship where there's lots and lots of people who are the parents. And I'm

wondering if there's a historical precedent for people to raise their children with a variety of different parents, maybe because they're, you know, in an open marriage or something like that. And what is the kind of current direction that we're moving in as we see blended families that are consistently more diverse than just the kind of mother and father and child kind of scenario? Great question, Alice. Thanks for calling. That is a great question. And I think that very often we're encouraged to think about families in the present as somehow radically different from families in the past. So this idea that the family has always been a nuclear family, the family has always, or maybe an extended family, but at any rate, it's always been a family of a father,

a mother, and its biological children. And that's just not the case. And it's, you know, it's hard to generalize historically across, you know, thousands of years and the entire globe. So we would have to ask this question in relation to very specific societies. But, you know, the short answer to your question is the family that we think of as, as, as modern or new, families have changed over time. And so there absolutely are historical precedents for the kinds of families that you're talking about. Just think about the fact, for example, that there were very high rates of mortality in the past, so that many children had to be reared by people other than their biological parents.

Just that one simple little demographic fact alone accounts for a whole series of different social practices for raising children other than biological ones. You talk about some very bizarre stories you encountered in your research. And one familiar bizarre story that, I mean, I've followed in my lifetime, is that of Charlie Chaplin and his paternity suits. I mean, tell us how bizarre that was. Yeah. So, you know, we might think about celebrity paternity scandals as something that is new. But in fact, I found that celebrity paternity scandals have really been with us since the 1920s. and probably the most famous such scandal in the 20th century involved Charlie Chaplin,

the Hollywood legend, who was a famous cad. He was famous for his womanizing and his predilection for much younger women. And at some point in his career, he was in his 50s, it was the early 1940s. He was accused of being the father of the baby of his young protege. a woman by the name of Joan Barry. And so there was a very loud suit that was followed very closely by the newspapers. And the suit, of course, was aimed to determine whether Charlie Chaplin was, in fact, the father of this adorable red-haired baby who would accompany her mother to the courtroom every day. And so the lawyers presented the kind of typical evidence that would be shared in a paternity suit.

suit of this kind. There were various witnesses, the handyman of, you know, Charlie Chaplin's estate, who testified that he had seen this young woman leaving his house at odd hours of the night and testimony of that kind. But then the lawyer brought in, Chaplain's lawyer brought in a very different kind of evidence, namely a blood test. And three doctors presented their findings a couple weeks before they had taken blood samples from Chaplin, Joan Barry, the young woman, and her baby, Carol Ann, and tested the blood types, right? Determine the blood types. And they discovered that the mother was type A blood, the baby type B, and Charlie Chaplin type O. In other words, he was not a compatible blood type and could not biologically have fathered that baby. So the jury

disappears into its chambers and deliberates for several hours. It comes back into the courtroom and declares that Charlie Chaplin is in fact the father of baby Carol Ann. Even though the science says that's impossible. Even though the science says that's impossible. So what is going on in this case? Well, the scientists have a field day. They say, what is wrong with California? It is declared black is white and white is black and up is down. Other critics, said, you know, the problem is the law is too conservative. It doesn't keep up with the science. The jurors are ignorant and they don't understand. But I think there's something else going on here that's actually more interesting than either of those explanations. And that's that the jury

really understands paternity in a very different way than the doctors. So for the jury, paternity is a social relationship. It derives from chaplain's romantic relationship with the mother as opposed to his biological relationship with her child. And so that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is that paternity is assigned rather than genetically determined. That's exactly right. So, you know, we see the rise of these new technologies and new meth scientific methods for knowing the father over the course of the 20th century.

And indeed, by the 1940s, blood group science is pretty indisputable. I mean, there's a very strong scientific consensus that blood types, there are four blood types, and they're inherited according to incontrovertible laws. And yet we can see even in a courtroom a very different logic playing out. So how did the blood test emerge as the best technique for testing paternity? Because in your book, you point out all the pseudoscience that came before it. That's right. And in fact, in the book, I really talk about the pseudoscience and the, quote, unquote, real science in the same breath.

because I think, you know, in retrospect, in hindsight, it's very clear which of these techniques worked and which techniques didn't work. But that wasn't obvious at all at the time, right? So we have a certain kind of hubris of hindsight where we can say, well, the blood group tests obviously worked and using fingerprints and electronic blood tests didn't work. But that wasn't obvious at the time. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. But blood group tests were a really,

important way of an enduring way of knowing the father. They emerge really in the 1920s out of blood group research, which dates back to really the turn of the 20th century. So by the 1920s, scientists know that there are four human blood groups, that they are inherited, they're passed from parent to child according to these immutable laws, that those laws are predictable and therefore that blood groups are useful potentially for knowing, if not who the father is, at least who the father is not. Because, of course, blood groups can exclude certain impossible fathers, but they can never tell you who the father is, right? I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Naramil Anish about her very interesting book, Fraternity, the elusive quest for the father

in just a few minutes left to keep, continue talking. Do we have separate tests now for paternity for American citizens and for foreigners? I mean, when we have the Department of Homeland Security beginning a pilot DNA testing program last month at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is being used to expose immigrants suspected of posing as families, that's not the same definition we are using to assign a father paternity for a citizen, is it? That's exactly right. So we're really using different definitions of paternity in different.

social contexts and the context of immigration law is a really great example of that we have a so-called family-based system of immigration so that we give you know rights to residency or even citizenship based on the relationship between family members right and so that means that immigration officials might be interested in being able to prove kinship relations between two alleged you know a citizen and say their son or daughter the problem with that is that it implies, it requires, or imposes a biological definition of kinship. And we can think of many examples where biology doesn't.

Well, just the simple sperm donor. The simple sperm donor. That's exactly right. Or the caller's question. Right. That we recognize socio-effective relationships and forms of kinship in all kinds of other contexts. But in immigration proceedings, we insist on a biological definition. And I think that's discriminatory.

Yeah. And in fact, the current situation at the border now is reminiscent of an era you talk about in your book in the 1950s when Chinese immigrants were detained in their family relationships question. That's right. So it was really in the 1950s in the era of the Cold War that we see the origins of genetic testing in immigration proceedings. When immigration officials are concerned that there are fraudulent Chinese families who are infiltrating the country and, And this is the Cold War, remember. So there's this concern about communism, right? That Chinese communist impostors will make their way into the country by posing as the sons of Chinese American citizens.

And so the State Department and the INS was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service begin testing the blood of Chinese migrants in order to determine. whether they are in fact related to their alleged kin. So that's really the origins of the policies that we're seeing in practice today. Interesting. I just have about a minute left. I want to ask you about something that everybody's doing now, and that's taking these ancestry testing services. What are your feelings about them?

So I think the phenomenon of these tests is fascinating. We love a good paternity reveal story. DNA didn't create those stories. Right? Those stories have been with us. I mean, Shakespeare, the 19th century novelists, but DNA gives a new way of telling the story. It adds a new twist to the plot. And so I think that those cultural narratives have been with us for a long time, but DNA and especially the mass commercialization of DNA testing has really, you know, breathed new life into those very old stories. You say, I'm going to quote from your book, essentially they're really advanced paternity tests. Right. And so, you know, one of the questions when people do DNA, you know, 23 and me is, are they searching for ethnic origins and identity, or are they searching for long-lost family members? Are they searching for their own identity? There are many things that people are clearly searching for when they spit into that little plastic tube.

There you have it. Thank you. This is a fascinating book. Thank you. Narimanagh is Professor of History at Barnard College at College. Columbia and author of the new book, Paternity, the Elusive Quest for the Father. And if you go to our website, you can check out an excerpt of the book on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash paternity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And, of course, we are all week on all kinds of social media. You can listen to a podcast. You can ask your speaker to play Science Friday. I'll get the last episode of Science Friday there. And, of course, you can go to our website and listen live if you can't hear it on live on the radio in your local public radio station. Of course, you want to send his email.

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I'm Ira Flato in New York.