A woman took an at-home DNA test and was astonished to find out that her biological father was a man from Essex whose sperm was allegedly used illegally by a Harley Street IVF specialist.
The tale will be told in a new BBC radio series called The Gift, which will premiere on Monday.
23andMe and Ancestry.co.uk, among others, have offered genetic testing kits that have been used by millions of people across the globe, many of whom received them as gifts.
One of the interviewees, who goes by the alias “Madeleine,” thought her father was a medical student at the time who gave his sperm to Dr. Reynold H. Boyd’s clinic before his mother became pregnant.
Boyd passed away at the age of 90 in 1991.
Madeleine’s suspicions about her father’s identity led her to take a DNA test, which she uploaded to Ancestry’s website, only to discover that the fertility specialist was not her father, as she suspected.
Her biological father was “Peter,” a man who had never donated sperm but had given samples to Dr. Boyd at a different facility in East London while he and his wife tried to conceive.
Madeleine’s mother may not have known Dr. Boyd used Peter’s sperm in her treatment. The man Madeleine believed was her father had a vasectomy.
She and her brother were conceived at different fertility clinics.
Peter, now in his eighties and retired, had taken a DNA test independently after receiving one as a present. Peter claims that he never gave permission for his sperm to be utilized in whatever way anyone saw fit.
Incredibly, the Golden State Killer, one of California’s most notorious serial murderers and rapists, was apprehended using internet genealogy sites to establish a DNA match over thirty years after his investigation went cold.
According to a government report, DNA evidence obtained at a murder site linked to the serial Killer was matched to a database of genetic profiles. The 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo was apprehended in 2018.
