Identifying Parents After Many Years

Answer 1

There are some situations that come up in modern society in which children are separated from their parents. There is the case of adoption, for example. A mother and father can give their child up for adoption if they so choose. The child can then be taken by another family who wants to have a child but does not desire to have one of their own. This also is done by couples who are unable to have their own for medical reasons. When the child grows up, though, he or she may want to know more about those birth parents.

This is not the only way in which a child could be separated from his or her parents. If a woman is not sure who a child's father is because there are two different men who could realistically claim the child, for instance, she might not live with either of the men. She could then not tell the child, when it grew up, who its father really was. There is one way to answer this question that is successful all of the time, that cannot be inaccurate just because of the way that people are made.

The solution is to figure out who the child's parents are by looking at paternity DNA. A child gets half of its DNA from the mother and half from the father. By looking at these strands of information that are present within the very cells of all humans, doctors can know without a doubt who the person is and who the person's parents are. This is an expensive procedure, but it is the best way for a child who wants to meet his or her parents to be sure that the people claiming to be the parents really are who they say they are.

In many ways, this process operates along the same lines that the police officers and forensic scientists use when they try to solve a crime. If they have DNA from the person who committed the crime, they can compare it to the suspects' DNA information. Whichever suspect is a match is the one who had to have committed the crime.