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Errors in DNA and Paternity Tests

DNA tests are extremely accurate. For instance, a paternity test can confirm the identity of a child’s father to a probability of 99.99 percent. Some experts estimate the chance of one of these tests being wrong is a staggering one in a billion. But there are several recent cases which have proved that DNA tests are not infallible.

One well publicised paternity case was that of Andre Chreky, a celebrity hairstylist, who found himself struck with a paternity suit by a woman he insisted he had not been involved with for several years. After voluntarily giving a buccal swab he was shocked when the results of the DNA paternity test showed he was the father, with only a 0.01 percent margin of error. Knowing this could not be the case, Chreky launched a two year legal battle against LabCorp. He eventually triumphed in court after it was concluded that the results of DNA test were, in fact, the result of human error.

There are also documented cases of incorrect paternity test results leading someone to believe they are not the biological father of their child. This is unsurprising. Although 0.01% is an extremely low error rate, for every 100,000 tests performed up to 10 families will receive the wrong verdict on the paternity of a child.

Errors in DNA tests may also have implications for the legal system, where DNA evidence is usually taken at face value.

No one knows the level of human error in DNA and paternity tests. Analysing DNA is an extremely complicated procedure and anomalies and unexpected mutations in such a small sample of DNA could both have a bearing on the accuracy of the results. The possibility of human blunders such as mislabelling, switched samples and simple misinterpretation of results should not be dismissed either.

There is no question that the error rate in DNA and paternity tests remains extremely low and if you undergo DNA testing or are involved in a paternity suit you can be confident in the reliability of your results. But with hundreds of thousands of DNA tests being performed each year there is a possibility that DNA test errors may be impacting on hundreds of lives.