January 23 2000                                      BRITAIN

          One in seven fathers 'not the real parent'   

                                  Lois Rogers, Medical Correspondent 

 AT LEAST one in 10 children was not sired by the man who
 believes he is their father, according to scientists in paternity
 testing laboratories. 

 Some laboratories have reported the level of "unexpected"
 paternity to be as high as one in seven when they perform
 DNA genetic tests on blood samples from supposed parent
 and offspring. 

 There are now seven government-approved laboratories
 doing paternity testing. Cellmark Diagnostics in Abingdon is
 the largest and receives more than 10,000 requests a year.
 One in five of them is "private" and has not been ordered as
 a result of a court or Child Support Agency dispute. 

 David Hartshorne, spokesman for Cellmark, said that in
 about one case in seven, the presumed father turns out to be
 the wrong man. 

 "It is surprising how often the mother is wrong about the
 person she thinks is the father," he said. Marriage
 breakdown and more births outside marriage have increased
 disputes about paternity and the desire for testing, he added. 

 In addition to DNA evidence, other studies of mass blood
 samples suggest that increasing numbers of women are
 unsure if their husbands are the fathers of their children. 

 This phenomenon of misattributed fatherhood has been
 investigated in a newly published study by social scientists at
 the London School of Economics (LSE). 

 Oliver Curry, the principal researcher, said long working
 hours and commuting by fathers could contribute to
 uncertainty about whether children have been fathered by the
 man who is bringing them up. 

 "It can have major consequences for the way men treat their
 supposed children and the amount of time, money and
 emotion they invest in them," Curry said. "It can range
 through the entire spectrum from serious abuse to deciding
 not to pay for their education, or not buying them the latest
 expensive trainers." 

 The team from the LSE is calling for investigations to be set
 up by the government's new National Family and Parenting
 Institute. They believe that mistrust over paternity may be an
 overlooked factor in family breakdown. Women are driven
 by primitive urges to seek the optimum genes for their
 children, which can lead to them sleeping with a "high
 social-status Casanova" as well as their regular partner
 during the fertile period around ovulation, researchers claim. 

 David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas who
 is about to publish a new study on the subject, said: "A
 proportion of these misattributed fathers will believe that the
 child is genuinely theirs, and often the mother tries to foster
 that belief." 

 He also estimates that the tendency for women to shop
 around for the best genes leads to them making mistakes
 about who has fathered their child. 

 Soraya Khashoggi, 57, former wife of arms dealer Adnan
 Khashoggi, has revealed how DNA tests established her
 18-year-old daughter, Petrina, to be the child of Jonathan
 Aitken, the disgraced former Conservative minister. 

 Khashoggi said her ex-husband had completely accepted
 Petrina: "He gave her his name without ever asking who her
 true father was," she said. 

 Paula Yates, the television personality, discovered at 37 that
 her real father was Hughie Green, the Opportunity Knocks
 star.