Development of the method
Paternity – from witness testimony in court to today’s DNA Technology.
As early as the late eighteenth century, cases in which paternity was disputed could be brought before the courts. At that time, witness testimony and statements from the parties regarding the circumstances surrounding the conception of the child served as evidence in such cases.
Medical expertise could also be called upon, for example to assess the duration of pregnancy or anthropological factors such as external physical characteristics.
The Austrian scientist and later Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine, Karl Landsteiner, described the ABO blood group system in 1900, thereby laying the foundation for the use of biological testing to exclude paternity with a certain degree of probability. The first time blood group analysis was used as evidence in a paternity case was in Germany in 1924. Expertise in transfusion medicine and immunology was appointed by the courts to perform and interpret blood group testing as evidence in paternity cases in Norway from the early 1930s.
The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Oslo was established in 1938, partly to meet the needs of the justice system for blood group analyses in paternity cases. However, blood group systems at that time were not sufficiently reliable to exclude all falsely attributed fathers.
In the period up to 1970, new blood group, serum group, enzyme group, and tissue typing systems were described (serological analyses). Taken together, these serological methods eventually achieved a probability of approximately 95 percent for excluding paternity in cases where a man had been incorrectly identified as the father.
In 1985, the first publications on the use of DNA analysis in paternity cases appeared, and from 1989 such analyses were introduced in paternity testing in Norway. The analyses were carried out at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. DNA testing replaced serological methods in 1992. Methodological development in forensic genetics has since moved towards less labour-intensive and more automated methods and processes. A large number of DNA regions can now be analysed simultaneously, and the analyses require only very small amounts of DNA as starting material. The development of methods has largely been taken over by commercial actors, who supply analytical instruments, reagent kits, and software.