Gee, I think it might be important information that the PUBLIC should be aware of. I wonder how many erroneous results they created that caused the wrong guy to pay CS for another man's child?
There is more and more info coming out of human error in these testing labs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082000998.htmlPaternity
Suit Raises Doubts About DNA Tests
Va. Judge Rejects Results, Questions Lab Work in Case of D.C. Hair Salon Owner
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 21, 2005; Page C01
Washington hairdresser Andre Chreky gladly agreed to a DNA test when a former employee hit him with a paternity suit.
The claim was absurd, Chreky said he remembers thinking. He had stopped dating the woman years before she gave birth to the boy, now a teenager. This would all be over soon. DNA doesn't lie.
A former employee sought, and won, child support from Andre Chreky, who denied being the father. After a two-year fight, Chreky won his appeal.
A former employee sought, and won, child support from Andre Chreky, who denied being the father. After a two-year fight, Chreky won his appeal. (By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
The results were back in a month, on a two-page report from Laboratory Corp. of America, or LabCorp, one of the largest paternity testers in the country and the state of Virginia's exclusive contractor: "The probability of paternity is 99.99 percent."
"It's crazy," Chreky, 50, who lives with his wife and two children in Great Falls, recalled saying. "We need to take this to battle."
The fight lasted two years. When it ended in May, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge David T. Stitt not only ruled in Chreky's favor, but also raised serious questions about the reliability of DNA testing during a time when it is relied on to prove paternity, guilt, innocence and more.
"I thought LabCorp's performance was shoddy," Stitt said at a hearing in May after ruling that the state did not prove Chreky was the father. "I think something unfair happened in this case, where a citizen was put to the greatest extent to defend himself against what really has turned out to be a moving target as far as where LabCorp is concerned. . . . I'm concerned about what level of oversight is being exercised by the commonwealth of LabCorp's work."
The state is not appealing Stitt's ruling.
LabCorp handles more than 100,000 DNA paternity tests for many public and private clients every year, including Montgomery, Prince George's, Howard and Anne Arundel counties in Maryland. (The District handles its own DNA testing.) But evidence at Chreky's trial showed that the company has only five people reviewing the data and making paternity determinations -- with one supervisor testifying that he issues an average of one paternity report every four minutes during a 10-hour shift.
DNA experts say Chreky's case underscores a growing problem in the burgeoning field of DNA testing: People make mistakes, and people collect the DNA samples and perform the analysis. So, they say, although DNA is as reliable as ever as a definitive science, the people reading and analyzing that science are imperfect. And the volume of DNA testing keeps rising.
The ruling in Chreky's case came as Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) ordered a review of DNA testing at the state's criminal forensic lab after an audit detected human error in an analysis of a death row inmate's case.
Laurence D. Mueller, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of California-Irvine who has been tracking lab errors in DNA cases for years, said DNA labs "use techniques that have been automated, like Hostess Twinkies on an assembly line. Most of the time, the Twinkies are fine. But once in a while, you see a bad one."
The bad ones, some biologists say, are coming more frequently.