Abstract
A FURTHER refinement in the use of blood groups as a test of paternity was indicated by Dr. V. Friedenreich of Copenhagen at the seventh International Congress of Genetics which was held in Edinburgh immediately before the outbreak of war. Dr. Friedenreich, as reported in the Lancet of September 16, described the division of the A group into three varieties; A1 is dominant to A2 and A3, and Atto A2 A3 is very rare. The distinction between A1 and A2 is already employed medicoIegally on the Continent, thereby increasing the proportion of cases in which false accusations of paternity can be disproved. Reference to the important work of Dahr indicated a still further possibility of discrimination in that persons of constitution AA may soon be distinguished from those of constitution AO, a point of very considerable evidential value in the legal sense. From the anthropological point of view, the occurrence and distribution of groups A and B in both anthropoid apes and man constitutes a problem—so much so, indeed, that Dr. G. Montandon, of Paris, goes so far as to deny on this ground that it has any evidential value whatsoever as a criterion of race in man. Prof. Ruggles Gates, however, in a communication to the Congress at Edinburgh, argued that while gene A probably arose in the common ancestors of anthropoid apes and man, gene B in all probability arose much later by parallel mutation in both stocks.
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Blood Groups and Paternity. Nature 144, 542 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144542c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144542c0