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BBC R4 The Gift by Jenny Kleeman MP3

Without us realising, an enormous DNA database has been created online. It holds the secrets of your true identity and promises to reveal untold family connections. But what happens when online ancestry tests reveal more than you had bargained for?

Across six episodes, Jenny Kleeman meets the men and women whose lives changed forever after they opened a box that contained a DNA test. Exposing scandals, upending identities, solving mysteries and delivering life-changing news - Jenny investigates what happens when genealogy, technology and identity collide.

1. Fraud - 11 Sep 2023

In this first episode, a scandal deep in the heart of London's Harley Street is exposed when a man in his eighties receives a DNA test Christmas present from his daughter.

Madeleine was 40 when her father died, and her mother revealed that she and her brother had been donor conceived at two separate Harley Street fertility clinics. The revelation threw Madeleine into a tailspin. She became determined to find out who her biological father was.
"It was a massive, massive thing for me not to know one half of me," she says in the programme. "I would look at most men and think, 'you could possibly be my biological father.'"

Having read news reports about fertility fraud cases where doctors used their own sperm to inseminate their unwitting patients, Madeleine became convinced her mother's fertility doctor must be her biological father. But it was an at-home DNA test given to another patient at the same clinic as a birthday gift that finally gave Madeleine the answers she craved.

Presenter: Jenny Kleeman
Producer: Conor Garrett
Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke
Executive Producer: Philip Sellars
Production Co-ordinator: Gill Huggett

2. Justice - 18 Sep 2023

When Andrew's father, John, died, he realised he knew almost nothing about John's childhood. While Andrew had grown up in Australia, John was American. He'd always said he grew up in a Catholic orphanage in Chicago, but Andrew had the impression his dad never wanted to talk about the past.

Andrew became increasingly determined to learn about his father's life in the US, and connect with any relatives he might have over there. When he finally took an AncestryDNA test he discovered the shocking truth about his father, a double murder, and the quest to find him that had consumed federal law officers for more than 40 years.

As Andrew says: "True crime is obviously a really big thing at the moment, and I think it's very interesting to be on the other side of the fence."

3. Mistakes - 25 Sep 2023

When Vanner and Donna Johnson saw that 23andMe DNA tests were on sale for half price, they decided to buy kits for their two sons as well as themselves. If the kits hadn't been on special offer, they might never had discovered the truth that Vanner and 11-year-old Tim were not father and son. A mix up at the IVF clinic where Tim was conceived meant they were not genetically related.

"I felt like I wanted to scream," recalls Vanner. "How could his father be unknown? I'm his father. I've been his father since he was born."

Donna and Vanner turned detective to try and track down the man whose sperm had been used to create their child. How would Tim react when he found out that Vanner was not his father? And how would Vanner's biological father respond to being told he had had an accidental son?

4. Race - 02 Oct 2023

Growing up in Seattle with a white mother and a black father, Kara had experienced racism for as long as she could remember.

When she was 43, she wanted to find out exactly where in Africa her ancestors came from, so she could take her three sons there for a 'finding our roots' tour. Her DNA results showed her to be half European and half Ashkenazi Jewish. The man who raised Kara wasn't her father – and she had no African American heritage at all.

"I'd never even heard of the term Ashkenazi before," she says. “I didn't even think my mum had ever met a Jewish person before. Obviously she did once."

Five years later, Kara wears a Star of David pendant in our Zoom call, has recently returned from spending a few months in Israel and is a practicing Jew – even though her biological father had passed away more than a decade earlier, and his family refused to have a relationship with her.

In an age of identity politics, where your race can give you different claims in the world, how much do your genes actually matter?

5. Health - 09 Oct 2023

When Sara’s family decided to gift each other 23andMe tests one Christmas, they made sure she didn't get the package testing for any genetic predispositions to health conditions. Knowing that Sara was an anxious person and a mild hypochondriac, they thought no good would come from her learning about the possible medical future foretold in her genes.

But, keen to rule out conditions like Alzheimer's, Sara couldn't resist the option to upgrade her test. Kenn to learn about her health, she paid up out of her own money.

Months after submitting her DNA, Sara learned that she had a mutation of the BRCA gene, meaning she had an elevated risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. As she says in the programme: "You don't have it yet, but you most likely will have it. You have this like crystal ball in front of you that you can see."

At only 30 years old, she was faced with two choices: a lifetime of tests and medical observation, or a double mastectomy. It was a choice that caused her to move home, end a relationship, lose friends and eventually rediscover what mattered in her life.

6. Secrets - 16 Oct 2023

Family is everything to Peter. A foster parent, father of five and grandfather to 11 from New South Wales, Peter got into genealogy in his 40s. He liked the challenge of tracking people down. And he was good at it – building a family tree of more than 13,500 names, and organising reunions of distant relatives all around Australia.

Aged 59, Peter saw an TV ad for AncestryDNA, and decided to throw his genes into the mix. But when his results came back, it looked nothing like the family tree he’d spent so many years cultivating. The only name he recognised on it was his own.

"All those reunions, all those people… I wasn't related to any of them. It wasn't my family," he says.

When he googled the name of the hospital where he was born and saw result after result on government apologies and forced adoptions, the penny dropped. How would the parents who had raised him explain the secret they'd kept from him all his life?

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