In the summer of 2019, Donna Johnson spotted a special offer: 23andMe kits were half price. She and her husband, Vanner, had been thinking of getting their DNA tested to learn about their heritage and any health issues that might be related to their genes. Given the deal, Vanner thought they should buy four kits and test their sons as well as themselves. “A fun family activity. That’s how we coined it to our boys,” Vanner says.
Vanner Jr and Tim – then 14 and nearly 11 – were happy to indulge their parents. They had an idea what DNA was, Vanner says, but didn’t ask many questions. The logistics proved unexpectedly challenging: you’re not supposed to consume anything for half an hour before you produce your saliva sample, and finding a time when neither boy had eaten or drunk wasn’t easy. But within a week of receiving the kits the four of them were standing around the kitchen table together at their home north of Salt Lake City, Utah, spitting into little plastic tubes. They registered their kits online, sent off their samples, then they got on with their summer.
It’s no longer remarkable to hand over your DNA to a multimillion-dollar corporation and trust them to use it to decode who you really are. The Johnsons are one family among tens of millions worldwide who have used a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company such as AncestryDNA, MyHeritage or 23andMe. Their tests promise to unlock the truth of our heredity and how we’re connected to the world – even a medical future foretold in our genes, if we tick the appropriate box. DNA kits have become popular gifts, the go-to Christmas present for the person who has everything. At least one in 20 British people have been intrigued enough to take a test. As AncestryDNA has said, “There’s no limit to what you might discover.”
The results arrived on Donna and Vanner’s 16th wedding anniversary. Vanner got his email notification first. He saw connections with some familiar names, but Tim wasn’t there. “I thought, huh, that’s interesting.” He texted Donna, who was at the local school where she teaches second grade. He tried to rationalise it – perhaps, because Tim was a minor, the connection wasn’t immediately displayed online? But it niggled at him all day.
Donna’s results came in when they were together that evening. They showed she had two sons: Vanner Jr and Tim. She looked at Vanner Jr’s results. “It showed he had a half-brother through me,” she says. “Then we looked at Tim’s results; it showed me as his mother and his father ‘unknown’.” There was no connection between Tim and Vanner. They were not genetically related.
“I felt like I wanted to scream,” Vanner says. “How could his father be unknown? I’m his father. I’ve been his father since he was born.”
“That’s when we realised something went wrong. Either with the test,” Donna says, “or the IVF we’d had.”
* * *
There is, of course, a third explanation, but there was never any question that Donna had been unfaithful to Vanner. They met in high school and have been inseparable ever since, spending whatever time they can together as a family: Donna teaches at the same school their sons attended, and summer holidays are spent camping, fishing and hiking, or on road trips in the large minivan they bought when they imagined they would be a family of seven.
Donna and Vanner come from big families and always assumed they’d have one of their own. “We had in mind five kids and a dog,” Vanner says in our video call, as he wrestles with their excitable puppy, Daisy. “We thought, it’s just going to happen.”
And it did happen, at first: they had Vanner Jr with no problems. But when it came to their second child, they tried to conceive for 18 months with no luck. Their doctors assumed the problem must be with Donna and gave her drugs to stimulate ovulation, but it turned out the issue was Vanner’s: he’d had hernia surgeries, which had led to scarring that blocked his sperm duct. They couldn’t conceive naturally, but they could with help.
Out of the two fertility clinics they knew about, they chose the University of Utah Center for Reproductive Medicine because one of its specialisms was male infertility. “We felt comfortable,” Donna nods. “Very nice staff, very nice doctors, very caring,” Vanner adds.
The process was physically and emotionally gruelling. Vanner had to have a testicular biopsy so his sperm could be retrieved and injected into Donna’s eggs. Their first cycle failed. On their second cycle, Donna had ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome – a dangerous side-effect of the drugs she’d been taking – which caused her ovaries to swell to “the size of grapefruits”. Seeing how distended her abdomen was when she went in for the embryo transfer, her doctors decided it would be safer to freeze the embryos, delaying the process by three months to give Donna’s body a chance to recover. Still, it was worth it, in the end. Their second cycle was successful and Tim was born in 2008.
“He was the cutest baby,” Donna says, a smile blooming across her face. “So much dark hair, wide eyes; just a beautiful child.” But he had reflux, and could be cranky. “A lot of times he seemed discontented. Sometimes it felt like he was almost inconsolable.” They discovered that, even as a little baby, Tim could be easily distracted with a ball. Vanner couldn’t understand it. “I was like, ‘Where does this kid come from?’ Because neither of us are really sportspeople.”
“His older brother was very content to sit on our laps and read for hours on end – which I loved, as a teacher,” Donna says. “I’d pull Tim up on my lap, pull out a book to read to him and he’d swat it out of my hand, run away and grab a ball and start shooting baskets.” They put it down to normal sibling difference. “Being from large families, we knew all our siblings had different interests.”
Every now and then, they talked about using the remainder of the frozen embryos that were being held in storage. They tried again, in 2011 and 2012, but both transfers failed, and they left their dreams of having five kids behind, Donna says. “It felt like it was better to put our time and energy into the children we had.”
* * *
For more than a year, Vanner and Donna kept the 23andMe results to themselves. The connections between them displayed in the results were too consistent for there to be a problem with the DNA test: the problem had to be with the IVF. Thankfully, their sons seemed to have forgotten about taking the tests. They went completely unmentioned. “We didn’t want our family to change at all, and we felt like this could change our family. So we were very quiet. Yet it bothered us,” Donna says. “There were times I felt like the anxiety would consume me.”
Then the pandemic hit, and the Johnsons were locked down together. They began to feel they had to tell Tim sooner rather than later. “We couldn’t tell him when he’s graduating, when he goes to college, when he’s getting married,” Vanner says. “The longer we held off, if he found out – which is possible in today’s world – he would think we’d hidden it, and we didn’t want that. We wanted to have control of telling him.”
So in October 2020, Vanner took 12-year-old Tim out for ice-cream. He didn’t want anything to sound scripted, but he’d carefully prepared what to say, and planned to say it in the car. As Tim fiddled with his phone in the passenger seat, Vanner brought up how he’d been conceived through IVF in a fertility clinic – a fact they’d never kept from him.
“I said, ‘Well, we found out that somehow, when we were there, something happened.’ In my mind, I can’t use the word ‘mistake’, so I said, ‘Something happened, somehow something got mixed up, and it turns out I’m not your biological dad.’” Vanner’s eyes still brim at the memory as he tells me this, nearly three years on.
Vanner says Tim looked up from his phone for a moment, into Vanner’s eyes, then back down. “He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re still my dad.’ I said, ‘I’m so thankful to hear you say that, buddy, because that’s how I feel, too.’ I didn’t know what it looked like from his perspective – that’ll be his story to tell – but it was a sweet moment. I thought, wow, he is wise beyond his years.” A family who had taken a test to reveal the truths held in their genes had decided that, in one respect at least, genetics didn’t matter at all.
As they headed home, Tim remarked that if he’d happened to have had a different racial background from Vanner, they all would have found out much earlier. While errors in IVF treatments are rare – 99% of all fertility treatments and storage cycles in the UK occur without an incident of any kind, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – mistakes do happen: in 2019, two California families swapped babies four months after they were born, having realised that the wrong embryos had been implanted in each mother. Cases in which the wrong sperm, eggs or embryos are used tend to come to the attention of parents only when there is something visibly very different about a baby. We don’t routinely give babies DNA tests to ensure they have been created from the right genetic material; we assume everything has gone according to plan. But as at-home DNA testing becomes more commonplace, more cases like this are likely to come to light.
The Johnsons didn’t contact their fertility clinic at this point. “We didn’t know what to do,” Vanner says. They were unsure of his legal status regarding Tim, and if Tim’s biological father might be able to claim paternity rights. A lawyer reassured them. “It was comforting to get the confirmation that he is ours under the law, but we understand anybody can sue anybody for anything, especially in the United States.”
“There was a lot of fear about who Tim’s biological father was,” Donna says, quietly. “We started hearing about donor-conceived children having multiple siblings. It was scary.”
They had already tried to find Tim’s relatives through the 23andMe results before they broke the news to him, but the closest connection he had was to a third cousin. After Tim expressed an interest in finding out who his biological father was, they decided to do another test, this time with AncestryDNA, because the company is based in Utah and they figured there was a better chance of finding someone who had used the same fertility clinic on Ancestry’s database. Once again, Tim was spitting into a vial and sending his DNA off to be decoded. But this was no longer a “fun family activity”.
The results came in early 2021 and they revealed a match with a woman who shared enough DNA with Tim for Ancestry to label her a “close relative”. “Her whole name was there,” Donna says, wide eyed. “We started searching through Facebook and other means to see the age of the person. Was it a half-sibling? A grandparent? We landed on, it must be his aunt.”
They became adept at online sleuthing. Vanner worked out how to search obituaries using the term “survived by”. “I put this woman’s name in and an obituary popped up that ended up being her dad.” The woman’s father – Tim’s biological grandfather – had died a year earlier and the names of all his children were listed. They began to Google all the names and scour social media for them.
That’s how they discovered Devin McNeil and the long-forgotten blog he used to keep with his wife, Kelly. They’d written about how they were from Utah, how they were trying to adopt, how they’d struggled with fertility issues and had been able to have one child through IVF: a son, Talon, who was the same age as Tim.
Donna takes a deep breath. “We went, ‘Wow.’”
* * *
Vanner was determined to keep his emotions in check. “I didn’t want to dig too much into whether I was upset, because maybe I would find that I was,” he says, simply. “As his dad, I wanted what would be best for him. If Tim wanted to find his biological father, there’s a connection there that can explain things I could never explain, no matter how hard I try.” A part of him was fascinated to learn what Tim had inherited from this other man. “What does he look like? He’s going to be more good-looking than me – taller, because I’m not that tall. Those types of thoughts were going through my mind, absolutely.”
The Johnsons found photos of Devin through Kelly’s Facebook profile and scrutinised his face for signs of Tim. “It was hard to see the connection,” Vanner says. Tim has a distinctive dimple in his chin; this man had a bushy beard. “But I think we also didn’t want to see a connection,” Donna adds. “I don’t want to see another man in my child.” After so many months searching for Tim’s biological father, they were repelled by the idea that they might have found him.
And then Vanner found Devin’s phone number. The morning they decided he was going to ring it, Donna went out for a run. “A couple of miles out, I got physically ill. The anxiety took over and made me sick.”
Waiting for Devin to pick up was “like for ever minutes,” Vanner says. “It was like time stood still.”
* * *
But Devin didn’t pick up, because he didn’t recognise the number. “I thought it was a spam call.” He shrugs. “I just ignored it.” Whoever was calling from this unfamiliar number was persistent. They kept trying, over a number of days. “Finally, I thought, OK, I’ll just answer it and tell them I’m not interested.”
The unknown caller struggled to get his words out. “You don’t know who I am, but my name’s Vanner Johnson. I think you and I have a connection,” he eventually said. “Did you and your wife do in vitro, by any chance?”
Devin said that they had.
“Was it at the – the University of Utah clinic?”
It was.
“Well,” Vanner said, “I think you and I need to talk.”
“I immediately thought,” Devin says, “the only people who know that are those that are close to us” –they hadn’t updated their blog for more than a decade and had forgotten it was still up. “But I was still sceptical that this was a scam call.” Devin pretended he was going into a meeting and couldn’t talk, but Vanner offered to call back in an hour, on FaceTime, and said he should get Kelly to join them. It was fine if they wanted to keep their camera off, Vanner said, but he wanted them to be able to see his face. “My plan was to get off the phone and not answer it when he called back,” Devin says.
He went upstairs and told Kelly about the weird call. “I also thought it was a scam,” Kelly says. “What does he want? Is he trying to tell us that maybe our baby is not our baby from 14 years ago?” But she thought they should answer the FaceTime call, albeit with their camera off: “He knows too much about us already.”
Devin and Kelly are speaking to me from their home in Castle Rock, Colorado, a 10-hour drive from the Johnsons. They moved here from Utah a few years after Talon was born. There’s a scan of a baby’s face, framed, on the shelf behind them, in Devin’s home office.
Like Donna and Vanner, they come from large families – Kelly is one of five, Devin one of six – and wanted one of their own. After many years trying to conceive naturally, their first round of IVF led to Talon’s birth, but they weren’t able to store any embryos from that cycle. They went through two more rounds, without success. “Struggling with infertility was as emotionally challenging as anything we’ve gone through,” Devin says. “We had to pay out of pocket for all three of our IVF cycles,” Kelly adds. “It was a hardship, financially. It was emotionally hard, and it was physically hard. I ended up in the hospital after one of the cycles, from so much pain, and passing out. It was a lot.”
Three cycles were enough for the McNeils. They looked to adoption. They were far into the process – undergoing assessments, taking classes to better understand the process, setting up a public blog detailing their fertility struggles so that birth mothers could find them – when Kelly discovered she was pregnant with their second son, Paxton, now 10, without any medical intervention at all. Two years later, their daughter, Londyn, was born. “We felt complete,” Kelly says. “We were finally able to put all of our infertility behind us. And then, 14 years later, this comes back up.”
On FaceTime, an hour after that first conversation, Vanner explained what he had discovered through the DNA tests and how they’d worked out that there must have been some kind of mistake at the clinic. “You are, most likely, the biological father of my son,” he said.
At first, Kelly misunderstood: she thought Vanner was claiming Talon wasn’t their biological child. “Our son has the same chin dimple that Devin has, which is pretty unique,” she told him.
“So does my son,” Vanner replied. “And I’ve always wondered where he got it from.” It left Kelly speechless.
Vanner asked if Devin was sporty, like Tim, and Devin said he was – he played everything, growing up. He asked if Devin was tall, because Tim was already catching up in height to his older brother, and Devin said yes – he’s 6ft 3in. Then Vanner sent over screenshots of Tim’s AncestryDNA family tree. “I saw my cousins, an aunt, a sister, a grandma,” Devin says. Vanner stressed that he wasn’t calling because he wanted anything from them: not money, not even a relationship. He just wanted to discover the truth.
For a good 24 hours after the call, Kelly and Devin looked for reasons not to believe Vanner. They’d worked out that Tim and Talon were born three months apart, which didn’t make sense. But then Vanner explained how their embryo transfer had to be delayed by three months. “Everything had an answer,” Devin says.
Donna and Kelly started a text message chain, comparing notes about their treatment at the Center for Reproductive Medicine. Donna shared the dates and times she was at the clinic; Kelly looked at her journal and found a timestamped picture of her embryos that placed her there for her transfer within an hour of Donna. The clinic issued every couple with a number, and they realised their client numbers were consecutive. “So something happened. No denying it.”
When they finally FaceTimed with everyone’s cameras on, Donna stared at Devin’s face. “I think I analysed it a hundred times within that phone call, looking to see if my son could really be his son,” she tells me. “I could not see it. Once we hung up the phone I said, ‘Is it possible I really had a baby with that man?’”
Devin took a DNA test, as did Kelly and Talon. The results showed Devin was father to both Talon and Tim.
* * *
All four parents were violated by the mistakes at the clinic, in different ways. Vanner had the paternity of his son taken from him; Devin’s sperm was used without his knowledge or consent; Donna had conceived and gestated a child with someone she had never met or agreed to have a baby with; and Kelly had to come to terms with the fact that another woman was mother to her husband’s child.
Despite all his online detective work, Vanner was shocked to see Tim’s official family tree after Devin’s DNA test. “Even though I knew it was going to happen, it was still hard to see Devin and Donna side by side on this chart with Tim as the son,” Vanner says. “It affected me more than I thought it would.”
“Somehow a clinic created this relationship with someone I didn’t consent with,” Donna says, with quiet indignation. “I definitely felt there was a violation.”
“This happened in a medical field you put so much trust in. You’re so vulnerable,” Kelly says. “What if there are more children out there? We did IVF three times.”
Devin says he felt anger and disappointment with the clinic, but the overriding feeling was compassion for the Johnsons. “I don’t think our lives changed nearly as much as theirs did. It didn’t change the biology of our children,” he says. “I started to think about Tim. If I’m a 12-year-old kid and I just learned this, how am I going to handle this going into my teenage years? It’s already hard enough. I had to turn the focus back to: how do we make this relationship not toxic? We could have ruined each other’s lives, had we chosen to. Tim doesn’t need that. They don’t need that.”
In the most fraught circumstances, the Johnsons and the McNeils forged a friendship. “The McNeils are an amazing family,” Vanner nods. “They’ve been handling this with as much grace as somebody could expect, and then some.”
When the McNeils broke the news to their three children, then 13, eight and six, they had to have what Devin calls a “multilayered discussion”: first, they had to tell them how babies are usually made, then explain how IVF works, and finally they told them how they now had an accidental half-brother. The kids took it in their stride. Paxton had a particularly profound take on it all: “Life doesn’t always give you the gifts you want, but the real gift is life itself,” he told his parents. The Johnsons had those words put on a plaque, which they gave the McNeils the following Christmas.
The two families met for the first time in a park in Utah, on a blistering hot day in June 2021. “We decided on very neutral ground,” Donna tells me. “From the outside it would just look like two families having a picnic together.”
When they saw each other, they hugged. “It wasn’t awkward,” Vanner remembers. “It was like you’d embrace a good friend.”
They played football and threw a ball around. Tim pushed his half-sister, Londyn, on a swing. They had lunch. Then Tim and Devin sat down together for a one-to-one chat. Tim had a list of questions specially prepared for his biological father.
“They were very much 12-year-old boy questions,” Devin smiles. “‘How tall were you at my age, and when you graduated? What sports do you like? Who’s your favourite athlete? Are you a Lionel Messi fan or a Cristiano Ronaldo fan?’ We don’t agree on that.” At first, Devin says, he was focusing on how the two families were interacting, how Donna and Kelly were getting on, how Vanner and Vanner Jr were responding to this strange situation. But as the afternoon went on, he began to look closely at Tim. “He’s 50% me. Does he act like me? Does he have the same sense of humour?”
Vanner and Donna were looking at Devin in the same way. They saw he and Tim shared the same mannerisms.
“The way they walked,” Donna says.
“The same gait,” Vanner nods.
“Maybe the way they hold their hands.”
Vanner insists he wasn’t unsettled when he noticed this. “It was intriguing, almost,” he says.
After two or three hours together, Vanner asked Tim if he would like a picture with Devin. Tim replied that he would like a picture with “both dads”.
Once they arrived home, Donna asked Tim how he felt. “I have three new siblings,” he said.
“They’re your half-siblings,” she corrected him.
“Well, technically my brother Vanner is my half-sibling,” Tim replied.
“Well then, yeah, they are your siblings,” Donna conceded. “But it was a very hard thing to realise that he felt that much connection,” she tells me now. “It could have just been kids playing in the park, but he definitely felt something.”
* * *
Over the past two years, the McNeils and Johnsons have become aware of just how many scandals involving clinics and doctors are only coming to light now because a critical mass of people have taken home DNA tests and been able to connect with each other online. “It happens not only way more than it should, but way more than we know,” Devin says. “Patients are discovering it. There’s so much trust when you go into a clinic. We’re signing these documents, saying this is what we consent to. Then to find out it was neglected … They took something that really couldn’t be more personal.”
The Johnsons and McNeils settled out of court with the Center for Reproductive Medicine last year. When the story became public, the clinic released a statement: “The safety and care of our patients is our primary goal. Our providers and staff strive to provide excellent care and we constantly work to make improvements.” No explanation has been made public as to how Devin’s sperm was used to create the Johnsons’ child. Given their consecutive patient numbers and back-to-back appointments, simple human error seems most likely.
Donna and Vanner often think about how far the repercussions of the mistake might have gone. They wonder if other children conceived at the clinic will one day discover they have Devin’s DNA, or Vanner’s: could his sperm have been used to fertilise another woman’s egg? And they think about the other embryos they had stored in the freezer that they so desperately wanted to use to create a large family, but ultimately decided not to use. They have no idea if those embryos were created with Devin’s sperm, or Vanner’s.
The sum of the settlement the families received from the clinic is undisclosed, but the McNeils say it was less than they could have claimed if one of them had had a botched shoulder surgery. Both families are planning to meet legislators in the US to campaign for better regulation and quality controls in the fertility industry, and to make penalties stronger when sperm, eggs and embryos are misused, intentionally or accidentally.
“You’re very vulnerable going into those clinics. We want others to know that this can happen,” Donna says. “We’re hoping for some regulation to protect the couples that go in, because it feels right now, as we’ve discovered and researched, it’s a wild west situation.”
If the 23andMe test hadn’t been on special offer, the Johnsons would have no idea about the mistake at the clinic. But Vanner says they’re happy they do. As DNA testing becomes more commonplace, he says, it seems unlikely Tim could go through life without discovering the truth. “At the end of the day, he’s going to find out. There’s no way to hide this. As much as somebody might want to, you can’t.” Despite his and Donna’s best efforts, their family has been changed. “There are certain ways that we are closer, and other ways that have become harder. It’s still a work in progress.”
“DNA does not change how you love someone,” Donna adds. “As far as who you are, and what that looks like, it does change. Tim looks in the mirror and maybe sees a new person.”
“Your DNA is not what makes up your family,” Kelly says. “It’s who you spend your life with.”
Devin plans to be in Tim’s life for as long as he wants him to be. “I am happy that he is taking it well. He’s got a lot to navigate. We only have to navigate this from 600 miles away, but for the rest of his life he’s going to have a brother who’s his half-brother, and a dad who’s not his biological dad.”
When people ask Devin how many children he has, what does he say? He smiles. “My immediate answer is three. Sometimes I say three and a half.” He pauses. “Hopefully not any more than that. Hopefully I don’t get any more of those phone calls.”
• The Gift, Jenny Kleeman’s six-part series on the unexpected truths revealed by at-home DNA testing, launches on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 on Monday 11 September.
