A Downside to Artificial Insemination

A recent article in New Scientist illustrates a downside to assisted pregnancy – in this case the sperm used to artificially inseminate a woman passed on so-called fragile X syndrome to the resulting child. The story is at:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227032.400-sperm-bank-sued-under-product-liability-law.html

One lesson from this is that when the family historian is looking for physical traits that might signal the source of a non-paternity event, they can be misled by recessive or ordinarily unexpressed genes that show up in the child but are not seen in the biological parent.