Amid the tumult of the delivery room, Rohit and Geeta Jain were calm about one thing: Their new baby was sure to be a boy.
Six months earlier, the Jains had spent more than $300 for a test that screened a minute quantity of Geeta’s blood for traces of male DNA. The testing company said it was 95 percent accurate in determining the sex of a baby, even as early as the eighth week of pregnancy.
After six hours in the delivery room, Rohit gaped as his wife gave birth to a daughter.
“There’s only two choices — either it’s a boy or a girl,” said Rohit, 35, a computer scientist in the Vancouver, British Columbia, suburb of Surrey. “I couldn’t fathom how it could be wrong.”
Like scores of other expectant parents, the Jains had stumbled into a corner of the booming genomics industry and discovered that the claims of some genetic entrepreneurs have gone beyond what science can provide.
Marketing directly to consumers, the new crop of companies has jumped into a realm of dubious science, mining DNA to offer information on ethnic heritage, long-lost relatives, personalized dieting plans — even the sports for which one is best suited.
The tests are loosely based on legitimate scientific research, much of which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, among others. But often, the companies’ claims of accuracy have not been backed up by independent laboratory analysis.
Thousands of consumers have bought tests — and analysts say the number will only grow as entrepreneurs find more ways to market the mysteries of the human genome.
The Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from false and misleading advertising, has warned buyers to be skeptical of at-home genetic tests, which are now unregulated.
The tests, scientists say, are the latest incarnation of old myths about salty food cravings, hairy legs and belly shapes denoting the sex of the impending baby. This time, the predictions are being sold with the patina of cutting-edge genetic technology.
A host of companies, such as Acu-Gen Biolab Inc. of Lowell, Mass., and Consumer Genetics Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., have been selling the tests for $249 and up. Critics say they are banking on most disgruntled parents being too happy — or too busy — with their new child to file for a refund.
The consequences aren’t merely financial.
“I wouldn’t have had an abortion, but there are women out there who experience really big disappointment,” said Jolene Sodano, a stay-at-home mother in Nazareth, Pa., whose daughter was mistakenly identified as a boy. “They really want to give their husbands the little boy they want, or a little girl, and they will abort based on these results.”
More than 100 women have filed a lawsuit against Acu-Gen and its owner, Chang-ning Wang, that is pending in federal court. At least one customer has been questioned by the FBI. Wang has repeatedly declined to discuss the scientific validity of the test.
“It made me very angry at myself for believing this gibberish,” said Mandana Kouroshnia, a Redlands, Calif., dentist who joined the suit after her test incorrectly predicted a boy.
Acu-Gen’s Web site lists dozens of clinical studies that it says corroborate its approach, though none of them involved the specific DNA sequence that Acu-Gen says it uses in Baby Gender Mentor and none reported accuracy as high as 99.9 percent.
A woman who answered the company’s phone said she was “not interested” in discussing the test’s accuracy. Other calls and e-mails to Acu-Gen were not returned. In court filings, the company denied “any wrongdoing and any liability” in connection with incorrect test results.
Plaintiff Anissa Iverson, who works as an office manager at Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif., mourned when she discovered that the baby she expected to be a girl was actually a boy.
She had already washed and folded more than $500 worth of clothes for the daughter, to be named Sydney. When she and her husband realized they would be having a son, they changed the baby’s name to Zachary.
Iverson became pregnant again, this time with a girl. The clothes bought for Sydney came out of storage, but the name could not be resurrected.
“I felt like Sydney had died,” she said. “It was a tainted name.”
Instead, she named her daughter Courtney.
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What are you having?
A baby’s gender is determined by one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human genome. Mothers always contribute an X chromosome. If the father provides another X, the baby is a girl. If the father supplies a Y, the baby is a boy.
Scientific studies have found that a pregnant woman’s blood contains a small amount of fetal DNA, and the gender tests claim they can detect signs of the Y chromosome even if the embryo is no bigger than a grain of rice.
Science has tried for more than a decade to find a simple and accurate way to determine gender early.
In a 2004 study, five medical centers in a National Institutes of Health consortium received identical blood samples from 100 women who were 10 to 20 weeks’ pregnant.
The centers used the same method to look for Y chromosomes in the maternal blood, but none was able to detect all of the 35 fetuses known to be male. According to the study, the detection rates ranged from 31 percent to 97 percent.
