Paternity Determination

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Abstract
Dr Reuben Ottenberg's three articles published inThe Journalin 1921 and 1922 are remarkably prescient. The reader will find his articles easier to follow by mentally translating blood groups I, II, III, and IV to O, A, B, and AB, respectively. Although Ottenberg contributed much family data to analyze the inheritance of the ABO system, he and other scientists at that time were laboring under the false assumption that there were two loci for the ABO blood groups that segregated independently. Thus, some of the predictions he made in the last Table of the third article1are erroneous: an O parent cannot have an AB child. This would, of course, be possible under the two-locus hypothesis. For example, AABB times aabb would necessarily yield all AaBb children with the phenotype AB. Perhaps the reason he and others made this error was because there were so few AB matings