Infertility doctor secretly fathered dozens of children: how strangers became family

In 2014, Brianna took a consumer DNA test expecting to find cousins on her father’s side. Instead, she got a list of close relatives she had never heard of—close enough to be half siblings. Neither of her parents had had other children. “I kept thinking this is really sophisticated,” she recalled. “And how much money do they actually think they’re gonna get from me?” It was not a scam. Brianna had stumbled onto a secret family: dozens of strangers who shared the same biological father, a man none of them knew.

The doctor behind the deception

The half siblings—eventually 64 of them, with an actuary estimating the true number could be 400 or more—were all born in and around Philadelphia between 1945 and 1971. Most grew up in Jewish families. After more than a year of sleuthing, a genetic cousin led them to a name: Dr. Charles Charney, an Ivy League educated urological surgeon and pioneering infertility specialist who had served at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. Charney was born in 1902 in what is now Western Ukraine, fled the pogroms with his family, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1926. He fathered his secret children between the end of World War II and the first Nixon administration—a span of more than 25 years.