London

Are we related? A British sperm bank founder apparently used his own sperm to fertilize many of his clients’ eggs and may have fathered as many as 600 children. Austrian-born biologist Bertold Wiesner ran a London clinic from the 1940s to the 1960s, helping couples have some 1,500 children. His subterfuge was revealed when Canadian filmmaker Barry Stevens set out to find his biological father and discovered through DNA testing that it was Wiesner; at least a dozen other children have been identified. It’s unclear how many more kids Wiesner spawned, as he died in 1972 and his clinic’s records have been destroyed. But another of his progeny, British barrister David Gollancz, has launched an investigation and found that Wiesner made 20 donations a year and probably fathered 300 to 600 offspring who were passed off as those of other men.

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