IN MY PARAGRAPH last week about the Sunday Pictorial's stunting
of 'virgin birth,' I obviously overrated the importance of the medical tests performed on the mother and child in question. My guess was that the successful grafting of skin from the mother's body on to that of the child would be trotted out as proof positive of parthenogenesis. But as it turned out, the Pictorial did not even have that 'sensation' to fall back on, for the skin grafting tests ended in failure. It is true that mother and daughter gave identical results in the very special blood tests, but since the chances of this happening in the ordinary mother-daughter relationship are one in a hundred (according to the estimate of Professor J. B. S. Haldane, whose wife, Dr. Helen Spurway, set the ball rolling many months ago with a lecture on parthenogenesis), this cannot well be claimed as 'proof.' The author of the letter to the Lancet describing the tests said that the results from the tests (other than the skin- grafting—and that didn't count because not all experts would regard it as conclusive anyway !) were consistent with what would be expected in a case of parthenogenesis. Quite : but they were also consistent with what one might find in a case of ordinary genesis. (Professor Haldane indeed took the trouble to put out a statement through the Press Association dis- sociating himself from the conclusions reached by Dr. Balfour- Lynn in his letter to the Lancet. It is his opinion that the evidence adduced by Dr. Balfour-Lynn leads to the opposite conclusion.) That being so I entirely fail to see what useful purpose the tests have served. They have neither proved not disproved anything, and while the letter to the Lancet talks discreetly about 'Mrs. Alpha,' the Sunday pictorial is not so bashful. The net result is that one small child has had directed upon her the full yellow floodlight of the popular press at its most sensational.
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