DNA Helps Orphans Reunite With Families

Dec. 21 - KGO - A young woman is home tonight after being reunited with the family she lost when she was a baby. She was one of thousands of children displaced during the war in El Salvador. A Berkeley DNA project has made the reunion possible.

Jerry Fillingim holds on to the daughter he adopted as an infant 21-years ago. She just returned from El Salvador where she met her birth mother, and other family for the first time.

Angela Fillingim, Adopted: "It's been very surreal. I think just to be there, and meet everyone all at the same time, and trying to figure out everyone's name, and just to meet. I think the main thing is just meeting a family, that's your family, you just don't really know, and trying to figure out where to go from there."

Angela's mother gave her up for adoption when families were being killed and children were abducted in the midst of the violent civil war. She said her mother apologized for giving her up. But no apology was necessary.

Angela Fillingim: "I've just had like a lot of opportunities, and for me I thanked her for making the best decision she could given the circumstances, and for continuing to be really strong."

U.C. Berkeley's Human Rights Center has partnered with the State Department of Justice, and the organization Pro-Busqueda in El Salvador to create a DNA database to reunite children and families. Forensic mathematician Charles Brenner said the technology is similar to that used to identify bodies at disaster scenes.

Charles Brenner, Ph. D., Forensic Mathematician: "Identifying, mathematically speaking, identifying adoptees who have lost track of their families is the same probably as identifying corpses - except it's a little more cheerful."

Right now there are about 800 DNA profiles in a database waiting to be matched with missing children, but the experts say there could be as many as 14,000 such children worldwide.

Eric Stover, Human Rights Center: "We now need to go out, and find the children who've been adopted in various countries around the world."

Jerry Fillingim: "You never know what you're going to find in a family in this kind of relationship, but I think it's better to know."

So far the DNA project has matched more than 300 missing children with families looking for them.

Eric Stover, Human Rights Center: "There's no stronger human force on earth than a family than a mother or father looking for their missing child."

The next step is to expand the DNA database to reunite more families.