Ryan and I started the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR) in 2000. It was based on the idea that while my son's donor had signed up (had no choice) to be anonymous, Ryan was interested to know whether the guy might be curious about the children who shared ~50% of his DNA. Also, he wondered if he had any half-siblings out there: people with whom he shared a biological father. The concept of mutual consent contact was important to us, as we didn’t want to “out” anyone; we wanted to create a platform where we could facilitate mutually desired contact. As a young child (then 10), Ryan had been thinking about half-siblings and his biological father this way: “What if they want to know me, and I want to know them—how will we ever have the opportunity to find each other?”

Fast-forward to 2004, when a DNA testing company asked us if Ryan would like to test his DNA to find out more about his paternal countries of origin. We jumped at the opportunity, feeling that any new information about Ryan’s ancestry would be more than the sperm bank gave us. Neither of us nor the DNA company ever entertained the idea that Ryan’s biological father might be found using this new genetic testing technology, as that had never been done.

At first, the DNA test did provide some interesting information about where Ryan’s paternal ancestors hailed from. He thought that was cool, and we both thought that was the end of that part of the story. Nine months later, though, we received notification that Ryan had been matched with two very distant relatives. It was with the last name of these two Y-DNA connections, a public records search, and Google that nine days later led us to Ryan’s biological father.1

The irony didn’t escape us—here were the two founders of a mutual consent contact organization for connecting donor-conceived people with their first- or second-degree genetic relatives, and now we had, almost by accident, identified my son’s biological father—a guy who the sperm bank told, and who believed that he would remain anonymous. Ryan had become the first donor-conceived person to locate his donor via DNA testing.2 He might have been the........

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