(I changed the subject line.)

Short version for people who may not want to read this message: If 
Donald Locke remains confident that he has a case for updating the 1998 
Hemings-TJ DNA study with new methods, I hope he publishes a formal 
paper advocating that. The rest of this message tells why.

Mr. Locke wrote, in part:
 > If they are in fact relying on anything less then
 > the 37 marker level, as far as I am concerned
 > they have not tested near enough markers to
 > make a serious attempt to prove the connections
 > they are claiming.

And he also wrote, in part:
 > it is a very rash statement to claim TJ himself is
 > the father of Hemmings. The best they can claim
 > is to be a Jefferson descendant, but would be
 > jumping the gun to state they are TJ's direct descendant.

Mr. Locke, it's important to stipulate that the scientists who conducted 
the original DNA study never said that what they called their molecular 
findings had outright proven the paternity. In fact, months before the 
Nature report appeared, the lead scientist made clear publicly that at 
most, all they they would be able to do would be to contribute some new 
information to the discussion. And indeed in their article they reported 
the limits of their molecular findings.

But also in that article the reporting DNA scientists doffed, in effect, 
their scientist hats and donned hats as historical observers. Wearing 
those historical-observer hats, they based their ultimate historical 
conclusion on a combination of DNA evidence and historical records. It's 
that combination on which the historian Joseph Ellis, for example, 
relied in changing from paternity skepticism to paternity 
near-certainty. The scientists did a culpably poor job of making that 
hat distinction clear, but they did make it.

Then, however, the editors of Nature, in presenting the news to the 
world, completely steamrolled the distinction between molecular findings 
and the historical interpretation of molecular findings. A credulous 
worldwide press ran with with the misreported news. Even today many 
citizens -- having been ill-informed not by historians, ultimately, but 
by scientists -- have the mistaken idea that DNA science outright proved 
paternity. That's not fair to citizens, but almost none of that 
unfairness comes from historians. It comes from scientists, abetted by 
careless -- at best -- journalists.

Mr. Locke, you're apparently new to this decade-old installment in an 
even older discussion. If so, you should know that while, as you say, 
the DNA study was at least valid to some extent -- albeit an extent that 
you now say has become obsolete -- there was also a statistical study of 
the apparent coincidences between TJ's presences at Monticello and six 
Sally Hemings child conceptions. This study has been looked at 
informally and criticized harshly. (Please see my Web site TJscience.org 
for more on that, if you like, and also for more on the misreporting of 
the DNA.) In my view what's needed is for scientists unconnected to the 
Thomas Jefferson Foundation to review that statistical study formally, 
for it has been -- and might still be being -- cited as part of the 
combination paternity proof. (I inquired unsuccessfully in the past 
about seeing such a formal review conducted, and eventually I simply 
asked two distinguished scientist friends to review it informally, as 
explained at that Web site.)

This all leads back to your obsolescence point in the following way. 
You're saying that the 1998 Hemings-TJ DNA study needs updating with 
modern methods. So I hope you will publish a formal paper or even an 
informal article advocating that renewed study. If you do, it will then 
be possible to make a good case for scientists formally to review all of 
the dimensions of the special authority of science in this historical 
debate. A peer-reviewed paper would be best.

Thanks in any case, Mr. Locke, for an interesting assertion.

Steven T. (Steve) Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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