Apr 12, 2007 5:44 PM
Local DNA Doctor Talks About Anna Nicole Case
Posted By: Deb Silverman
The local DNA doctor who determined the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is talking about the case Thursday night.
Dr. Michael Baird runs the DNA Diagnostics Center in Fairfield. Now that he’s back from the Bahamas and the gag order’s lifted, he can share his experience with the rest of us.
“All around me is media craziness, the paparazzi, in Nassau, tourists off the cruise ships with their cell phones and their cameras it’s pretty nuts,” says Dr. Michael Baird. “You go to the courthouse down in the Bahamas, which is a closed courtroom and very civil and quiet in the courtroom and everything’s addressed logically. Then you go outside and it’s crazy.”
Baird has been doing DNA testing around the world 25 years and he says this is probably the biggest paternity case ever.
He took cheek swabs from Dannielynn, Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter, at a pediatrician’s office in the Bahamas.
“I had my four swabs to do the collection I went over and collected two from each side. She was cuddly. She was drooly. Looked like a typical six-and-a-half-month-old baby to me,” says Baird.
He then took samples from Larry Birkhead’s cheek. The coroner had already taken a sample from Anna Nicole’s body.
“I’m trying to treat this like any other case but clearly it’s far beyond any other case. A, normally I don’t do the collection. B, I don’t transport them from one point to another,” says Baird.
Baird brought the samples from the three back to the DNA Diagnostics Center lab in Fairfield where the cells were broken down and analyzed. Baird says he knew Larry Birkhead was the father two weeks before the rest of us found out.
“I think that was what was most surprising to people in the media. How can you keep this secret. Well, there were only three of us who knew and we took our responsibility seriously,” says Baird.
Baird says the results are 99.99999 percent accurate. “That means Larry Birkhead is 11 million, 515 thousand, 619 times more likely to be the biological father than [...] your camera man,” says Baird.
Howard K. Stern still has custody of Dannielynn, but that’s expected to change any day now. Baird says he’ll continue to follow the Anna Nicole saga but not as closely since he’s no longer directly part of it.
I like the next to the last sentence “expected to change any day.”