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Jack Nunn and his mother, Barbara Nunn, are from England. Jack Nunn was shocked by the discovery that he has about 1,000 half-relatives from the most fertile sperm donors. Photo/Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian
SYDNEY – A British man was shocked to learn that he has up to 1,000 half-relatives. Everything is related to his biological grandfather, Sang sperm donor fertile.
He even considered his biological grandfather to be the second most famous man in the world after Genghis Khan.
The man, named Jack Nunn, revealed that the discovery happened several years ago when his mother’s DNA test was shared online.
Jack Nunn was 21 years old, his girlfriend a year his junior, when he died suddenly while the couple were in England.
Nunn had studied literature, but the shocking tragedy in 2007 threw him down a new path that would end with a strange but unexpectedly positive discovery—that his grandfather was one of the world’s most prolific sperm donors, leaving him with thousands of close relatives.
The revelations became part of Nunn’s studies for a PhD in public health genomics, and more immediately brought his mother, Barbara Nunn, into reckoning with both the family she grew up in, and a large cohort of up to 1,000 new half-relatives.
“I feel that the experience of finding an unexpected close family has brought surprise, but more joy and interest to my life than I could have imagined,” she said, as quoted by The Guardian.
An astounding turn of events for mother and son began when an autopsy on Jack Nunn’s girlfriend revealed that he had died of sudden adult death syndrome, which likely has a genetic component.
Jack Nunn started working with health charities, and wondered how the public could be part of the questions around research, policy, and funding priorities.
He moved to Australia in 2014, where he became a public health researcher at La Trobe University. She said she “straight away” knew she wanted to study genomics research thanks to a formative personal experience with her boyfriend. When he began research for his PhD, he decided that more personal experience was needed.
“I thought, let’s do a DNA test on my mother,” he said.
