Arriving as it did in the midst of a presidential sex scandal and just before Election Day, the timing of Nature's November issue received almost as much media attention as the lead article's content. An editorial preface declared: "The scandals involving American presidents are nothing new. In 1802 President Thomas Jefferson was accused of fathering a child by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. A molecular genetics study in the 5 November issue of Nature finally puts the affair to rest, establishing beyond reasonable doubt Thomas Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings' sons." But the article's editors now acknowledge the conclusion that Jefferson was the father was "misleading."

The article, by Dr. Eugene Foster and others, was based on analysis of a distinctive genetic characteristic that is passed along only to male descendants. Since Jefferson had no legitimate sons of his own who survived to adulthood, the study focused on the male descendants of Jefferson's uncle, finding the family's genetic signature in descendants of Hemings's son, Eston. The article considered that another Jefferson may have been the father, but the authors concluded, "In the absence of historical evidence to support such possibilities, we consider them to be unlikely." Though the study fell back on speculative historical accounts, subsequent news accounts labeled Jefferson's paternity a scientific certainty, with many parallels inevitably drawn to President Clinton's present difficulties.

But Herbert Barger, an authority on Jefferson family history who provided assistance for the article's genealogical research, had sent Dr. Foster information on eight other Jefferson men who could just as easily have been the father, and Foster failed to share that information with the article's editors. In Barger's estimation, the most probable candidate was Jefferson's younger brother, Randolph, who after being widowed in 1793, was a frequent visitor to Monticello and was known to spend time playing the fiddle and dancing with Jefferson's slaves. The study did rule out Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's first son, Thomas Woodson, a claim alleged in 1802 by a Richmond newspaper and believed to be true by his descendants. But the question of whether Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston is not likely to be definitively settled any time soon.

[Ed.: Some blamed racism for the conclusion that Jefferson was not Mr. Woodson's father. Robert Golden, one of Woodson's descendents, said that whites "are not interested in proving Jefferson fathered black children." He could not be more wrong.]

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