University of Utah offers paternity testing for women fearing sperm swap

The University of Utah on Wednesday said it is providing free paternity testing to women who conceived children at two fertility clinics that employed a lab worker suspected of artificially inseminating a patient with his own sperm. Questions arose about practices at the now-defunct clinics when a woman artificially inseminated at Reproductive Medical Technologies Inc claimed that genetic testing showed that the late lab technician, Tom Lippert, rather than her husband, was the biological father of a daughter born in 1992, university officials said. The mother at the center of the supposed sperm swap has not been identified by the university but told local television station KUTV in an interview earlier this month that she discovered the situation through DNA tests that she had conducted on her family. A probe by the university into operations at the private clinic under contract to the school and its own community lab has unearthed records showing Lippert, who died in 1999, was considered a problem employee by some but a good worker by others, said Chris Nelson, a spokesman for the University of Utah Health Care.