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It is a fair question to ask whether your not you can trust us, regarding your DNA paternity test results.
DNA paternity testing is a very important life matter. We want you to ask us any questions you may have. Do not be shy or embarrassed or "kreng jai" (intimidated). If we were in your situation, then we would want to ask questions, too. We do not want you to be unsure, nor to waste time worrying. We want for you to have a clear mind and full confidence in our DNA paternity test. We are happy to answer your questions, and you can call us multiple times.
We are a registered company in Thailand, i.e., a Co., Ltd., registered with the Ministry of Commerce in Thailand. We are not just using a trade name related to some laboratory overseas without a "Co., Ltd." in Thailand. Our company certificates from the Thai government's Ministry of Commerce are displayed prominently in our office and can be confirmed.
Our company was co-founded by a physicist who come to Bangkok from Washington, D.C., in 1994 because Bangkok has the Asia Regional Office for the U.S. government, and who has experience in both the government and the purely private sector. (This includes experience not only in the US and Asia, but also a court in Europe where his expert DNA testimony in a case against a faked DNA report made a difference.)
We are accustomed to asking a lot of questions and clarifying things ourselves, and have a lot of experience in investigations, so we understand other people who also ask a lot of questions. Your questions are welcome! We don't want you to walk away with doubts and wonder and waste your time. We want you to ask questions to your satisfaction.
We have asked ourselves the same thing of laboratories, whether we can rely on them. We have seen a lot of slick marketing and questionable operations. We have used different laboratories in the past, but the laboratory we chose to continue using is the one which we have the most confidence in, due to their being able to answer our challenging questions in an expert and clear way, our ability to develop a good and frank working relationship with multiple key people at the laboratory, their willingness to take the time to discuss things with us to our satisfaction, and the laboratory certifications well beyond the minimum required. Our laboratory is not the cheapest (nor the most expensive!), but is very old and mature (i.e., well established), large, very standardized, and continues to upgrade to stay modern. It was the only one we could find which offers to test samples twice by two teams, their so-called Dual ProcessTM.
Our laboratory can claim to be the most accredited laboratory in the world. This is covered on our home page, but again, the laboratory's accreditations include:
We do not have a lot of affiliates spread all over Thailand, for reasons of trust and quality control -- we don't trust affiliates who we don't know very well personally. Part of the reason is because many Thai people have offered bribes to our staff. We know our staff very well, but we don't really know people in other provinces who want to offer to be DNA collectors for their business and money ...
We have trusted and well trained staff who we have worked with for many years who travel almost all over Thailand to collect and control specimens, for reasons also discussed elsewhere on this website. It would be easy to outsource to people in other major cities in Thailand for purely business benefits to maximize the money we make, by offering nearby clinics and people, but that introduces risks, as stranger affiliates could be bribed, or maybe they are not as careful because they don't handle DNA as often as our central staff. Our core DNA team is family and longtime close associates, so we are a small team as regards DNA collection agents in Thailand, willing to travel.
The issue of bribes is very important. Countless people have called us to offer bribes, such as girlfriends secretly coming back after we have done a DNA collection to ask us to make sure the result shows the man as the father. Of course, we have always refused, but how could we control an affiliate in a distant province if they are offered a bribe?
Since these things have happened to us on multiple occasions, I would think they would happen to others, too.
I am sure we could make a lot more money if we offered DNA collection locations in many provinces around Thailand, for the convenience of shoppers. All we would need to do is simply contacted a lot of small clinics and people around Thailand and offer them commission money for simply swabbing people and mailing the samples to us. We don't. Our experience with questionable businesses and people in Thailand is a major reason we use only our centralized, trusted staff, and don't just sign up stranger affiliates around Thailand for purely business purposes.
To minimize the chance of something going wrong, it's best to minimize the number of entities handling your DNA, and have an established entity here in Thailand who you can deal with.
We have a very well organized system for recording and tracking DNA specimens from the moment they are collected.
As you may note on our DNA specimen envelopes, there is a bar code and its tracking number. There is a unique ID for a case. The tracking number is what is used to track your specimens automatically, and the name written on the envelope is confirmation that it's the right case / specimen set.
We log into the laboratory to enter details, so that later, everything is double checked at the laboratory. This information matches our database in our office.
You will see on the laboratory's international website that for Thailand, our office phone number is the one listed. You can enter an inquiry on their website and we will receive it. That website is https://dnacenter.com/thailand/
If you come to our office, we are happy to show you our tracking system in our computer database, too. We can bring up your case, you can see your details in our system, including logging into the laboratory on the laboratory's own website with you sitting right next to us and track your case there. After you receive your results, you can forward them back to the laboratory at their own email domain. Generally, the laboratory may not deal with you directly in detail except to say that yes, we are legit, and to confirm case details -- they handle much too high of a volume and depend on local offices such as ours for customer service in detail -- and normally, they will forward your message to us, so that you can confirm even further that we are legitimate, because you didn't send us your message, they forwarded to us your message to them.
How can you be sure that the % probability of paternity is fairly accurate? This is a good question. You will note that in our reports, we do not just give you a number of 99.9999999%. Anybody can say that. Did they really calculate that number, or did they just make it up? Some laboratories have made questionable claims. We have examples of different laboratory reports with the same data (a customer sending their specimens to two different laboratories and comparing the results), whereby the two different laboratories report very different percentages of probability of paternity. Just because one says 99.9999999% and another says 99.998% does NOT mean the first laboratory is better. Is one just making up 99.9999999% just for customer satisfaction? Is the 99.998% laboratory just more honest?
For example, we have a case where there was a mutation so the DNA did not match completely, yet the other laboratory stated a very high probability of paternity, which looked questionable, and the other laboratory did not show how they calculated that % probability, they just stated a high probability, nor did the other laboratory note on the report that there was a mutation. The customer came to us because they knew enough about DNA to know something appeared questionable. The customer was right.
If there is a mismatch, such as because of a mutation, then we can keep testing additional loci until the probability is truly over 99%, or else additional mismatches exclude the father. We've actually had many cases which had a mutation. When there is a mutation, it is noted on the report you receive.
We show the basis of our calculation. First, there is a number for each locus, on our reports. It is the P.I. number -- Paternity Index -- for that locus (in case of a paternity test). All the Paternity Index numbers are used to calculate the overall probability of paternity. This is explained on our page about How DNA Testing Works .
Some laboratories do not show their calculation, i.e., do not show individual P.I. for each locus. So, how would you know where a 99.99999+% calculation came from?
Our very old laboratory has a very large private database of human DNA, plus our laboratory has multiple Ph.D. experts as you can see listed. (Though very old, it keeps its equipment modernized to be state of the art. We have seen upgrading over time, as one of the first laboratories to upgrade.)
Occasionally, customers who took their own samples and sent them to us in the mail have mixed up their samples by putting the wrong names on envelopes, or mixed up swabs. (This has never happened when our agents took the samples, but customers who take their own samples and mailed them in to our office have occasionally made a mistake.) There are ways to detect some customers' mistakes, with the resultant data. We can show you in our office some examples of how this is done, technically. We double check the data by various methods to make sure some kinds of errors were not made, especially by "do-it-yourself" customers who took their own specimens and mailed them in to us.
We also offer to mail DNA self-collection kits, whereby you can take your own samples and mail them back in, following our detailed instructions. In this case, just don't tell us the gender of the child. We will tell you. We can tell the gender, male or female, for each specimen tested.
(Notably, if you self-collect, then you cannot use your full names on the report. A full name can go onto a report only if one of our agents takes the specimens, properly identifies you by government issued ID, and takes a photo of each participant.)
Our reports show the gender at the bottom, i.e., whether or not there is a male Y chromosome. If an envelope labeled for a male comes up with only X, and if an envelope for a female comes up with a Y, then there has been a mistake by whoever took the specimens whereby they put a male's specimens into the envelope labeled as female and vice versa, a swab swap error. That requires further investigation. Yes, we've received self-sampled envelopes where we believe the mother apparently put her own samples into the father's envelope, for this reason, hoping to fool everybody. Because we check gender, they failed.
If a man tests an alleged child with a cooperative mother so that the laboratory has 3 samples, but mixes up the child and mother, and if the child is his girl, then the laboratory would notice the apparent relationship between the alleged father and the mother and we would ask whether he was the father or son of the mother (incest); otherwise, you might conclude that he is the father of the child due to a swab swap error, though we would also offer for a second collection to make things clear.
(If the alleged father is not related to the child, then a mistake in labeling envelopes would still result in no relationship.)
We are very careful about handling DNA.
We have heard from some customers that some competitors who have higher prices than us have told the customer that their price is higher because their quality is better. How would they know? If they make that claim, can you believe and trust them in general, or are they just saying things to sell and make more money? Do they say how their quality is better? Do they have as long a list of certifications and accreditations as we have, as noted on our home page? Our laboratory is very modern, and has a very long history of experience.
Because our laboratory is one of the largest and oldest, it does not pay the startup costs of new laboratories. Our laboratory also processes a very large number of cases, which makes the cost per case lower than if they processed fewer cases.
If you want to find out more information, then you may come to our office to visit in advance, at no extra cost. Of course, please make an appointment first. You can also feel free to call us anytime.
We are detailed in our support of our customers / patients.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask us. We want to make sure you have full confidence in our work, and are not bothered by any doubts, but have peace of mind because you have complete confidence in the results.
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