Human chimeras

[dracodraconis]

In a world where DNA tests are concidered the gold standard, things can go wrong. In the following story, a woman was accused of not being the mother of her own children. The complication? She has a rare condition called chimerism; she carries two sets of DNA.

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693&page=1

Comments

[samhaine.livejournal.com]

So... the one twin of DNA has the children, but the other twin is the one active in most cells... sounds like a scifi story waiting to happen: the day the twin awoke.

[mamabare.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of this before on an episode of CSI:LV where there was a rape/murder attempt and the vic was able to ID the guy who did it, but DNA proved otherwise so they dismissed her statement. Of course, she gets killed later by the suspect that ends up being the guy she fingered in the first place. He has Chimerism, (which of course Grissom figured out).
and evidently gotten away with it before.

Not sure where I'm going with this but fooling the 'foolproof' method of id'ing someone kinda makes me nervous in a way.

mb

[samhaine.livejournal.com]

Indeed. The problem with foolproof is, as is often pointed out, there's always a bigger fool. I'd be much happier with several differently based, high-success-rate tests that, when taken together, are conclusive than with one single "foolproof" test. When you have several people, including doctors, testifying to the veracity of something and you're willing to ignore them for one type of test, something is wrong.

[ziggy-b.livejournal.com]

I took a course in genetics and the prof said that it is suspected that up to 5% of people are chimeras. This is a guess based on their knowledge of embryos and how they act. There's no way to prove it, as it is so difficult to detect it.

What confuses me terribly is that there *is* a genetic link. The mother will appear to be their aunt, instead of their mother. In this case it would probably be obvious that the family couldn't afford to be surrogates for each other. I don't understand their inability to grasp this fact. At least Grissom had it right... he know that the DNA was for a brother, but managed to eliminate all the brothers so therefore something was odd in the genetic code.