The Gatekeeper has a little something inside her . . .
Posted on 09/27/2012 3:29:18 PM PDT by neverdem
For decades after a woman has carried a male child in her womb or shared her mother's womb with a brother, she carries a faint but unmistakable echo of that intimate bond: male fetal DNA that lodges itself in the far recesses of her brain.
That astonishing finding, published Wednesday in the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS One), suggests that the act of having a child is no mere one-way transmission of genetic material and all that goes with it: There is an exchange of DNA that passes into the part of us that makes us who we are. That, in turn, may alter a woman's health prospects in ways her own DNA never intended.
In the study, researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington examined, post-mortem, the brains of 59 women. In 63% of the brains, they found fetal DNA that could only have come from a male. While scattered throughout the brain, the genetic traces of this other individual were clustered heavily in the brain's hippocampus -- a region crucial to the consolidation of memories -- and in the parietal and temporal lobes of the brain's prefrontal cortex, areas that play roles in sensation, perception, sensory integration and language comprehension.
When a person takes on the DNA of another, as happens, for instance, in bone marrow transfusions, she is called a "chimera" -- in mythology, a beast that is the fusion of two or more creatures. The discovery that a person can carry the fetal DNA of another person has given rise to a variant: This is dubbed microchimerism.
This line of research, says rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson, coauthor of the study, "suggests we need a new paradigm of the biological self" and how it is formed...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Hmmm... this explains penis envy.
If the mother gets DNA from her son incorporated into her brain, that suggests that she gets a bit of her husband, too.
The Gatekeeper has a little something inside her . . .
Oh, crap, men! You just KNOW how this is going to turn out.
So the LA Times is now saying that unborn babies are human??
Apparently.
But I'll say this, your crowd at the LA Times probably aren't human.
This naturally acquired microchimerism (Mc) may impart beneficial or adverse effects on human health. Fetal Mc, which describes the persistence of cells and/or DNA of fetal origin in the mother acquired during pregnancy, has been associated with several different autoimmune diseases as well as implicated in tissue repair and immunosurveillance [4]–[6].Could progesterone be a key to the lock on the blood-brain barrier?
Nature linked that FReebie.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my combined microbiology/immunology ping list.
I’m not Catholic but what are the implications for Jesus’ mother, Mary?
I’ll go out on a limb and say, she’s good with it.
shouldn’t there be decades worth of medical studies that captured whether the subject bore one or more male children? Perhaps a study of studies could yield some interesting information.
My ex-wife had 3 sons with her first husband. She liked hunting, fishing, high-performance cars and sports. Oh, and Tom Clancy books.
Not bad for a girl from Colorado. :)
Not sure that screening for male children vs. female children would necessarily reveal anything. The article said they found fetal DNA that could have only come from a male - i.e. the XY chromosome. Finding a female child’s fetal DNA in the mother would be much harder, since it will look the same (XX chromosome) under a microscope. They’d have to sequence the mother’s and daughter’s DNA to compare. They just plucked the low-hanging fruit first. More likely that all children (male and female) donate DNA to the mother, which was unknown previously, and this can impact the mother’s health. Comparing women who have had vs. not had children, which has been done, reveals some statistical differences (occurrence of breast cancer for one, I think) in health prognosis, and this DNA chimerism may be part of the answer. Might also explain why both my wife and daughter seem to be getting more stubborn simultaneously...
But then again, I’m an engineer, so all of the above may just be a load of obama-spew...
>> male fetal DNA that lodges itself in the far recesses of her brain.
With luck, that bit of DNA will flip the chromosomal switch that prevents women from comprehending how to operate a toilet seat.
This is of course *after* they’ve met me.
Thanks neverdem.
Yes, I’ve noticed that.
very interesting.
...this would help explain a lot of things.
-
for example, many women are much more protective of sons, than daughters.
( related to ideas of Oedipus complex also.)
The entire purpose of the study - the philosophy of sexuality. Think homosexuals, transexuals, and all the other psychological issues. A new paradigm of the biological self?
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