Posted on 11/13/2003 6:24:42 PM PST by quidnunc
New York A MUM has stunned the medical world after tests showed she is made up ofTWO women.
And even more incredibly she is NOT the biological mother of two of the children she conceived and had naturally.
Docs found the woman, named only as Jane, was formed from non-identical twin embryos who fused together in her own mothers womb.
Her blood and some of her organs are made up of her own cells while other parts of her body belong to her unborn sister.
The amazing condition, which baffled doctors for two years, first came to light when Jane was given the bombshell news that two of her three sons did not share her DNA.
That meant they could not be hers even though docs confirmed her husband was their father.
Finally Jane was diagnosed as a chimera, a person made up of two distinct sets of DNA. There have been just 30 known cases, though this is the first described in detail.
Janes bizarre story, reported in the New Scientist journal, began when she needed a kidney transplant.
Doctors in the US city of Boston did blood tests on her three sons to see if they might be donors.
Instead they found two of the boys could not be her own. Dr Margot Kruskall of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston told how the results stumped her team and sparked a huge inquiry.
She said: No-one could figure it out. One suggested Jane had secretly undergone fertility treatment using donated eggs. Another speculated she and her husband had got her sister to conceive with his sperm.
The breakthrough came when tests on Janes brother revealed the sons were all related to her family in some way or other.
They then tested DNA from different parts of Janes body, including the thyroid gland, mouth and hair and were astonished to find they came from two different people.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at thesun.co.uk ...
How many men have been told they were not the father because of this condition? The world may never know.....
When you tell him to go scr*w himself, he says, "Thank you."
An article you may find interesting on the subject of chimeras:
Human Genetics: Dual Identities
What troubles you about this condition? Is it that most of these individuals seem to be the product of IVF, and thus there are some rather snarly metaphysical questions attached?
Does she have two souls? Did one of the twins actually die during the melding process and the woman could be considered as having a massive organ transplant?
I dunno, this "chimera" concept bothers me a whole lot more than I thought it would. I would never let personal beliefs deny the existence of evidence (unlike some folks I've seen on this forum), but that doesn't mean I don't try to reconcile the two.
I don't have the training to deal with this issue, but my first reaction is "yes." If the soul exists at conception, then she has two. It's odd, but not creepy. The only "problem" is that her moral decisions involve twice the risk of any other person's, but "in for a dime ... "
Still, it's a startling thing to hear going on.
Very good! Sort of "If St. Thomas Aquinas Wrote for Comedy Central."
Could they be called Democrats?
Stacy Brown Got Two, by the late Shel Silverstein.
What are the psychological implications of realizing that you may be having the fun, but your unborn twin is fathering the kids? I don't know. Looks like it's good for about one bad made-for-TV movie.
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