ChimerasFollow

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My Tivo suggested a show about this a few days ago and I was intrigued. This Lydia lady had 2 children and according to DNA testing she was not their mother. Her children were about to be taken from her and put into other homes.

Luckily for her, the hearing was only a few days before the birth of her 3rd child and the judge ordered that someone from the court be there to witness the birth and see that blood samples were taken from mother and child immediately and that DNA testing was done. The tests showed that she was not the mother of the 3rd child either.

Turns out she is a chimera and she actually has 2 sets of DNA in her body. The children were inheriting the DNA that was least common in her body and did not show up in her blood or hair samples.

This is a rare thing and even more rare for someone to show no external signs of being a chimera but it does happen. This is interesting when I think about how much we rely on DNA testing as being 100% accurate.

Seems that could really throw a kink into DNA used as evidence.

Does the term come from the mythological Chimera monster (head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a dragon - sometimes it has multiple heads)?

Yep, from wikipedia:

This kid has got it made. So long as he wears long pants he's got none of those pesky social bigotry issues to contend with and he still gets the benefit of having a very happy missus at home with his black bottom half. This may be evolution in practice.

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Being from the southern US, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I spend way too much time on wikipedia

She turned me into a newt!!!!!

















































I got better

Saw this on an episode of CSI awhile back. Kind of an interesting topic actually.

The only real implications for DNA is that you can't absolutely rule someone out based on DNA tests. It does not change the reliability for proving someones identity, only the reverse.