Have you ever seen a man with yin and yang eyes and a big, strange birthmark? Have you ever heard that in the African savannah, an animal that emits two colors, red and yellow, is the "red nose"? They look very peculiar. These people are different, probably because there are other people living in them.
What is the strange case of three children born in their mother's womb whose DNA tests do not match their mother's, but rather "deceased" DNA? What is the cause of this? Is it genetic or mutated? Can genes determine a person's fate? How is DNA formed? Do genes alter the structure and function of the human body? Are genes really a conspiracy?
On August 15, 2006, Lydia Fairchild of Washington State had an incredible event.
Lydia had just broken up with her boyfriend and was struggling with her two young children, so she applied to the state for relief money.
The hospital must perform DNA tests on the two children and their parents to prove their identities.
A few days later, the social services department called Lydia and asked her to come to the office immediately, where Lydia was questioned.
DNA tests showed that Lydia's boyfriend was indeed the father of two children, but Lydia was not the child's mother. For the past 10 years, Lydia has lived in a small town called Lana in northern California, where her husband is a lawyer and she is a kindergarten teacher in the area. Lydia's father was a police officer. The state government believes that Lydia came to defraud the grant and believes that she is a suspect in the theft of infants and young children.
Lydia was stunned, how could she not be the mother of two children she conceived in October?
Lydia questioned a number of witnesses, including her boyfriend, her boyfriend's parents, his own parents, and even the doctor who delivered her, who certified that the child was 100 percent from her uterus.
For a time, there was no answer to this question. Lydia is the chairman of a British company and her father is a doctor. Lydia's mother was a nurse. Lydia lives with her two daughters in a small town north of London. As part of the judicial process, county prosecutors charged Lydia with several offences, including allegedly defrauding the government's infant, and the lawsuit has been brought before the court.
While there is plenty of evidence that Lydia is a mother, the possibility that Lydia conspired with her boyfriend to implant fertilized eggs into her boyfriend and borrow the child, the reality is that Lydia has no such motivation.
It doesn't make sense for Lydia to borrow an unborn child in order to apply for a grant, even if it means cheating on the grant to give birth to her own child, so why give birth to someone else's child?
By this time, Lydia's third child was already on the way, and the judge decided to send someone to supervise the birth of the child until the child was born.
When the third child was born, the hospital had already conducted DNA tests, and the results were still unbelievable to everyone, and the data once again showed that the child was not Lydia's own child!
Court overseers and hospitals can prove that the baby is indeed Lydia's, but why does DNA identify the mom of three as someone else? Why is this happening?" Why is that?" This is a problem we encountered when we were doing research on a case. In this case, DNA identification is thought to determine whether the parents are the same person. There seem to be some mystery that modern medicine cannot explain.
As the case intensified, Lydia's lawyer, Alan Tyndall, took a tough stance. Because she found a medical record similar to Lydia's, the case progressed quickly. Lydia, a girl with severe intellectual disabilities and autism, is being treated in a psychiatric hospital. In recent years, Tyndall consulted all the major medical weekly magazines in the library and finally found a case very similar to Lydia's in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The story takes place thousands of miles away in Boston.
In 1998, Ms. Kevin, 52, suffered from severe kidney failure and needed a kidney transplant, and all three of his sons expressed willingness to donate their kidneys to their mother.
To compare the couples, the hospital conducted DNA tests on three men, but the results were unexpected: Kevin had two sons whose DNA didn't match his, meaning two of his three sons weren't biological. Kevin's mother told him that his two sons were Kevin and his own brother, and that their father was a doctor. Kevin is Kevin's father, and Kevin is Kevin's sister. Kevin's mother said. Kevin's family said they were horrified by the test results and insisted the child was Kevin's.
So the hospital took more DNA samples from Kevin, and they took samples of her blood, hair and oral mucosa, but the results were the same each time, and the boys' DNA did not match.
Then something stranger happened.
Kevin's thyroid was recently removed, and a sample of her thyroid tissue is still in the lab. Doctors remove thyroid cells for study. Strange things happened. The DNA of all these cells matches the kevin son!
This thyroid gland is the biological mother of Kevin's two sons, in a very graphic but less scientific way.
"What's going on?"
The case has attracted great attention from the medical community, Boston has the best medical institution in the world, and after two years of unremitting efforts by medical workers, the mystery has finally been solved.
It turned out that Kevin's mother was twins when she conceived him, one of the embryos died very early, and some of the cells were swallowed by Kevin, but not all, but in the form of separate strands of DNA. So Kevin has two genes in his body, a rare case in the medical community called chimera or chimera.
The word Chimera is derived from ancient Greek mythology and refers to mythical beasts with lion heads, goat bodies, and snake tails. It is used to describe a person with multiple sets of chromosomes, such as a person's bicolor pupils, a person's yin and yang face, a person's large and strange birthmark, and a person's different blood types.
The Chimera phenomenon also occurs in the animal kingdom, such as the red cat below, whose yin and yang face and two-color pupils are almost completely symmetrical.
Obviously, it was a cat with two embryos fused together.
Kevin's situation was carefully considered, and when the fertilized egg representing Kevin won the womb war and fused with her twin sisters, the temporarily failed fertilized egg dormant in Kevin's body, quietly passing on the genetics to Kevin's next generation at the first opportunity.
Genetically, two of Kevin's three children are her twin sisters, and who wins? By the time they were born, Kevin's father had died and his mother was a psychiatric doctor. In the eyes of his mother, Kevin was a good son; in the eyes of his father, he was a bad son. For a while, no one could tell.
From Kevin's case, we can infer many social phenomena, such as intersex people.
Intersex means that a person has two sets of sex organs in the body, could this be another fantasy?
Back in Lydia's case, inspired by Kevin's case, the judge ordered more DNA tests on Lydia, which turned out she was also a chimera. While much of the DNA on Lydia's body was inconsistent with that of her three children, cell samples taken from her womb were consistent with their children's DNA.
So her children are indeed her own, but genetically, they should be her twin sisters.
The judge ultimately ruled that Lydia, the mother of three, regained custody of her children. With Lydia's help, all three children learned to live independently. Finally, Lydia came to school with her three children. The children also gradually integrated into the new environment. The kids are happy. Through this series of events, the father of the child also repented and returned to the family.
Scientific estimates suggest that about 6 out of every 1,000 newborns in humans are fraternal twins, 20 to 30 percent of whom are absorbed by the placenta or siblings.
In other words, 3 out of every 2,000 people may be chimeras, which is not a low probability, but most people don't know they are chimeras for a lifetime.
In 1976, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published an epoch-making book, The Selfish Gene, in which he thought-provokingly pointed out: "The meaning of living things is actually a container for genes, and all our actions are designed to make them permanent." ”
Like a fetus engulfed by fraternal twins, this different DNA code can exist anywhere in the body, can run to the heart, can be a red blood cell that is passed to you throughout the body of two different blood types, and can enter the brain as a neuron to store memories.
But once a germ cell is found in the womb waiting to bind, it struggles to break free and rushes to the uterus to pass on the genetic code to the next generation.
The case of Lydia and Kevin seems to confirm dawkins' dreaded theory that living things exist only in a container of genes, that all survival strategies and laws of competition, and that everything about manipulating the world can be genetic tricks.