Saw the strangest thing on Discovery Channel

Have you ever heard of a chimera? Or of chimeric cells? Well, I hadn’t until being enlightened by a program on the Discovery Channel.

The science on this is very young, but there have been known cases where DNA testing has failed, miserably, to identify a person. Not because the technician was lazy, or the specimen was tampered with, but because some people’s DNA breaks all the rules.

In the case I saw, DNA testing proved, yes proved that a woman’s children were not her own. The kids weren’t stolen or swapped at birth though – they did the blood tests right there in the delivery room.

In her case, scientists believe that when conceived, she was actually a pair of fraternal twins but that early in development, the two eggs combined to produce one person. With two distinct sets of DNA.

Her blood had one type of DNA only, but her skin cells, hair cells, and other samples appeared to come from a completely different person. How freaky is that?

Apparently it has some pretty scary ramifications too for the use of DNA tests in investigating crime and proving paternity in lawsuits. If you’re interested, here’s a link to some more info.