Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jen's avatar

My favourite WTF story is a cautionary tale about DNA.

A woman and her husband had two children, and she was pregnant with their third, but the marriage had ended and they were going through the court system to determine custody of the kids. As part of this, a paternity test was done, but while it showed the children were in fact their father’s, the test said their mother was not the woman he was divorcing. This was a shock to everyone; the children hadn’t been conceived via IVF, and a hospital mix-up which swapped both children with ones the husband had *also* fathered seemed astronomically unlikely.

The Court assigned an officer to stay with the ex-wife as her pregnancy progressed, and attend the birth. The officer did so, and took a DNA sample from the baby and mother moments after delivery.

Same result. The child which the officer had watched being born was not the child of the woman they had watched it be born from.

Turns out the mother of these three children had medical chimerism. When she was in the womb, she had a twin who did not survive, and who she absorbed during development, meaning that some of her cells had her own DNA, and some (including the cells collected for her DNA tests) had her twin’s DNA.

Expand full comment
Dick Frizzell's avatar

Can't beat that but i have funny little ghost story. Saw Peter Cushing's Frankenstein when i was about 13...ran home down the middle of the road (Hastings) arrived at the front gate in a bit of a lather...turned up the path...and saw, hanging right in front of me, a classic 'ghost in a shimmering sheet' image...like Munch's 'Scream' through a diffuse lens. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face. Took my hands down and it was gone. Then i saw another, weaker one, and realised that it was a sweat drop on an eyelash refracting the porch light. Bloody hell...those Hammer films!

Expand full comment
75 more comments...

No posts