I think there was a similar case, but about the mother. The courts took her baby and she was on trial for kidnapping.
Eventually a geneticists saw it on the news and suggested she got tested again using DNA samples from other parts of her body and they found out she also was a chimera.
Some racism was involved as she was working class and black, so the courts were just looking for a reason to take her baby and throw her ass in jail…
Some racism was involved
Not surprised after reading the first paragraph
Yes, it was the case of Lydia Fairchild
From Wikipedia
Fairchild stood accused of fraud by either claiming benefits for other people’s children, or taking part in a surrogacy scam, and records of her prior births were put similarly in doubt. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken away from her, believing them not to be hers. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered that an observer be present at the birth, ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild, and be available to testify. Two weeks later, DNA tests seemed to indicate that she was also not the mother of that child.
A breakthrough came when her defense attorney,[1] Alan Tindell, learned of Karen Keegan, a chimeric woman in Boston, and suggested a similar possibility for Fairchild and then introduced an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Keegan.[2][3] He realized that Fairchild’s case might also be caused by chimerism. As in Keegan’s case, DNA samples were taken from members of the extended family. The DNA of Fairchild’s children matched that of Fairchild’s mother to the extent expected of a grandmother. They also found that, although the DNA in Fairchild’s skin and hair did not match her children’s, the DNA from a cervical smear test did match. Fairchild was carrying two different sets of DNA, the defining characteristic of chimerism.
You’d think they’d change DNA test methodologies so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again
It’s rare enough for them not to give a fuck. especially since it’ll only hurt poor people who cant afford a genetic consultant
Can’t even trust a brother you ate in utero
her eggs were cheating
The brothers ghost, after cucking him for revenge:
but why would you assume he’s one brother or the other? he’s both brothers simultaneously, and neither, like Tuvix.
Tuvix was a blend of both, not parts of each. Chimeras end up having different DNA in different parts of their body but due to close enough biological relation there isn’t organ rejection.
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Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story… There’s a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.
So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They’ve since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.
They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta’s family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that “discarded biological materials” is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells’ usage, and there are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.
Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.
HeLa is extremely interesting, but still requires humans to cultivate her cells.
Canine transmissible venereal tumor however, is an immortal, contagious dog tumor from a dog thousands of years ago that evolved into its own lifeform - a sexually transmitted parasitic cancer - that has continued to this day to spread from host to host. Yet, genetically, it is still “dog”.
Anyway, this is my answer when the job interviewer asks me about long-term goals.
I worked with HeLa cells as a molecular biology student. The ethics weren’t a great look, and I’m happy that today there has to be informed consent for stuff like that.
Without having an immortalized cell line like this genetics would have taken even longer to get going tho, and she’s actually one of the few people whose genes will be preserved for near eternity. Creepy, but it’s closer to actual immortality than any of us will ever be.
That means every time that guy has masturbated in his life he was really jerking off his dead brother.
Hey now his brother has never been more alive.
I’m a data analyst at a medical nonprofit, primarily doing analyses on germline variants for rare forms of cancer. I’m new to this kind of work, but had a decent educational background in biology.
Something I’ve learned is that genetics are complicated as hell. A single gene can produce multiple different proteins, and proteins change over time due to somatic variation. Only 1% of the genome are protein coding, called exomes. Exomes can be affected by variations to start and stop codons, non coding regions, and untranslated regions. There are entire fields dedicated to studying genome-wide, exomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, and probably several others that I don’t know about. The amount of data involved with these fields is in the tebibytes region. Have you ever seen a “small” 3GiB csv? I have. The filtered and cleaned data frames created by genetics are over 100 columns wide and have nearly 5 million entries.
There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. There’s a whole field of computer science dedicated to biological computing, using DNA as a storage medium. There are companies dedicated to simply classifying genes.
DNA is cool as hell.
If you really want to blow your mind, look into the theoretical alternatives to DNA. we are all taught about RNA and how it is a precursor to DNA, but what if it went another way? Look up PNA, PNA-O, or even GNA. If life existed on other worlds, there is a decent chance it follows an xNA structure, but not necessarily DNA.
There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes.
My dude, not a fun thing to think about who might have control over that. Is it a musk, zuck, cook or epstein?
No, none of those guys are involved afaik. The one that made the first breakthrough in artificial life is ran by the same dude who competed with the Human Genome Project to map 99% of the human genome. They modified an extremely simple bacteria that only had something like 300 base pairs
We still don’t know what type of person they are. Them being smart and focused on the research, doesn’t give them a pass. They could even not care who else has the info.
That’s too much science. We, as a people, need less sci- wait, no. No, no. Uh - We need bett-er? Science? Hmm.
Look just make it an animated cartoon with fun music for now and we’ll circle back.
I have no context/knowledge on topic. Are you saying DNA has that much data that can be extracted from it? If so, that’s nuts.
yes, all that data is extrapolated directly from DNA. It’s a huge amount of information. All the DNA in a single human cell is directly translated to about 750MiB. Now, add in the fact that genomic studies use biobanks, like the UK Biobank, which contains the genetic info of hundreds of thousands of people. The data we can extrapolate from DNA is absolutely massive.
We have 3/4 of a GB of data in every cell? I need to read more into this. Wish I’d bothered with biology at school. 😂
To add that the general understanding of how DNA works and is used can be scary, just like other measurements. I bet there’s still a lot of people that believe fingerprint analysis is some kind of rock solid science based evidence, but my understanding is that it’s very much prone to errors and interpretation.
I don’t mean to say that DNA analysis suffers the same flaws, just trying to illustrate with an example.
I hate the generalized concept of “AI”, but I love the concept of “Machine Learning”
If you think LLMs are good at anything, I am almost 100% certain to disagree with you about pretty much everything, to help you understand this distinction.
Anyhow, some computer scientists found that a machine learning algorithm could predict beyond a null hypothesis that A fingerprint belonged to a person given a different fingerprint (different finger but still same person)
“Criminology” expers were just like “no, it’s settled science”
This is the state of discourse.
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why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?
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how tf is “settled science” even a concept in a science
I get a similar vibe from psychology. There’s a number of “experts” that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours… And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can’t be reproduced in a lab.
Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).
Psychology has been going through the replication crisis for some years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
TLDR: half of what you ever heard about psychology is false, they are working on figuring out which half it is. But there is not as much promotion on this as the initial false claims.
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Same with bite mark analysis, polygraph, and bullet/gun rifling matching. CSI, Law and Order, etc. all have convinced people these things are just the pinnacle of evidence.
At the end of the day, nothing is really beyond any doubt. Witnesses can imagine things, cops can be bribed, judges can have a newborn kid and maybe slept 3h last night
As someone who has undergone extensive genetic testing, we’re still in the dark ages of medicine. We basically know nothing at all about jack.
As someone with chronic issues, the amount of timed doctors just shrug and give up is kinda high.
Thats what I like House M.D. though, because it’s basically a Sherlock show, there’s always an answer. Unlike in real life, where they just send you home without actually figuring things out. I’ve had like 8 seizures in the last 10 years and still the best I’ve got it “idk, MRI seemed clear” and that’s all.
The vast majority of what we do is just trying to get the body to a spot where it can manage the issue itself because we don’t have the means to do it ourselves.
Personalized medicine is the frontier that everyone has been trying to break into since the race to decode the human genome. What a lot of people don’t realize is that for every drug that goes to market there are thousands of promising candidates that are shelved due to a small population of adverse effects.
Now imagine what we can do if we can screen for those effects. Overnight the market would be flooded with powerful, effective medications with much fewer side effects. And that’s just medical drugs.
Personalized medicine is going to be much more of a political problem than a technical one, at least in my country. We have a hard enough time screening for things like cancer and diabetes.
The last time I did a deep dive on the research, they estimated somewhere around 3% of the population had some form of chimerism, and I calculated my personal chances around 6%. And then I did some family research and anecdotal evidence pushed that number much higher, including being a single born twin.
One of the articles I recall postulated the number is much higher than 3% due to the condition only being confirmed or discovered through rare circumstances that result in multiple genetic testing.
The must of truly love that woman to keep getting tested. The average man would nope out once it came back kid wasn’t his.
Sometimes you just know when your best friend is telling the truth. :)
The must of truly
Quick! Raise both arms!
he probably was never cheated on or lied to about sex.
that stuff messes you up, and the average person deals with it. some lucky folks don’t.
I never imagined anyone would cheat on me until they did. and they told me it was my fault. lol
dude: I want a divorce, your honor.
judge: on what grounds?
dude: on account that my wife fucked my dead brother and had a child with him.
judge: is this true?
woman:
Jerry Springer gonna come out of retirement for this one.
Biology really said “plot twist” and rewrote the whole family tree. This is wild and fascinating at the same time.
That’s what Cadmus wants you to think.
Chimerism is weird and it can do really weird shit to your body
