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.
There was a similar case of a woman who absorbed her twin brother in the womb. Only a small patch of cheek had her brothers DNA, but that is exactly where DNA is taken from when they want to take a DNA sample. This was discovered when she took a DNA test which came up as male.
I think they are saying this dude is so cuck that he is raising his wife and non-existent brothers child.
Biology is complicated. Never forget when you try to make an argument based on it.
𝘣𝘜𝘵 𝘪𝘛’𝘚 𝘉𝘢𝘚𝘪𝘊 𝘉𝘪𝘖𝘭𝘖𝘨𝘠! is always said about how trans people can’t be trans.
I mean, 2+2 is just basic math but quantum physics is a little more complicated than basic math. Biology tends to get more complicated when you pass Grade 2.
The issue with that comparison is that math is constructed from pure logic based on axioms, whereas the real world just is and our mental models can always only approximate reality.
So basic math still applies at any higher level, whereas basic biology is contextualized by the exceptions and limitations pointed out by advanced biology.
Why does this make DNA scary? I think it’s awesome that our understanding of DNA makes us able to unravel things like this.
Imagine your dead twin using your penis to impregnate your wife with his DNA.
Yeah, I get it. Chimerism is scary, but not DNA
“You may have defeated me in the womb brother, but impregnated your wife. I win.”
The child is then born, gets to around 18 years old and challenges the father to a boxing match:
“Brother, it is me, beyond the grave! I have come to reclaim my rightful place in the world, and seek my vengeance!”
I would say that he’s not really dead, his consciousness has taken shelter in some dark cranny of his mind, and slips out to cause trouble now and then.
Imagine you are le innocent wife, but your son does not have your father’s DNA
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.
This is wild, and and important party of the plot for orphan black.
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.
How does two genomes work together in one body without immune system going haywire?
We’ve been doing transplants for a while now. Close family are always easier and this happened during development, which possibly makes it even easier for the immune system to recognize as friendly.
Being incredibly close, genetically, probably helps a lot. Cancer is just ones own cells that turn into a parasitic mass BUT there’s entire dog STI that’s actually a thousands of years old boneless dog(the dog’s cancer cells) which was likely originally spread through a bunch of domesticated, inbred dogs.
So his immune system’s like “eh, close enough”.
Let me preface this by saying I don’t know shit about shit, leastways medical shit, so this is probably completely stupid:
His immune system developed like this from the beginning, and it know no other way. So it just works.
Or maybe it doesn’t. The person could have all sorts of auto-immune stuff going on, they didn’t say.
There might be two reasons why there was no immune response:
- The immune system responds to protein on cell wall known as Major Histocompatibility Complex. Siblings share many if not all of the important MHC proteins to seem identical to immune system. Maternal twins or identical twins share all of the MHCs. That is one of the reason why there is a high chance of you getting a compatible tissue or organ donation from siblings than parents.
- Sperms and seminal vessels are essentially outside the immune system just like spinal disc, eye lens, joint cartilages. Immune system doesn’t even know they are present.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he had autoimmune disorders his whole life, without knowing why.
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…
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.
Some racism was involved
Not surprised after reading the first paragraph
I remember that one, it was the first time I heard of this scenario. It really sucks for folks involved, but it is kind of interesting too.
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
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:
Apparently this is more common with cats. If you see a cat with two different coat patterns, either divided down the middle or along the neck (as if they only had spare parts left at the cat factory), they may also be a chimera.
Venus!!! I love Venus. She long predates AI for the curious. She’s an ig celeb.
I saw this one too the other day on the other site, I think.
Half scraggle muffin, half had enough of your shit.
Cool looking cat. I wants one
“I’m not black! I’m a tabby, like you officer!”
Whoa, that’s crazy. It’s basically like having two cats in one!
I wonder… is this more common in all animals that have average litter size >= 2? Or is there something else special to cats that explains this phenomenon?
In-utero growth rate + chromosome counts play a big role. I admit, ashamedly, that I have largely forgotten the reason they matter, but they do.
Source, trust me bro
“Source, trust me bro”
Seems legit to me. I trust you as an authoritative source on the subject.
Half and half chimera is just the more unique variant, iirc, at least for humans. The more common type would just look splotchy if the different parts even happen to color differently. The patterns usually follow Blaschko’s lines but don’t have to.
There are also more basic forms where people will just have certain body parts with different DNA, like an extra blood type or other less consequential things.
Can’t even trust a brother you ate in utero
her eggs were cheating
Nah, his sperm was unfaithful
There was a woman who went to prison for this, her chimera baby’s dna contradicted her story, I think to get public assistance of some kind, and the dna test convinced the state assholes she was lying and they sent her to prison, I think some researchers exonerated her eventually.
Are you thinking of Lydia Fairchild? In her case she wasn’t sent to prison. However, her two children were taken from her and placed in foster care. Lawyers had refused to represent her at first, due to the belief that DNA evidence is too strong to fight. On the plus side, she became pregnant again. So a court officer was present during her third child’s birth.
Despite being at the birth and witnessing blood draws from both mother and child, the court still claimed she was being untruthful somehow. Thankfully, that birth and its evidence were peculiar enough to attract a lawyer to finally represent her. Only after that did the investigation into potential chimerism arise.
More info here - https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-chimerism-2002
Might be I just heard it on a podcast, Poor Historians, Misadventures in Medical History, and I may have gotten the story wrong.
Why are they assholes? Because they didn’t know about chimeras?
Because they don’t know the limits of their tools and were convinced they’re infallible, and as a result an innocent woman was punished by the state. Just a guess.
Nobody knows the limit of their tools until those limits are known. Where did you decide they thought they were infallible? They followed the law they have, as is their job. Justice is not perfect, we don’t have all the answers, jumping to such vicious conclusions speaks more about you than them. The entire incident, and her successful appeal after further investigation, was like a year. Nobody threw the woman into prison for a decade or something. Seriously, people are so reactionary.
Nobody knows the limit
I’m not sure, but let’s say that’s true. They usually also don’t care to know the limits. Another interesting case is Patricia Stallings (emphasis mine):
an American woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder after the death of her son Ryan on September 7, 1989. Because testing seemed to indicate an elevated level of ethylene glycol in Ryan’s blood, authorities suspected antifreeze poisoning, and arrested Stallings the next day. She was convicted of murder in early 1991, and sentenced to life in prison.
Stallings gave birth to another child while incarcerated awaiting trial; this next child was diagnosed with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder that can mimic antifreeze poisoning. Prosecutors initially did not believe that the sibling’s diagnosis had anything to do with Ryan’s case. Stallings’ lawyer was forbidden from producing available evidence as proof of the possibility. After a professor in biochemistry and molecular biology had some of Ryan’s blood samples tested, he was able to prove that the child had also died from MMA, and not from ethylene glycol poisoning.
One incident does not prove another.
That kinda depends on the circumstances, but I’ll try to stop arguing after this reply
I mean unless they proved she was not providing for the kid I think they’re assholes. But I shouldn’t assume
If the state has good reason to believe someone had abducted children, I would want them to intervene, would you not?
If no one is missing those children, that’s not good reason to believe she kidnapped them at all. I want the children to be happy, and regardless of genetics taking them from the parents that raised them into a foster home will just damage them (unless parents are just very abusive)
There are plenty of missing children, of all kinds of ages that went missing at all kind of times. So yes, they could have been. What was known of the situation more than justified taking some kind of action on behalf of the children, incase they were not hers.
Jerry Springer gonna come out of retirement for this one.
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.
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.
Depends on what you mean by “anything.” The current obsession in the tech world of trying to shove LLMs into the AGI box? Yeah, not a good fit. Pure language stuff like translation or brainstorming? Very useful. LLMs now even surpass DeepL.
why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?
I have a similar compulsion to clarify that my interest in LLMs centers mainly around local open-source models that can run on consumer hardware.
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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
