Three months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nev., learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful of messages with.
He’d been encouraged to test his blood by a colleague at the Sheriff’s Office, where he worked. She had an inkling this might happen. It’s the goal of the procedure, after all: Weak blood is replaced by healthy blood, and with it, the DNA it contains.
But four years after his lifesaving procedure, it was not only Mr. Long’s blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA — but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Mr. Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor. “I thought that it was pretty incredible that I can disappear and someone else can appear,” he said.
Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
[…]
If another patient responded similarly to a transplant and that person went on to commit a crime, it could mislead investigators, said Brittney Chilton, a criminalist at the Sheriff’s Office forensic science division.
And it has misled them, Ms. Chilton learned once she began to research chimerism. In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.
Abirami Chidambaram, who presented the Alaska case in 2005, when she worked for the Alaska State Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage, said she had heard about another disconcerting scenario since then. It involved police investigators who were skeptical of a sexual assault victim’s account because she said there had been one attacker, though DNA analysis showed two. Eventually the police determined that the second profile had come from her bone marrow donor.
Similar scenarios could also create confusion around a victim’s identity — and in fact it has, said Yongbin Eom, a visiting research scholar at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
But don’t worry. The same experts who assured this could never happen have also declared that the phenomenon is harmless.
From the comments: Oh great, we’re going to have to learn yet another set of pronouns.
That’s friggin’ amazing.
Heavy on the friggin’
The story is from the New York Times, so it may or may not contain zero percent truth…
That occurred to me also@Kevin.
Another way of perhaps looking at this, (conspiracy theory?) is the transgender community looking for ironbound credibility thru DNA ??!!
My son and I had a hardcore discussion about societal acceptance of gay marriage etc back in 2006 and where it might lead.
Here we are less than 15 years into it and one need only look at how far it has encroached on what was once considered moral ground.
There are a ton of mysteries surrounding the organ transplant industry.
Having sat in on a lecture by a gentleman researching these very scenarios, he also stumbled across another interesting effect.
In the case of organ donor transplants, there are documented cases that the person not only got physical parts but also spirit/soul parts.
One case was a man got a new heart from another man who had blown his head off with a gun in his garage. After the recipient had recovered he was given the opportunity to meet the donor’s widow to thank her for her late husband’s heart and a new lease on life.
The remained in contact and eventually fell in love and married.
His life began to change, foods which he once loved were replaced by new tastes which he formerly had dislikes or no leanings toward. His musical tastes changed to completely new genres. There were many things which changed.
Not all for the good.
He began to lose his vibrancy and love of life, which he was well known for. Depression set in. Then one day he went out into the same garage and with the same gun, ended his life identically to his heart’s original owner.
What gets transplanted may not only be physical.
But … but … but … here in Yang’s “21st Century of progress” … man has no spirit. Man is just flesh and blood. A bag of carbon and chemicals. Meat puppets, the whole lot of us. Man just needs $ 1k a month and all will be well … or at least those annoying, unemployed, poor people will just go-away and stop bothering him (read: threaten to kidnap his wife and kids for ransom – or worse)
So, can we now accept perverts or are they still perverts. I know, they are still perverts.
http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.com/papers/levi_sentient.htm
In his book, The Heart’s Code, Paul Pearsall reports on the findings of his interviews with seventy-eight heart transplant patients and sixty-seven recipients of other organs. What Dr. Pearsall discovered is that in some patients, those he calls “cardio-sensitives”, the new heart seems to bring with it some “memory” of the heart donor. Often these memories are experienced in the recipient as new taste preferences, such as food or hobby interests, language choices such as use of specific words or phrases, or even memories of incidents in the donor’s life. One, very moving, experience Pearsall relates happened at an international meeting of psychologists and psychiatrists where Pearsall spoke about “cellular memory” as it had been reported to him by his transplant patients. One psychiatrist, clearly moved by the findings came to the microphone and spoke as she struggled through her tears.
Sobbing to the point that the audience and I had difficulty understanding her, she said, ‘I have a patient, an eight-year-old little girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old girl. Her mother brought her to me when she started screaming at night about her dreams of the man who had murdered her donor. She said her daughter knew who it was. After several sessions, I just could not deny the reality of what this child was telling me. Her mother and I finally decided to call the police and, using the descriptions from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with evidence my patient provided. The time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him…everything the little heart transplant recipient reported was completely accurate.
He really put his heart into it.
The other common part was the wife….just sayin’
Personality changes? No longer liking food he loved? Really??
This goes well beyond your simple and dumb statement.
Read somewhere the exact same exchange, something to do with “the woman whom You gave to be with me – she gave me of the Tree, and I ate”.
C’mon; that was funny.
Anyhew, this may dissuade the use of black market organs.
Got Uighurs?
*
bro… i’m pretty sure that’s the plot of
a “michael connelly” crime novel from
2002… it’s called “blood work.”
Connelly was inspired to write the story…
by a friend who received an organ transplant.
*
These are the same experts who insist that vaccines are safe!
They are. EVERYTHING on the planet, man-made, or natural have outliers who react poorly to the stimulus. Some people have peanut allergies … which can KILL them from anaphylactic shock, but for the VAST MAJORITY of humans … peanuts are tasty and nutritious.
Vaccines are safe. Overwhelmingly. Statistically. And the lives they SAVE? from defeating disease and viruses?! Well worth the outliers.
In other words, well worth crippling or killing those outliers.
Thems as can’t lives, dies, pardner.
Better that millions die of diseases which would otherwise be easily prevented?
I believe it was a dying Spock who said … “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”
By way of elaboration:
By CARL ZIMMER https://twitter.com/carlzimmer September 16, 2013
” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information —
or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”
But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes.
Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity.
Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood …
Women can also gain genomes from their children….“It’s pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera,”
One woman discovered … that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dna-double-take.html
So much for the what a tangled web we weave.
Oh great, we’re going to have to learn yet another set of pronouns.
Actually, I’d be ok with calling this guy “they”…
Hmmm. Would it be wrong of me, if I get to that point, to insist that I only receive organ and marrow donations from men? Wouldn’t receiving from an XX donor cause issues with my hormones? (I like my beard, thank you very much.)
I assume you are not interested in … uh … transitioning?
I saw this on Young Frankenstein. When the doctor and the monster merged, the monster was rewarded with great intellect while the doctor received a Willy Wonka Bar, which certainly impressed his wife, being a great lover of chocolate.
Or is it just the NYT pushing their BS beliefs with made-up crap which they call science – again?
I smell a rat. Why are they pushing the DNA-determines-all here, but DNA doesn’t matter at all when talking about “ transgenders “ After all, they claim that merely self-identifying as a woman makes a biological male into a woman. No DNA required.
Just another riff on: don’t believe us, believe the “ science “?
I can see the lawyers salivating over billable hours already!
You see Chimeras quite often in the plant world – trees and shrubs… Not sure which “…experts who assured this could never happen…” because It doesn’t surprise me at all.
Then there’s the joke about the guy who is in a serious car accident where he goes through the windshield.
The specialists are able to reconstruct his face but can’t rebuild his ears.
They settle on attaching a pair that are from a female donor who unfortunately didn’t survive.
After some time healing they take the bandages off and the man is reasonably satisfied with the repair job.
A couple of weeks later he goes in for a checkup to see how things are progressing.
While talking to the surgeon it comes up that he is having trouble with his new ears to which the doc asks him what seems to be the problem.
He finally tells the doctor that his hearing seems to be just fine but that he can’t understand a damn thing that is being said to him!
Ok I’ll leave now.
I guess this gives new meaning to the phrase “I’m not feeling myself today.”
Aye, Thomas at 3:29.
“Oy! It was me blood transfusion made me do it, yer Honour”
The most well known Soviet era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo supposedly have this condition. After he was first arrested and ‘cleared’ due to the mismatch blood type and free to kill more. I tend to subscribe to laughably bad Soviet forensic science at the time.
When Hillary’s DNA starts being identified at various suicide scenes, NYT will run stories on how generous she was with donating her bone marrow to random people.