
She's Her Own Twin - 001sky
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/shes-twin/story?id=2315693&singlePage=true
======
voidlogic
As soon as a read the first sentence + headline, I thought, wow, I bet she is
a chimera! If you were the birthing doctor and you got her call, how could
this thought not cross your mind?

As for the people doing the genetic test, weren't they a little surprised that
even if she wasn't the kids Mom, she was their aunt? Why didn't they think to
suggest the authorities look at the mitochondrial DNA. Without a mitochondrial
DNA mismatch the states aggressiveness is completely unfounded.

I'm so confused by the ineptitude of the medical and genetic professionals in
this case. I'm also confused by the state, if the birthing doctor and father
were to vouch, shouldn't that imply a less aggressive and more thoughtful
investigation is in order?

Couldn't they extract an egg from each ovary and do a DNA test?

~~~
ronaldx
It's not uneducated to use Occam's razor: if someone tests as not being the
mother, they almost always are not the mother. This is an every day
occurrence.

Chimerism is a possible explanation but vanishingly unlikely. Two identified
cases, ever (i.e. none before this).

This is news because it's exceptional.

~~~
voidlogic
I'm not disagreeing with you in thinking the scam is more likely at first
glance, but as soon as there was compelling evidence it was not a scam, the
professionals involved should have shared their awareness of the obvious
biological possibly.

The smoking gun in this case that there was not a scam, but something more
going on is the fact that she was her kids aunt.

~~~
ronaldx
Apologies for editing my point above.

Chimerism is well-studied because it's biologically interesting, but most
social/medical professionals are not expected to come across human chimerism
in their whole career.

Chimerism not often documented in humans and the other possibilities (e.g.
surrogacy scam) are hugely more probable explanations.

~~~
Locke1689
I think the parent's point is that, while rare in practice, well-qualified
physicians should easily identify the unusual situation and propose the
alternate hypothesis.

As an aside, this fact was of great annoyance to me when I was younger, as the
child of two pathologists trying to watch the tv show House. If you're not
familiar, it's a medical mystery show with a genius misanthrope doctor named
House who diagnoses people with extremely rare diseases, almost killing them
in the process.

It was a regular occurrence for one of my parents to walk through the room
while I was watching the show, in the first 5 minutes, and throw out, "they
obviously have x (vasculitis, chimerism, etc.)," thus ruining the rest of the
episode for me. Of course, they never actually watched the show, since from
their perspective it was just an incompetent medical team torturing some
patient.

~~~
tzs
A site with a medical review by a doctor of every "House" episode:
[http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html](http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html)

------
korethr
While I realize that one is going to find droids in government departments
like social services, the mindless robotism displayed by government agents in
this case were rather disturbing. To be absolutely certain that the child is
hers, they had an officer there in the room to witness the birth. And yet
despite actually witnessing the birth, it was decreed that the child must not
be hers because of the DNA mismatch.

I can think of a scenario besides chimerism where this could happen: in vitro
fertilization using eggs donated from another woman. But if someone has the
means to have access to IVF, it strikes me as implausible that she'd try to
scam welfare. Such implausibility should have occurred to the government
agents on the case as well.

~~~
kghose
One probability mentioned is that she is acting as a surrogate mother -
getting money for bearing an embryo.

Also, I can see the postion of the govt. officials. You have some training in
a technique, but you are not an expert. By all accounts the technique is
infailable. Here is a person whose account differs from the data.

Your a priori on this being clever fraud rather than a little known, one in
several billion case is high.

I think the officials were doing their job. It was a complex case and it went
up to a complex level (courts, judges, expert witnesses).

What I didn't like is the threat (We can take them away). I think we should
have techniques to out fraud without threatening people who have not proven to
be guilty.

~~~
nardi
> One probability mentioned is that she is acting as a surrogate mother

No, this doesn't make any sense. A surrogate mother doesn't RAISE the children
she gives birth to. That would just make her a regular mother. Why would they
take away her children when no one has come forward to claim them? There's no
crime. It's not illegal for your DNA to not match your childrens' DNA.

~~~
gwern
> Why would they take away her children when no one has come forward to claim
> them?

Because you have no idea where the genetic mother could have come from,
anywhere in the world (and given vitrification, anywhen), the absence of
evidence doesn't show much. What do you do, put up an ad in the classifieds:
'are you missing two embryos? please cal 911'?

As the other commenter says, this is an interesting failure mode which it's
not clear you can do much about without allowing many other severe failures:
it's much more likely that it's an extreme fraud which has beat detection thus
far than chimerism, which makes the actual chimeras go through a lot to prove
the latter, but if you loosen the standards, then what...?

~~~
scholia
It still doesn't make any sense. You have a women who has _provably_ given
birth to children that don't share her DNA, and who is bringing them up as her
children.

Taking them away solves nothing. In fact, it's inhuman to the point of
insanity. It's also financially nonsensical, since the cost of children in
care is dramatically higher than social assistance, and quite likely to get
worse (because of the impact on the kids of being torn from their mother).

A system not operated by idiots would have suggested a quick and cheap
compromise, such as making the kids legally hers by adoption.

~~~
gwern
> You have a women who has provably given birth to children that don't share
> her DNA, and who is bringing them up as her children.

Yes, so? Stealing someone's kids is OK if you then bring them up while, of
course, on welfare?

~~~
scholia
There was never any evidence that she stole the kids, or that they had ever
belonged to anybody else. In fact, there was a vast amount of reliable,
historical evidence that they were her kids.

The _only_ evidence to the contrary turned out to be wrong, and it was proven
wrong when she was observed giving birth.

Otherwise, even if she had stolen the kids, the government action was insane.
As I already pointed out, it costs social services a lot more to break up a
functioning family than it costs to provide enough support to keep it
together.

------
norswap
The level of meddling by the government is absolutely incredible. No-one
complained, they had a bunch of witness to the contrary, but still they had to
go through with their procedure. Frightening times we live in, when our lives
may hang on the whim of some bureaucrats.

~~~
yitchelle
When I read the story, I was getting frustrated at the government "knee jerk"
reaction that she was immediately in the wrong. Would it not be better if the
government spend the effort in determining why their DNA does not match? It
seems that not enough humanity is withe social services and the courts.

~~~
hnal943
Or perhaps more pragmatically, to simply deny her claims for assistance until
she can prove her maternity.

------
tantalor
The article mentions surrogacy (in the context of fraud), so I wonder why the
theory of her having used donated eggs was not mentioned. Would accepting
donor eggs disqualify someone from receiving benefits?

Also, it is a MUCH more likely explanation than chimerism.

~~~
venomsnake
What I thought about that - doesn't that leave a lot of paper trails? Medical
billing histories that could be combed etc.

If government thinks she is surrogate - they must prove it. And DNA test just
gives a fact and not a proof.

------
ZoFreX
Single page link: [http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/shes-
twin/story?id=2315693&s...](http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/shes-
twin/story?id=2315693&singlePage=true)

------
ronaldx
This article doesn't totally add up.

If the mother was chimeric, she would be chimeric with a 'twin' from the same
(grand)mother and father. Therefore her 'twin' chimera would share 50% of her
DNA, as any regular sibling.

This would be identifiable on a DNA test as a close relative: she would be
genetically equivalent to an aunt rather than a mother.

It's also surprising that they had to test the thyroid when the gametic cell
line is the important one (wikipedia suggests they tested her cervix).

~~~
Jtsummers
Siblings don't share a guaranteed 50% of DNA, there's actually a chance
(though remote) that they'd share no DNA.

Assuming each chromosome of a pair has an equal chance of being passed on
(someone else got info on what, if anything, is known to change these odds?).
So there are 2 x 2^23 possible chromosome sets. While the odds are low, it's
entirely possible that two siblings with the same parents would have less than
50% of their DNA in common.

In the case of a chimeric individual, if they already were below 50% DNA in
common, then the children they produce might appear as only distantly related,
nieces and nephews at best.

~~~
ronaldx
True in theory, but unlikely to the point of irrelevant.

Assuming chromosomes are inhereted whole, the probability that siblings share
less than 25% DNA - the equivalent of one further generation away - is 0.00531
(0.5% chance).

But chromosomes are not inherited whole - they recombine. This hugely reduces
the probability even from that start point.

------
derekp7
This is one of those cases where, even though the science is correct (the
children didn't contain the same DNA as the mother's blood), the
interpretation was way off (that these children weren't hers), and almost
ended in a travesty of justice. Have we really come that far from the days of
the Salem witch trials, and the tests they used to determine if someone was
guilty of witchcraft?

~~~
amirmc
When you fully believe that a test that is "100 percent foolproof" and
impartial, it's easy to convince yourself that the person in front of you must
be lying. In this case the implicit assumption was something like the
following: A perfect DNA match implies parentage, therefore, parentage implies
a perfect DNA match. As this article shows, the latter isn't always true. I'm
sure the former isn't true either, but I'm trying to describe how most people
think about these things.

~~~
DougN7
That's the thing that is worrisome - ever assuming our knowledge is 100%
solid. When we're in a reflective mood, we say we'd never do that. But it
happens all the time. I remember in sixth grade learning that stellar red
shift absolutley proved the universe was not expanding, thus provin the big
bang. Well, despite KNOWING, turns out it was wrong - the universe was
expanding after all. In this case it didn't change the underlying meaning, but
was wrong. That left me questioning science more than I should. I can say I
hate hearing "now we know..."

------
oska
IMO, this piece [1] on Lydia Fairchild is better written and has much more
information on chimerism and microchimerism.

[1] [http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201303/the-you-in-
me](http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201303/the-you-in-me)

------
jessaustin
Bureaucrat A: We've found something slightly odd about this family.

Bureaucrat B: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will now
completely fuck up their lives.

~~~
Jtsummers
It's not just her family. She was applying for government assistance. People
try to defraud government programs so countermeasures are developed. One is
ensuring that the children people claim as dependents (and thus will get money
for) are, in fact, their children. If someone turns up with 3 kids and
falsified documents, DNA tests would reveal the attempted fraud (assuming the
kids aren't their identical twin's or a very genetically close sibling's).

In this case the bureaucrats, as you call them, were faced with someone who
appeared to be attempting to defraud the government. She insisted (rightly)
that they were her children, but initially the DNA evidence pointed to that
being a lie. They asked about them being her sister's children (suggesting she
was the aunt), she denied this. They inquired about surrogacy, in vitro, etc.
She insisted that the children were conceived normally and delivered by her.
Once the latter was proven, the DNA still didn't match which left the
surrogacy angle (which presented a risk that she'd defrauded someone else).
She'd likely get assistance if it had been surrogacy (but she kept the kids
legitimately) or in vitro with donated eggs and above board, but she kept
insisting (because she was right) that it wasn't, which left the investigators
in a bind. The facts didn't match the claims.

It's unfortunate that she happened to get caught up in all of this when she
was totally innocent of any wrongdoing or attempted fraud, but given the odds
of chimerism the bureaucrats were not wrong to investigate further. Now that
the condition is known and understood hopefully this will be resolved more
quickly for future chimeras.

~~~
jessaustin
Attempts to defraud the government are punished by losing one's children? Can
you point to a particular law that establishes this? I'll certainly think
twice before grabbing extra maps at highway rest stops from now on...

In the absence of any complaint from any interested party, the default action
should not be "break up this family and parcel out the kids to foster homes
where they're more likely to be abused and will definitely cost the government
more." We should have less empathy for powerful and stupid bureaucrats and
more empathy for their victims. This is especially so now that they have total
surveillance powers over us, so our every private expression can be
misconstrued by cretins to justify any action they'd like to take.

~~~
Jtsummers
In this case, the fraud is that they _aren 't_ her children (that was the
accusation, not the reality). They'd be removed because she had either
borrowed them from someone to conduct the fraud or "borrowed" them (read:
potential for kidnapping) them from someone and committed a crime in addition
to attempting fraud.

Was this not clear in the article? They didn't believe the children were hers.
That was the entire premise of the government's involvement after the initial
exams.

~~~
jessaustin
They weren't taking the children to give them to someone deemed more likely to
be a parent, or indeed to someone who even claimed to be a parent. They were
just taking them. If you think this makes any sense at all, you've got the
burden of proof reversed. Yay totalitarianism!

~~~
Jtsummers
They did not (unless I missed it again after a third read of the article) take
the children away. They threatened to because they were not (per the DNA) her
children. That's the crux of the issue. They appeared to be someone else's
children, she had no paperwork for adoptions. She denied that in vitro was
used for conception. She had, if these results were correct and she were not a
chimera, no apparent legal claim to these children. That meant they came from
somewhere else, which is what the state would've been left trying to determine
if the chimerism hadn't been discovered.

If someone comes to you with a story that completely contradicts all evidence
("I didn't do it, I just look exactly like the guy that did and happen to have
the same name and live in the same house.") you wouldn't believe them. The
story contradicted the physical evidence. Her pregnancy and delivery only
confused it because it indicated that, rather than the children being
abducted, in vitro was probably being used (again, there was no reason to
suspect chimerism given its rarity and extreme obscurity at the time). Labs
repeatedly showed that the children were _not_ hers. In 999,999 cases out of a
million they would have been correct, that she was conducting some sort of
fraud.

This isn't totalitarianism. That'd be, they found the DNA didn't match and
took the kids from her and the father that instant, locked her up and even
after the discovery of chimerism kept her imprisoned for fraud and refused to
allow visitation with her children. This was an unfortunate case that ended
well (though stressful throughout).

------
skrebbel
Why would government agencies take away kids from a mother only because they
don't believe they're hers? If the whole family wants to stay together - the
kids, the mom, the dad (assuming the dad is in the picture), then why does it
matter how things got to be? It's a family by all definitions that matter.

------
chris_mahan
"People over Process" shouldn't be only for Agile software development.

------
chadrs
Think about the implications for all the "who's the daddy" day-time television
shows!

~~~
delinka
Well, they knew who the fathers were; it was a question of "who's the mama?"

~~~
ars
In that case sure, but a father can also be a chimera.

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, but with the father the semen would hopefully not be more than the third
or fourth thing tested, if you kept testing. Ovums are much harder to get to.

------
bazzargh
This famously came up in cyclist Tyler Hamilton's 2005 suspension for doping,
casting doubt upon the identification of his blood:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/health/10bloo.html?pagewan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/health/10bloo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

It's been muddied over the years, Tyler has since said he never claimed to be
chimeric.

------
mnw21cam
Bit of information which is on Wikipedia, but missing from the article:

 _A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen
Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defence..._

Which restores a little bit of one's faith in humanity.

------
ninguem2
But if she is a chimera and "her own twin" then she is her kids' genetic aunt
and that should show up in DNA testing. 23andme kept telling me that so and so
was my 3rd cousin until I blocked that "feature".

------
jevinskie
Do all of her ovum contain the same DNA or will some ovum have DNA A while
others have DNA B? Would testing the DNA of her ovum (instead of blood, hair
follicle, etc.) definitively shown a genetic relationship to her children?

~~~
ronaldx
The ova all come from the germline so IMHO it's overwhelmingly likely they
would have the same DNA but it's not exactly guaranteed: it depends if her
ovaries are chimeric.

~~~
gus_massa
It’s more complicated. The germline cells are “chosen” in a very early stage
of the embryo, and later they migrate to the ovary/testes. So perhaps the
tissue of the ovaries are from one chimera-twin and the germline cells and the
eggs from the other one. (Perhaps each embryo selected the germline cells, and
both group moved to the ovary later??)

More info (I coud’t find a source with better formatting):
[http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/G/Ger...](http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/G/GermlineVsSoma.html)

------
GigabyteCoin
FYI this article is from August 2006

------
nickfargo
Faster read:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Humans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_\(genetics\)#Humans)

------
louthy
I wonder how common this is? I have different coloured eyes, which can be
caused by Chimerism. Twins are very common in my family and I have two
brothers who are identical twins, so I have often wondered whether Chimerism
is the cause of my condition (although not enough to do anything about it!).

------
m_mueller
Here's a fascinating Radiolab episode dealing with this subject:
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91597-mix-and-
match/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91597-mix-and-match/).

------
Mz
I had seen this story before. I find this kind of thing enormously frustrating
and it hits a nerve for me personally: Having figured out how to get well in
the face of having an incurable and deadly genetic disorder, I basically get
treated like I have Munhausen by Internet for trying to talk about it. And it
just frustrates the hell out of me, on so many levels. And it seems to make no
difference to talk about it. Talking about my frustration winds up being
another excuse to dismiss me as a nutcase and attention whore.

So I can identify with the frustration of the two women in the story.

(I can't help but wonder if sexism plays a part here. I am also female.
Questioning my sanity seems like a more PC thing to do than dismiss as "girls
are too stupid to come up with any good ideas.")

~~~
chromaton
I read some of your stuff on your various blogs and kept looking for a post
where you described what illness you actually had. I never found it.

Is the problem that people don't believe you had a particular disease to begin
with?

~~~
Mz
No. There are a long list of problems.

My official diagnosis is "atypical cystic fibrosis." Cystic fibrosis is quite
deadly and when I was active on various CF lists, no one believed me that I
was, in fact, getting well. That seems to be the issue in a nutshell: That no
one believes it can be done, much less by a former homemaker and mom.

I have a long list of credibility problems. Listing them here would not help
my credibility. I intentionally lowered my profile because being more open
about things was only attracting really ugly personal attacks. It was all
downside, no upside.

I have actually made some progress on some of the things I think need to be
solved in order to move forward on, someday, helping people. But I find it
maddeningly frustrating the degree to which I simply am not taken seriously
most of the time, by most people.

~~~
kghose
CF is a very broad spectrum disease. People have been diagnosed in their 60s
and 70s, coming in with a peripherally related complaint. Not all CF
manifestation is deadly. The gold standard test is the sweat test and the real
test is a full panel genetic screen.

~~~
Mz
I cannot fathom why you are telling me this. I am abundantly familiar with
these facts.

------
001sky
Tetragametic chimerism

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29#Tetraga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29#Tetragametic_chimerism)

------
Shivetya
so by the same token no DNA evidence gathered at a crime scene would match
her?

But I did think it interest if not distressing to that the authorities could
witness a birth and totally discard her as being the mom because of a test.

Hopefully it drops the hint about all sciences, just when we think we know
something there is always something else

~~~
Lexarius
Depends. The article didn't reveal which parts of her had which DNA, we just
know that her eggs had different DNA than whatever they were sampling from. If
she left blood behind and they did a blood test, it would come out as a match.
If she left some other random bit of cellular structure behind, it might not
match against her blood.

------
benihana
This reminds me of Doc Daneeka from Catch-22:

For those who haven't read it, he's a flight surgeon who hates flying, but
since he's attached to a bomber squadron, he's required to get a certain
amount of flight time a month to get flight pay. He hates flying, so he bribes
the guy in charge of the flight log to just say he got his flight time. The
problem, is the plane he was _officially_ on (but not on in reality) crashed
killing everyone onboard. This is the official record for the government, and
since the official record says he's dead, he must have died.

This causes all sorts of problems when people in the bureaucracy notice that
he's not dead. Instead of accepting that their records don't match reality so
the records are wrong, they reason that reality doesn't match their records so
reality must be wrong. His wife realizes that it's financial beneficial for
her if she acknowledges his death, so she pretends he's dead as well.

It's a brilliant satire on government bureaucracy and how members of the
bureaucracy take it as being fact, and until I read this story about the woman
murdering her twin in the womb, it was hilarious to me. Now it's a bit more
frightening.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Daneeka](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Daneeka)

~~~
anigbrowl
'woman murdering her twin in the womb'?! What a bizarre and offensive thing to
say.

What the article says: _In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at
least two genetically distinct types of cells -- or, in other words, someone
meant to be a twin. But while in the mother 's womb, two fertilized eggs fuse,
becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes -- two separate
strands of DNA._

~~~
Mz
"The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you. So, y'know, try to
show a little respect?"

The question is: Which baby ate the other and whom do we charge with murder?

(the "/s" tag does not fit here -- someone clue me as to what kind of tag I
need here, k? thx.)

~~~
colanderman
I think you were downvoted because your comment, while humorous, doesn't
really add to the conversation. Humor is appreciated more on HN when it is
coupled with insight.

~~~
Mz
Well, I don't agree. If it was twins and they "fused" and you are going to
assume one "murdered" the other, then which one is the murderer? It is a
serious question. Also, how did the one baby "murder" the other? What does a
baby in utero have on hand to attack its twin? The body kills invaders by,
essentially, eating them (white blood cells engulf and consume microbes). At
the cellular level, it is a battle and it is a case of eat or be eaten.

I realize humor is a big risk on hn. But, for me, it seems to be a big risk
anywhere. (shrug)

~~~
colanderman
IANAB, but the way things went down was probably more like this: Two embryos,
composed entirely of stem cells, were growing adjacent to each other and
bumped into each other, forming a larger embryo composed entirely of stem
cells. The stem cells probably aren't really aware that their neighbors have
slightly different DNA, so they just cooperate like stem cells do in forming a
single human being.

~~~
Mz
Yeah, I actually get that. I am not the one who called it murder. I was kind
of mocking the idea that it was murder.

Thx.

------
stefantalpalaru
Viable chimeras are fascinating. How does the immune system tolerate two
different definitions of self?

~~~
pygy_
Self-recognition is the consequence of a selection process that occurs in the
thymus at a young age, for T-Cells, and in the bone marrow for B-cells.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus)

 _First, T cells undergo "Positive Selection" whereby the cell comes in
contact with self-MHC expressed by thymic epithelial cells; those with no
interaction are destroyed. Second, the T cell undergoes "Negative Selection"
by interacting with thymic dendritic cell whereby T cells with high affinity
interaction are eliminated through apoptosis (to avoid autoimmunity), and
those with intermediate affinity survive._

See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%28D%29J_recombination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%28D%29J_recombination)

 _V(D)J recombination, also known as somatic recombination, is a mechanism of
genetic recombination in the early stages of immunoglobulin (Ig) and T cell
receptors (TCR) production of the immune system. V(D)J recombination takes
place in the primary lymphoid tissue (the bone marrow for B cells, and Thymus
for T cells). V(D)J recombination nearly randomly combines Variable, Diverse,
and Joining gene segments in vertebrate lymphocytes, and because of its
randomness in choosing different genes, is able to diversely encode proteins
to match antigens from bacteria, viruses, parasites, dysfunctional cells such
as tumor cells, and pollens._

------
Yuioup
Is HN upvoting articles now because it has a go.com domain? This Go craziness
is getting out of hand.

