DNAddy
(midwest.social)
fossilesque
Science Memeshttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/failed-paternity-test-vanished-twin
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5845036/
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.
Biology is complicated. Never forget when you try to make an argument based on it.
I think they are saying this dude is so cuck that he is raising his wife and non-existent brothers child.
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.
Imagine you are le innocent wife, but your son does not have your father's DNA
How does two genomes work together in one body without immune system going haywire?
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.
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.
Jerry Springer gonna come out of retirement for this one.
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:
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
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
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.
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.
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)
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!).
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Can't even trust a brother you ate in utero
her eggs were cheating
Nah, his sperm was unfaithful
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.
Ultimate cuck
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.
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.
I don't understand. First, what was the point? I doubt there was a way to split the sample attacked by a cancer cells, they probably weren't going to recalibrate the transporter and untuvix them.
Second, weren't there thousands of the copies of the sample? Why wouldn't they compare it to one of them, instead of bothering the family?
That confused me as well. The stuff I read didn't elaborate on how that would help.
They detected allozymes (differences in proteins) by electrophoresis in the 1970's.
This could tell the difference between species and maybe if they were lucky large family groups. It wasn't as exact as using DNA.
What the FUCK bro
It's like in Naruto when Itachi gave his eyes to Sasuke. Bro could probably unlock balls mangekyou.
Wut
That's what Cadmus wants you to think.
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.
Yup. Many Nazi scientists only cared about the research. A lot of medical and physics breakthroughs last century directly resulted from those experiments.
Like what?
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. 😂
Interesting, could you enlighten what types if data is in those 100 columns? I’m aware of ATGC and thought it would be just one column, but maybe the rest are some that indicate intensity or activity. Or what sequence they are part of.
Well it varies depending on what the file is meant for. Usually there's columns like chromosome, variant position, reference nucleotide, observed nucleotide, type of variation, codon sequence, gene name, etc.
There's also columns that result from various analyses. In the file I've been working on lately, there are columns such as variant impact, level of confidence, pathogenicity, clinical significance, etc.
That sounds like a marker file. It's a bit different than a sequence file.
Molecular markers are linked to specific sequences in the DNA. These markers are generally close by or in the gene of interest. All the extra columns described its characteristics and results. Anyplace in the entire genome where there is one nucleotide difference (polymorphic) can be another marker. There's millions of these and they add up to massive files.
A sequence file is basically just a long boring sequence of nucleotides and are not that large. Now some of the files you use to generate the sequence. Let's just say they had to wait almost 20 years for computers to get fast enough to process those files in a reasonable time. Those make the marker files look like childs play.
I'm not familiar with the name of the file I'm currently working with tbh. It's used to create the annotation files for regenie analyses. It has every variant for every gene within the biobank. There's far more than just missense; there are stop/start gain/loss, splice donor/acceptor, frameshifts, and ptv. It contains primateAI scores, spliceAI scores, cava data, clinvar data, and more.
Sweet, thanks for the reply. I didn’t expect to fully understand what they would contain but I got the idea.
There’s a Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda who you might like, he has visualised DNA and all sorts of data. I like his data.gram exhibition’s style the most esthetically amusing and he has published some albums too.
https://www.taronasugallery.com/en/exhibitions/ryoji-ikeda%E3%80%8Cdata-gram%E3%80%8D/
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.
Part 3 DIO be like.
That's cool af
This reminds me of the law and order episode with twins where one was a rapist...
https://lawandorder.fandom.com/wiki/Double_Strands
I had a relative who worked at a parole and probation office. There were a pair of twins who had a long history of covering for eachother (which the courts had become well aware of) and one got a sentence including probation. Since twins have the same fingerprints, they were required to provide a DNA sample at every court-mandated probation meeting to prove that the correct twin showed up to every required probation meeting
DNA sample of identical twin doesn't work. It is identical. They started as one individual and split into two.
The only way to tell them apart is if one of the brother has a distinguishable difference in scars, dentistry, etc.
Dang I must be misremembering the specifics then!
Edit: looks like fingerprints are in fact different for identical twins so it must've been that they got fingerprinted on every visit (which is much more realistic for a parole and probation office to collect and test on-site, whereas DNA would have to be sent for processing which would presumably take days or weeks)
I only heard the tale secondhand like a decade ago so not surprising that some specifics got mixed up
TIL identical twins can't (in most cases) be differentiated using DNA.
Identical twins - one egg + 1 sperm that splits into two after fertilization aka clones. This happens randomly in the population.
Fraternal twin - Two different eggs + 2 different sperm from daddy. They are siblings that happen to share a uterus. This genetic in some families.
Semi-identical twins - One egg + 2 sperm. The egg splits before it is fertilized. The genetically identical eggs are fertilized by different sperm. Freaky huh....
The child of a ghost who never got to exist
Something kinda romantic about that actually…it’s like he gets to live on genetically and be raised by his brother to be the person he was aways supposed to be.
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
it has always seemed weird to me that everyone else seems to get these feelings of jealousy, but not me.
So I guess this means he ate every part of his brother except for the balls. Meaning he has 4 testicles knocking about in his scrotum, like a bag of shallots.
Nah, this post's phrasing is misleading. Chimerism comes from a fusion of two separate embryos, not from two fully-formed babies merging together. A chimera is less one dominant embryo that "absorbs a twin," and more a regular person that just happens to be made up of two separate sets of genetic material. Imagine having two different puzzles with pieces that are cut in an identical pattern. You could use pieces from either puzzle to fit into each other. If you randomly draw pieces from either set and merge them into one picture, you end up with a puzzle that's a bit of both, but still only one. That's how it works with chimeras - the DNA from two individuals are mixed and matched to create a patchwork of both in one body. A key difference is, a puzzle would have leftover pieces - but the body would not.
It's often not apparent in any way. However, if the two sets of DNA call for different skin colors or something, a chimera might show both colors in different areas.
In the post's case, the cells that went on to make the man's testicles were made with different DNA than whatever part the first sample was taken from. There may be more parts of his body that use that same DNA, but unless they test a sample from every part of him, we'll never know exactly.
Biology really said “plot twist” and rewrote the whole family tree. This is wild and fascinating at the same time.
Reminds me of when President Vic Michaelis asked Hank about who has the most DNA.
https://youtu.be/SocSaQ-0IbI?t=931
Well, who's the biggest person? That one got the most DNA obviously.
That would make the Australian Mudfish the biggest of all, as it has the biggest genome, followed by some other mudfish, then interestingly the humble critically endangered axolotl, a sort of salamander than never loses it's lungs, and is only in the valley of mexico naturally.
Yes but the question goes much deeper from there ending up at chimeras.
Chimerism is weird and it can do really weird shit to your body
Aren't all women technically chimeras? Having two X genes means that 50% of the time one X is active and 50% of the time the other one is. And they tend to activate in stripes.
"Uncle"
Are we still recycling this story?
I've never seen it before.
https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
It's very dramatic to nerds and people that don't realize chimeras by definition are the twin as well
