![]() ![]() Tests revealed that while her blood cells had one set of genes, her ovaries held distinctly different ones. The gene tests, however, said the 52-year-old Boston woman wasn’t actually the mother of her children. Keegan needed a kidney transplant, and her sons, as close relatives, were tested as possible donors. People usually have just one set of genes - half of them from their mother and half from their father.īut in 2002, researchers reported the chimeric case of Karen Keegan in the New England Journal of Medicine, a rare case of maternity testing being fooled by a ghost’s genes. “Chimera reports are very rare, but they are real.” At that point, he realized they might be dealing with a chimera. ![]() “That was kind of a eureka moment,” said Starr. Bizarrely, their results said that the man was his son’s uncle. The results of those tests came back late last year. That was when the couple approached Starr, who suggested they test the father and son with a direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry test sold by the startup firm 23andMe. But the fertility clinic said that the 34-year-old father was the only white man to donate sperm at the facility on the day their son was conceived, and the child looked white. About 24% find that the man is not the father of the child.Ĭoncerned that the fertility clinic had made a mistake, the Washington couple approached them with the results of the paternity test. labs perform nearly 400,000 paternity tests every year in legal, immigration, and criminal cases, with more than 99% of them relying on cheek swab samples. Again, the test came back negative for paternity.Īccredited U.S. Just like the at-home test, the new analysis relied on skin cells from a cheek swab to check the father’s genes against the child’s. The parents hired a lawyer and sought a more precise paternity test from an accredited lab. “They thought the clinic had used the wrong sperm.” “You can imagine the parents were pretty upset,” said Starr, whose colleagues have presented the case at two scientific meetings this month, most recently the International Symposium on Human Identification meeting. The boy was born healthy, but strangely, his blood type didn’t match that of his parents.Īn at-home paternity test suggested an explanation: The man wasn’t actually the father of the child. In June 2014, the parents (who have chosen to remain unnamed because of concerns for their privacy and confidentiality of medical records) had a son with the help of fertility clinic procedures. The answer to their mystery points to a possible genetic loophole in standard paternity testing, Starr said - “one where we have no idea how big the problem is.” Last year, a Washington couple came to Starr, who answers the “ Ask a Geneticist” questions on the website of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, looking for help with what appeared to be a mistake at a fertility clinic. ![]() “Even geneticists are blown away by this,” Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News. Cells from these miscarried siblings are sometimes absorbed in the womb by a surviving twin - but are only rarely discovered by surprises such as the paternity-test puzzle. man is the first-ever reported case of a paternity test fooled by a human “chimera” - someone with extra genes absorbed from a nascent twin lost in early pregnancy.Ībout 1 in 8 single childbirths are thought to have started as multiple pregnancies. How can a man who was never born father a son? When the ghost of his genes lives on in the DNA of his brother, genetics researchers have found.Ī 34-year-old U.S. ![]()
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