You might find this hard to believe, but up until a year or two ago, my every day car was so old it came with a rocking factory am-fm-8 track tape player. I got sick of hearing either: 1) the same songs over and over, or 2) the same commercials over and over. Since I think they quit making 8 tracks in about 1980, that left me in a delima. My choices were: listen to nothing on the way to work, try to find an 8 track tape at garage sales, or find something new to listen to on the radio. The first two choices just didn't work out, so I started tuning around the dial. I finally found something I liked with no comercials. No music either, but since we listened to the radio all day at work I didn't mind listening to people talk. I discovered NPR: National Public Radio. It's like PBS on the radio.

So why am I telling you all this? Because a couple of weeks ago, when I was still having the computer problem and couldn't write about it here, they had the most interesting news story. It was about a medical condition called chimerism. Some times a single embryo will split up into two identical twins. On the other side of the spectrum, sometimes two seperate embryos will fuse into one single person, called a chimera. Most of the time it isn't even noticed, unless one embryo was male and the other one was female. People generally notice hermaphrodites, when someone is half male and half female. The person featured in the story on NPR was a normal woman for 50 or 60 years, until she started having medical problems. I don't remember exactly what was wrong, a bad liver or kidney or something. Anyway, doctors tested her family and found out that her children weren't genetically hers. Her husband was their father, but she wasn't their mother, even though they weren't test tube babies and she had given birth to them. It turned out that parts of her body were all that was left of a twin sister that her body somehow sucked into itself before she was born. So actually, she was her children's aunt. Talk about creepy.

Besides just being weird, this could cause legal problems. If a chimera leaves hair at a crime scene and the police give him a blood test the DNA wouldn't match. Paternity tests that don't test semen might say someone isn't the father when he really is. Well, I guess technically he would be the uncle. If there's a plane crash or something and they have to identify the body parts by DNA they might not be able to tell what parts go to what person, or even how many people were really involved. There could be 6 or 7 people and 10 or 12 different DNA profiles.

What's really scary is there is a South Park episode about the school nurse who has a similar condition. Unfortunatly, she didn't completely absorb her twin, so she has a dead fetus sticking out of her head. Trust me, it was funnier than it sounds. Somebody tried to calm down the boys by explaining her situation, telling them that they might also have a dead fetus that was inside of them where nobody could see it. Some how that didn't comfort them very much.