Baby boy belongs to an unborn father

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Baby boy belongs to an unborn father

Think of a father who realizes that his twin brother, who has never been born, is actually his son’s father. That is, an unborn man genetically becomes the father of a child or, simply put, the father is in fact his son’s uncle. How is it possible? The living father, in this case, is actually a human chimera, a hybrid that is composed of genetically distinct cells as a result of what scientists call chimerism, in reference to a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid of different animals in ancient Greek mythology.

A 34-year-old American man took a paternity test after his son’s blood type neither matched his own, nor his wife’s. The results showed that the man is not the boy’s father. Puzzled doctors, then, revealed that the baby boy actually belongs, genetically, to the man’s dead twin, whose DNA had been absorbed by the man while developing in his mother’s womb, British daily The Independent reported on Sunday.

The Washington couple had the child with the help of fertility clinic procedures after it turned out that they cannot have children.

They first feared that the man’s sperm might have been mixed up with others’ at the fertility clinic, but it was revealed that he had been the only white donor on the day in question, and their son was Caucasian.

Doctors showed that the son and father were genetically related, but the father was, genetically, the son’s uncle, who was born dead due to a miscarriage.

Further testing revealed that at least 10 percent of the man’s sperm came from his reabsorbed brother, during their mother’s pregnancy.

Human Chimerism, though seemingly bizarre, is a known phenomenon with about 100 cases reported in the medical literature, but as genes only feature in detectable amounts in very few organs, searches for chimeras are incredibly complicated. The Washington case, for example, had cheek cells that displayed just one set of genes, different from those present in the sperm.

A study conducted in 1996 revealed that Chimerism in humans “is not rare” and affects about 8 percent of multiple births.

The latest case is the first one ever to have fooled a paternity test.

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Baby boy belongs to an unborn father