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?
When did you first learn of human chimerism? This story is from 2006, about a dispute in 2002. Social workers aren't the most scientifically-literate, and bureaucracies are often under the spell of folklore-beliefs in the certainty of genetic science, picked up from TV or state prosecutors. (Even medical 'professionals' aren't always up-to-date on topics that were considered only vanishingly-rare curiosities, when they were in med school decades ago.)
Awareness of chimerism has risen a lot in the last decade, and if you learned about it yourself in the last 10 years, it might have been due to followup coverage from this and similar cases.
And while this 2006 article describes it as a 'rare' condition ("only 30 documented cases worldwide"), in fact the more scientists look the more they find it. There's since been evidence that on a small scale, cells pass from mother-to-child and child-to-mother in the womb, and these cells are still present in blood or brain decades later... meaning almost everyone might
be a chimera.
The USA has 319 million people, that means every federal agency is going to have to deal with hundreds of "one in a million" cases, so handling something "rare" badly is still worthy of criticism. Chimerism in humans was reported on in medical journals, and as an issue for tests, since at least the 1950s and appears in the titles of all sorts of academic papers from the fields of biology and medicine from there to now.
I would have thought that if the father is saying she's the mother, she's saying she's the mother, she has the birth certificates saying that she's the mother, witnesses to the births like her parents and there is no person missing those children or claiming to be the real mother it would be reasonable to consider the possibility it is an edge case even if you still thought fraud was more likely.
Wasn't a federal agency; instead a subdivision that has 2% of the US population. So, it's possible in a hundred years, most such bureaucracies won't see a single such case.
Caseworkers don't Google extreme scenarios regarding obscure words ("chimerism") that they've probably never heard of before. Apparently, neither the mother nor her own obstetrician nor her lawyer came up with this theory, either, for quite a while, so who's fault is that? (The people with the most at stake couldn't find the magic research promptly, either.)
It wasn't until after the 2002 paper about the Keegan case, and then other media coverage of this Fairchild case, and then followup stories/dramas and more recent research, that people outside of research had any idea anything like this could happen. No, low-level state caseworkers are not going to come up with the idea themselves. And the fact they kept running tests, including monitoring a live-birth-and-immediate-DNA-test, and deferring final judgement, indicates that the system was entertaining the possibility that this was an edge case.
There's some serious hindsight bias in the know-it-all criticisms here.
I first learned about chimerism in the early 2000s, but it was a huge shock to me (it has some very deep implications beyond the scope of this article), and I was a biologist at the time.
Long ago I was pretty skeptical of the absurdly high confidence levels in forensic DNA testing because they made a number of very basic assumptions, which chimerism (among other things) show to be wrong, at a rate within the population which is higher than the reported confidence rate.
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).
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.
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.
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.
That your parents and the parent commenter react in this way ("it's obvious") is by design of the author of the piece and the author of House.
I can watch an episode of House and anticipate "they obviously have lupus", which makes me feel intelligent and satisfied even though I can see they are planting obvious clues from the very start which a diagnostician would be mind-numbingly stupid to ignore.
The same with the headline of this article. It's designed that way. In reality, you don't get to read the headline or watch the episode before making a clinical decision.
Regarding House: in mid-series episodes, I believe they occasionally subvert this by planting clues for the wrong thing. At least, I enjoyed being wrong in those episodes.
We don't really know how common chimerism, because it is expensive to test for. It requires sampling many different tissues/ parts of the body and comparing the gentic material found in each. Some kinds of chimerism are easy to detect and are believed to be relatively common. See:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149...
What if a woman tests specifically as being the aunt instead of the mother, but also all her sisters (if any) test as aunts? Do we assume that the woman had a sister that none of her other sisters knew about, who she hid in the basement her whole life, impregnated with the woman's husband's sperm, raised the child as her own, repeated this several times, and then finally murdered the sister and hid her body?
I would disagree: it's certainly uneducated to use Occam's Razor as an excuse to be lazy, or perhaps to ruin another person's life based on one piece of evidence. The children's father vouched for her, she has witnesses to the birth of these children, etc. In fact, everything lines up with the children being hers except the DNA test results.
I would argue Occam's Razor decides against such a large conspiracy and, instead, points to problems with the test.
>The state was still so suspicious of Fairchild that when she gave birth to another child, a court officer stood in the delivery room to witness an immediate DNA test.
If you go as far as that, why wouldn't you test mitochondrial DNA? Using Ocamm's razor myself, I will speculate that she wasn't able to get a very good lawyer.
AFAIK -and please do correct me if I am wrong - twins have the same mitochondrial DNA, therefore even if she is a chimera all her cells should share the same mitochondrial DNA.
And isn't testing for mitochondrial DNA fairly simple/cheap?
Mitochondrial DNA between twins is expected to be almost identical, but you and I also have extremely similar mitochondria: since it doesn't recombine and rarely mutates. So, you have to get to a much deeper level to identify the differences.
Even if it's now possible/cheap, that's a recent development.
mtDNA is good for finding your (maternal) ancestral group, less so for your immediate relatives.
So, chimerism in the broad sense isn't that rare. I have no idea whether that is different from what is described here, but I would think it isn't. Those blood cells have to come from somewhere.
Chimerism also occurs as a result of organ transplants.
there is no Occam's razor when you're doing an in depth investigation. Either they do a cursory DNA test or they try testing the father too, and then everything is in depth.
(well I come form a country where the judicial system is inquisitory, not accusatory, so maybe I'm biased in my point of view)
Familial link a different type of test than what the Social Services people order. They probably didn't think to do so.
Egg extraction is a very intrusive and painful procedure.
The social services people deal with thousands of people, and develop fairly rigid procedures designed to address more common issues, like people committing fraud. They are also legitimately concerned for the child's welfare, because they can be held accountable when things go wrong.
Testimony of the doctor and father aren't necessarily reliable. Who's to say the baby delivered was the baby birthed by the doctor? Who's to say that the father did't have two pregnant partners (happens often)?
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?