https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.guidebook.com/upload/YnRUvjJ6wFNbZy57p2gxKBeTLt4azQcE/32d18488-6782-11e5-b77e-12b18ff74829.pdf
CHIMERIC GERMLINE TISSUE: ALLEGED FATHER’S GENETIC CONTRIBUTION TO CHILD FOUND IN SEMEN SAMPLE BUT NOT IN BUCCAL SAMPLE
Baird et al

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/failed-paternity-test-vanished-twin

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.
A 34-year-old U.S. 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.
About one-in-eight single childbirths are thought to have started as multiple pregnancies. 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.
“Even geneticists are blown away by this,” Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News.
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Yes that is very interesting.
It was discussed at length on the BBC last night but unfortunately not very well.
The journalist couldn’t get his head around it and the boffin he was interviewing was not very good at explaining things.

Peak Warming Man said:

Yes that is very interesting.
It was discussed at length on the BBC last night but unfortunately not very well.
The journalist couldn’t get his head around it and the boffin he was interviewing was not very good at explaining things.

They should have got dv to provide his 3 word summary of what happened.

Peak Warming Man said:

Yes that is very interesting.
It was discussed at length on the BBC last night but unfortunately not very well.
The journalist couldn’t get his head around it and the boffin he was interviewing was not very good at explaining things.

Should have had MZL interview me about it.

One thing:
I gave praise to the Buzzfeed Science journalist who found this story, Dan Vergano. The news was in the abstracts for the International Symposium on Human Identification conference: he must pore through abstracts looking for juice. But he contacted the author and got more information, then made up illustrations for the article. It’s nice to see a science journalist who does a bit of work and knows about science.
Other mainstream established old media sources such as the Daily Mail have since run stories on this but they all point to the Buzzfeed article.

dv said:

Other mainstream established old media sources such as the Daily Mail have since run stories on this but they all point to the Buzzfeed article.

Always good to know that a story did not originate at the DM.

> A 34-year-old U.S. man is the first ever reported case of a paternity test fooled by a human “chimera”

Human chimeras are pretty well known, I first heard about them back in the mid 1980s. According to wikipedia they’re been known since at least 1953.

All that is surprising is that it’s taken this long for one to show up in a paternity test.

I’m no Karl

skite