We already started the week with confusion. Many people read the story of the man who turned out to be the ‘uncle’ of his child, and are already making inferences.

“How? When he is an only child?” “What is a chimera?” “Is it possible that there are many other cases like that, and marriages have been broken for no reason?” Well, the answer has only one response – the chimera effect.

The term, chimera, has been borrowed from Greek mythology and has a long history of use in biology and genetics.

The first human chimera was reported in 1953.

What is a chimera?

According to Healthline, “ancient Greek mythology includes stories of a fire-breathing creature 🐉 called a chimera.” The monstrous hybrid creature had a body and head of a fire breathing lion, a head of a goat on its back and a tail with a snake’s head. Away from that, chimeras are animals or homo sapiens that contain the cells of two or more individuals.

The bodies of chimeras have two different set of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms.

How?

One way that chimeras can happen in humans is that a fetus absorbs it’s twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies in early pregnancy, and some of its cells are absorbed by the other twin.

This means that the living twin will have it’s original set of cells, plus the one from its twin.

A chimera can also come to being if they undergo a bone marrow transplant. During the transplant, a person will have their bone marrow destroyed and replaced with the bone marrow from another person. In some cases, the blood cells of the person who received a bone marrow transplant will match the 🧬 of their donor.

Chimerism can also occur as a result of organ transplant. The organs are from another person, so, it is natural that cells from that alien organ start growing in other parts of the recipient’s body.

In some cases, there is microchimerism. This is when a woman becomes pregnant and a small number of cells from the fetus migrate into her blood and travel to different organs. A study suggested that this happens in almost all pregnant women – temporarily.

These individuals do not know they are a chimera. It is usually discovered by accident.

What else?

Many people’s bodies contains at least a few living cells from another person. More rarely, a single person can be a fairly equal mix of cells that appear to derive from two different individuals.

Plants can be chimeras too. In fact, many fruits we eat come from chimeric plants, due to grafting of fruit-producing branches onto the roots of another variety of species.