To ancient Greeks, the chimera was a spitting, snarling, fire-breathing female patchwork of scary animals, with a goat thrown in for good measure. “A thing of immortal make,” wrote Homer, “not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.” She apparently lived in Lycia (part of modern-day Turkey).
This might seem a long way from the Department of Social Services office in Washington State, USA, where a solo mother was summoned after applying for welfare in 2003. The incredible story of Lydia Fairchild – an American chimera and a living testament to the tricks heredity plays on us – is recounted in a new book by US science writer Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: the Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity.
In the years since Bianchi’s paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal in 1996, researchers have found that more than half of mothers carry fetal cells decades after their pregnancies. And according to a recent estimate, says Zimmer, 42% of us carry cells containing our mother’s DNA.
Heredity, says Zimmer – and this is the overarching theme of his book – can surge and commingle in strange ways, blowing backwards and sideways like a strange eddy of wind, or a river current flowing the wrong way.
read more here @ NOTED
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