Tetragametic Chimerism

enough of the sad shit. i get too emo too easily.

by the way, i don’t know if it’s the computers or if it’s me, seems like the coding just went warped again, so bear with me - i can’t do anything with the computers.

 

so… these few days, i have nothing to do. i don’t really like going out so much because i had spend all my money. as it is, i visited daiso and almost wanted to buy the whole shop out - EVERYTHING’S $2!!!  - reasons to love singapore, right?

 

most of my friends are busy with work, with families, with their hobbies, so i have no one to hang out with some times, and i obviously can’t disturb them if they are all married and stuff like that. i am happy enough though, that i managed to visit most of those who matter to me. being able to hug them and kiss them and stuff is just so overwhelming you know?

 

so, i have been spending my time watching various seasons of The Apprentice, CSI, a couple of the O.C - stuff that i never had the time for when i was in Australia! omg, it’s like catching up on the tides of life all of a sudden! that said, even when survivor was running, and i had time to watch it, it never caught my interest anyways.

 

i am beginning to see why people are so hooked, in a love-hate relationship way, to these shows. sure, some of them make my skin crawls, like how bitchy some of those “corporate” women are in The Apprentice. Trump’s constant need to tell his sidekicks, “i think that was a good decision to fire him/her!” drives me up the wall. you FIRED that guy, you have already justified it, you don’t have to do that justification 19832832 times, as if to soothe your conscience.

 

the thing is, these shows brought a whole new perspective into my little mental horizon. like what my dad said: some people just don’t know how to mature, so they never do. that sometimes, standing in the frontline with everyone CAN bring down your entire team.

 

amusingly, The Apprentice has got me thinking about my career. if business is so much fun, laughing at people’s mistakes and my own (obviously having a good cry about them before that too), i can handle it.

 

Anyways, before i digress too far, with regards to the title:

 

i just watched an old season of CSI. episode Bloodlines, it taught me something new. Rare, but new. In the story, some guy raped a woman twice, finally killing her in the 2nd round. while being positively identified as the rapist initially, he was let off because his DNA did not match that of the sperms found on the woman. Due to some… observant forensics person, he found out that this guy is a “chimera”.

 

now, i have heard of the mythological chimera. chimera in genetics? i did a few search around the net and found this - tetragametic chimerism. The most simplified way to explain it is that the woman was meant to have fraternal twins - 2 eggs with 2 sperms. these 2 fused together, resulting in one of them “disappearing” or dying, however you want to look at it. however, their DNA lives on in the more dominant twin’s body.

 

someone theorised that there’s a few of us with multiple dna’s too, microchimerism, more commonly, perhaps, found in women. this is due in part to the exchange of DNA between a baby, and her mother, and etc. a baby’s DNA might be able to stay on with their mother or host womb for a few decades.

 

this brings me back to this question from a few months ago - how reliable is DNA then, in the light of all these? Add that to issues such as transference, unreliable testing, limited capabilities of the technology… while it is a GOOD factor for evidence, for a case to be won or lost, it should not be the 70-90% contributing factor.

 

just my thoughts