Lydia Fairchild

Lydia Fairchild and her children were best known for the British documentary The Twin Inside Me (the twin in me ). It is one of the rare cases of a human chimera - a human that is not descended from a single fertilized egg cell, but from multiple cell lines .

Lydia Fairchild was pregnant with their third child when she and husband Jamie Townsend separated. When Fairchild applied for welfare in 2002, she had to prove that Townsend was the legal father of the children. While the results clearly confirmed that Townsend was their father, DNA testing showed that she couldn't be the mother of their children.

Fairchild was then charged with swindling financial support for strange children; However, no attention was paid to hospital reports of the birth of their children. The prosecutors then requested that their two children be given to foster parents. When the birth of their third child was imminent, the judge ordered a witness to be present at the birth. They should then confirm that blood samples were taken immediately from both the mother and the child. Two weeks later, the tests showed that Lydia was also not the mother of this child.

A breakthrough came when a prosecutor's attorney found an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on a similar case and realized that Fairchild could also be a chimera. In 1998, 52-year-old Boston teacher Karen Keegan needed a donor kidney. When her three adult sons were identified as possible donors, it was found that two of them could not be her children. Further testing found that Keegan was a chimera, a combination of two cell lines with different sets of chromosomes. The foreign cell line presumably came from another fertilized egg cell, which then connected to the embryo.

Prosecutors in Fairchild's case notified their attorneys of the possibility, and further DNA samples were taken from close relatives. Fairchild's mother's genetic makeup was what was expected of the children's grandmother. It was also found that the genetic material of Fairchild's skin cells not with the matched their children, however, but samples of their cervix (cervix). This confirmed the assumption that Lydia Fairchild was a chimera.

Web links

• ABC News about Lydia Fairchild (English)

credentials

1. ↑ Yu, Neng; et al. "Disputed Maternity Leading to Identification of Tetragametic Chimerism" , The New England Journal of Medicine , 346: 1545-1552, May 16 of 2002.