Lydia Fairchild

Lydia Fairchild and her children were known by the British documentary The Twin Inside Me ( Engl. The Gemini in me). She is one of the rare cases where a human chimera - a man who is not derived from a fertilized egg, but by several cell lines.

Lydia Fairchild was pregnant with her third child when she and her husband Jamie Townsend parted. As Fairchild signed up in 2002 for social welfare support, they had to prove that Townsend was the legitimate father of the children. While the results properly confirmed that Townsend is their father, showed the DNA testing that could not be the mother of their children.

Fairchild was then prosecuted because they had financial support for foreign children want to swindle; Reports of the hospital on the birth of their children no attention has been paid, however. The prosecutor demanded then that their two children should be handed over to foster parents. As the birth of her third child was imminent, the judge ordered that a witness must be present at birth. This should then confirm that blood samples are taken from the mother or the child. Two weeks later, the tests showed that Lydia was not also the mother of this child.

A breakthrough came when a lawyer for the accuser an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about a similar case took place, and realized that Fairchild could also be a chimera. In 1998, namely needed the 52-year old Boston teacher Karen Keegan a donor kidney. When her three adult sons were clarified as potential donors, it was found that two of them could not be their children. Further testing found that Keegan was a chimera, a combination of two cell lines with different sets of chromosomes. The foreign cell line was derived probably from another fertilized egg, which then merged with the embryo.

The prosecutor in Fairchild's case, her lawyers notified of this possibility, after which additional DNA samples were taken from close relatives. The genome of Fairchild's mother corresponded to that which was expected by the grandmother of the children. It was also found that the genetic material of Fairchild's skin cells did not coincide with that of their children, however, but samples of their cervix ( cervix ). This confirmed the assumption that Lydia Fairchild was a chimera.