When one U.S. couple was struggling to conceive a child, they decided to go to a fertility clinic. There, intrauterine insemination was performed. Things went smoothly and — nine months later — the mother gave birth to a healthy baby boy. However, one thing wasn’t quite right.
Through testing, doctors discovered that they baby’s blood type didn’t match either of his parents’.
The father then took a paternity test. Shockingly enough, it showed that he was not the child’s father.
Every paternity test they took gave the same results.
The couple then accepted the advice of their lawyer and ordered an ordered a 23andMe genetic test. The new parents, needless to say, were shocked by the results: the test suggested the child’s father was actually his uncle.
Curious and confused, the team decided to test if the baby was a “human chimera” (i.e., a person with different genomes).
This case study shows that, although the cheek DNA swab did not the man was the child’s father…the semen sample did.
Essentially, the doctors discovered a “‘major’ genome, accounting for roughly 90% of the sperm cells, and a ‘minor’ genome that only represented about 10%” (via IFLScience.com).
This finding supported the “human chimera” idea…and now the father can stop researching divorce attorneys.
