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crime labs were seeing the same DNA strand all over various crime sites and authorities thought they had a massive serial killer case brewing before they tracked the traces back to a person who worked the machinery that makes the swabs the police use to collect evidence.

Yeah, I remember that episode, too.

they had a guy four square for a brutal rape, but the guy was unconcerned. sure enough, the dna test came back and turned out he only shared half the dna with the culprit: the murderer must be the guy's brother

so they let him loose and track down brother after brother, sample his dna, and it turns out to be yet another brother. meanwhile, the woman who was raped is murdered, and they find a hair on her body that matches the original suspect's dna 100%

while examining the original suspect again, grissom sees that his skin is strangely mottled, and he has an interesting statue in his house: the legendary greek chimera

grissom cracks the case: the guy committed the rape because he knew he was a genetic chimera. the dna of his semen was the "brother" of the dna of his blood

http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/miami/bloodlines.shtml

a genetic chimera is an extremely rare individual in which fraternal twin zygotes are created, then fuse. so different organ lines in the body are from two different "individuals". you are your own twin, you are a mix of two people. there is also the real life case of a woman who became a criminal suspect because she was suspected of kidnapping: she claimed to be the mother of a child, but a genetic test reveals she was the aunt: her own ovaries weren't hers but from her "phantom sister"

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693&page=1

not that this is an argument against how they caught the grim sleeper, i applaud this use of genetic profiling of relatives to solve crimes. its simple sleuthwork, and plenty of innocent people come under suspicion all the time in criminal investigations that must be ruled out with basic detective work

anyone remember that csi episode about the chimera?

incredibly rare, but sometimes two fraternal twins will fuse while still blastocysts. so the dna of two seperate individuals form different organ lines in one individual. so your blood and kidneys and stomach might be from one person, while your brain, skin and lungs might be from another. most chimeras go through life never knowing what they are, but every once in awhile, a blood test reveals that, for example, a mother isn't even the mother of her own children (her womb is from a nonexistent twin):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild

Lydia Fairchild was pregnant with her third child, when she and the father of her children, Jamie Townsend, separated. When Fairchild applied for welfare support in 2002, she was requested to provide DNA evidence that Townsend was the father of her children. While the results showed Townsend was certainly the father of the children, the DNA tests indicated that she was not their mother.

This resulted in Fairchild being taken to court for fraud for claiming benefit for other people's children or taking part in a surrogacy scam. Hospital records of her prior births were disregarded. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken into care. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered a witness be present at the birth. This witness was to ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild. Two weeks later, DNA tests indicated that she was not the mother of that child either.

A breakthrough came when a lawyer for the prosecution found an article[2] in the New England Journal of Medicine about a similar case that had happened in Boston, and realised that Fairchild's case might also be caused by chimerism. In 1998, 52-year old Boston teacher Karen Keegan was in need of a kidney transplant. When her three adult sons were tested for suitability as donors, it was discovered that two of them did not match her DNA to the extent that her biological children should. Later testing showed that Keegan was a chimera, a combination of two separate sets of cell lines with two separate sets of chromosomes, when a second set of DNA was found in other tissues[3] This DNA presumably came from a different embryo from the one that gave rise to the rest of her tissues.

anyway, in csi, the aberation was used to good effect: the killer knew he would get away with the crimes because his dna from the crime scene would not match the dna from his lab tests. but of course, the dna would indicate the killer was a brother of the prime suspect, because half the dna would match his phantom brother (which puts a twist on the subject of this story: if relative dna banks enjoy common use, a lot more chimeras out there are going to come to light)

most of the episode the csi investigators run after one brother of the suspect after another, in a fruitless red herring chase to find the dna of a brother who did not exist, except inside that of the killer

http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/miami/bloodlines.shtml

Todd has four living brothers, and one who died, named Joss. Sara questions fraternal twins Larry and Roger Coombs, who own a car repair shop together. Brass talks to one of the brothers who is a police officer, but the CSIs are unable to locate Kevin Coombs, another brother. ...

Sara locates Kevin living on the edge of town in a trailer. He is called in for questioning, but the CSIs attention again alights on Todd. A strand of hair was found on Lindley's jacket, and the DNA is an exact match for Todd. When Grissom examines him, he notices some odd markings on his back.

Grissom hits the books and reads up on fraternal twins and Chimeras. He brings Todd into the interrogation room: he's cracked the case. Todd is a Chimera. He should have had

"Toned down"? They pulled audio off of a ceramic freakin' pot in an episode. There isn't anything worthwhile in CSI if you don't turn off your "I know what it's like to live in the real world" sense.

If I want to know about Desperate Housewives, I'll go to Get Desperate. For Lost, I visit Lost Media; for Family Guy, the Family Guy Files, and for CSI, CSI Files. I even still visit Crashdown, a Roswell fan site, even though that show was cancelled YEARS ago. Most of these sites are updated several times a day -- TV.com can never compete against that.

What I would really like would be an index to the best show-specific fan sites on the internet, for every single show that's out there. TV.com should just switch to that!

Be careful. Those crime shows sometimes do things that aren't feasible or possible in reality. See this USA Today article or this article on CSI Files

You must be a fan of CSI.

P.S. For those that don't know, here is what I'm talking about.