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Semi-Identical Twins Discovered
daftna writes in with a story from Nature about a pair of twins who are neither identical nor fraternal: they are semi-identical. Researchers discovered twins who share all of their mother's DNA but only half of their father's. Both children are chimeras — their cells are not genetically uniform, but include a mix of genes from two separate sperm cells that fertilized a single egg. This is, apparently, not as rare as one might think; but the resulting fetus is rarely viable. This report marks the first known incidence of two half-identical twins resulting from a double fertilization.
Subject says it all.
We're finding new chimeras every day, now that DNA testing is becoming more common. Discovery Health even had a program where genetic testing showed a mother's children to be the product of her BROTHER and her husband; though she had no brother. Turned out she was a hermaphrodite- some of her cells, including her EGGS, were male- a fraternal twin that had been absorbed early in the gestation process.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This story was already posted!! Oh, no, wait...
I understand it's mythologically correct to use the term "chimera" but whenever I hear it I always envision something else: a ghastly soulless beast with an iron heart, breathing fire out of a cavernous tooth-lined maw, crushing entire houses under gigantic feathered elephant legs; a scaled, whiplike tail kicks up ashy dust clouds as its dragged for miles behind this monstrocity.
No matter how many times I hear the biological equivalent of the term (which is never as exciting) I'm always let down. I always think some giant monster has been discovered, or someone turned into this monster, or geneticists have new clues as to the cause of this monster.
It's a bit annoying once I'm letdown but for a precious few seconds I'm always aghast in wonder.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
No I can count up to five, even with one hand busy!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Maybe this was slightly different, but I knew two guys back in high school who were genetically half-identical twins. I guess the condition was caused by the polar body (which normally disentigrates) containing enough cytoplasm to sustain itself, and thus allowing it to be fertilized by a sperm other than its pair. They refered to this as "Polar Body Twins". It is extremely rare, but not unheard of. Furthermore, they really looked the part, being much closer in appearance than fraternal twins, but being subtley different from identical twins.
There seems to be a hot debate over the possibility of this happening. Some scientists fully support the notion that this happens, while some have rejected the notion altogether, citing that polar body's don't "normally" contain enough cytoplasm to sustain themselves. But this sounds like a rediculous arguement, to me, since the exact amount of cytoplasm that is both required for fertilization, and the exact amount that a polar body usually contain, very wildly.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to confirm whether or not this occurs, since percentage of difference in genetics between both fraternal twins and polar body twins is not exact. Polar Body twins will always contain between 50% to 100% of the same genentics (averaging at 75%0, where-as fraternal twins could be anywhere between 0% to 100% similarity. So, my friends will never actually know whether they developed from identical zygotes, but their genetic makeup was similar enough, that many doctors speculated that this was the case.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
talk about deja vu!
Some time ago, I wondered about the exact situation this article raises.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130374 &cid=10879347
At the time, it fascinated me because it occured to me that you could have twins which share a maternal set of chromosomes but have one sex chromosome from the father be an X for one of the siblings and the other be a Y.
In other words, almost identical twin brother/sister pair! One wonders how much of gender is actually in our genes. Well, to have a pair of individuals share so much with the exception of the sex chromosomes - it becomes more reasonable to do an actual comparison. (I am aware there is still lots of room for genetic variation from the rest of the father's somatic set) I don't know how scientific it would be, but as a thought experiment, I wasn't to concerned about it at the time I posted it.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
There's actually an interesting story, almost the flip side of this rare case in humans, running now in the New York Times about marmosets, in which a form of chimerism is quite widespread:
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
According to my anatomy textbook, after the spem digests its way through the zona pellucida:
And the plot for the next gang-bang porno suddenly comes into view.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
It just hasn't happened in humans yet.
. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6196225
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Do you really think that this is the biggest problem intersexual people will ever face in their life? If yes, you seriously need to read up on these things a bit.
First of all, as a disclaimer, I'm not intersexual myself, but I'm interested in inter- and transsexuality and know a couple of people who are. Most of the intersexuals I know had a gender surgically assigned to them after birth, too (female, FWIW; as doctors say, "it's easier to dig a hole than build a pole"). But you know what? Neither of them is happy.
In fact, the *exact opposite* is true. *Every single* intersexual I've talked to or heard about has said the same thing so far - that doing so is, essentially, butchering, a traumatic experience that will haunt you for your entire life. Even in these times where sexual reassignmet surgery is not impossible anymore, the results are far inferior to anything that nature came up with (if you can even afford the whole procedure!), and the psychological problems associated with having your body mutilated after birth are just as serious.
What really needs to be done when an intersexual child is born is really easy: bloody leave them alone. The child will eventually grow up and be able to make their own decisions; if they decide then that they really belong to one gender, it's not too late to do surgery etc.. What's more, it might well be that the child decides that they're really male - contrary to popular opinion, "intersexual" and "transsexual" do not mean "a guy who wants to become a chick".
But there's also a decent chance that the child will say "I'm happy the way I am", and who's to say that that's not within their rights? If the only reason you can come up with is that there might be confusion over which restroom is appropriate, well... I'm sorry, but that isn't quite enough.
What's more, when you're talking about things like restroom usage, you make a very fundamental mistake: you look at what other people and society in general will see the child as, rather than what the child themselves thinks. But it's the child who will have to live with their body; the idea that society has a right to say "you don't fit into our binary system, so we'll cut up your body and then pretend that you do (even though you really still don't)" is outrageous.
FWIW, BTW, another fundamental mistake that's often being made is the assumption that it's even possible to reassign gender - that is, the actual gender that someone identifies as, as opposed to their physical sex. One of the reasons why intersexual people were mutilated in the past and raised as girls is that doctors (wrongly) believed that if you just cut off everything that was non-girly and if you just put the child into a dress and told them they were female, they'd really believe it and grow up as a normal, well-adjusted *woman* - but in reality, it doesn't work, and never has.
Of course, I do understand that there are no ulterior motives - doctors, parents etc. really are trying to help intersexual children. But it's also important to realise that it's not working and that the only thing you're doing is CAUSING harm, not preventing it.
So, although this has little do to anymore with the original TFA, just let me say this: leave intersexual children alone, and let them make their own decisions when they're old enough. Until then, be tolerant, be honest, explain to them why they're different, and explain that it doesn't make them worth less or anything like that. That's the ONLY way you can actually help them.
butter the donkey