Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

Of the eight women who were tested further, six didn’t pass muster. The daughters had a different blood type from their mothers. Another mother–daughter pair was thrown out because their eye colour did not match.

Only one mother and daughter remained who passed all the preliminary tests: Emmimarie and Monica Jones. They also stood up to several more sophisticated trials. For example, they shared the ability to taste phenylthiourea, a chemical that has the unusual property of either tasting very bitter or being virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic make-up of the taster. Mother and daughter Jones were ushered into a consulting room and required to take a sip from each cocktail glass along a long row. Monica noted that the drink in several of the glasses tasted funny; Emmimarie thought so, too, and for the identical drinks. Monica said the experiment had been great fun; she reported to the Pictorial that the doctors’ rooms looked like a bar.

Then they took a substance secretor test. Around eighty percent of people with a European ancestry come up with a positive result in this test, which looks at whether or not you have the so-called secretor factor, something like an honorary blood group. The genes that make you a secretor are found on chromosome 19, so the test was a crude way of determining whether Emmimarie and Monica had the same genes at that location. Being a non-secretor seems to have several disadvantages. It is associated with insulin resistance syndrome, where the body becomes less efficient at lowering blood sugar levels, and lowered levels of antibodies, which put you at greater risk of infection and illness. Non-secretors are especially prone to Candida organisms, such as the yeast that causes thrush, and tend to have more problems with heart valve disturbance as a result of infections after dental work. They may also be at increased risk of recurrent urinary tract infections and a variety of autoimmune diseases, including reactive arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which can lead to fusion of the spine. All of which shows how a small change of one gene on one chromosome could manifest itself as a big difference between a mother and a daughter.

Now, if you are a secretor, your blood type – the classic A, B, AB or O – will show up not just in your blood, but in your saliva, sweat, tears – and in your semen, if you are a man. If you are not a secretor, your type will not show up in these other fluids. Emmimarie and Monica were both blood type A, and the saliva of neither mother nor daughter contained substance-A secretions. So again, Monica was indeed the spitting image of her mother.

The final preliminary test looked at patterns in the blood-serum proteins of mother and child. These proteins were separated by size, and an image created that showed the line-up of the proteins, which could be compared. The Joneses were an identical match at every size.

But there was one final test that the pair was required to pass, should they be willing to take it. Helen Spurway saw it as the test that could provide the conclusive proof that Monica was fatherless, and had no genes other than those of her mother. Other scientists, however, believed its results would be obscure, at best. Nevertheless, absolute secrecy was assured, because if the doctors found out that Emmimarie Jones was not, in fact, a virgin mother, not one word would ever have been published to the world. The test in question was a skin graft.

When skin is grafted on to a body, the body’s immune system will work to reject it as a foreign body, unless the donor is genetically similar to the recipient. This is why many graft surgeries involve taking donor skin from another site on the person’s own body, known as an autograft, and why people who have undergone a graft from another person (who is not an identical twin) or another species must take immunosuppressant medications long after the surgery. The test Spurway proposed was to take a piece of Monica’s skin and graft it on to Emmimarie’s body. If the mother’s body allowed this graft to persist indefinitely, without breaking it down, that would prove they were a genetic match – that there was nothing in Monica’s skin that was considered to be ‘alien’ to Emmimarie’s body. Spurway also realized that doing a graft the other way round, from mother to child, would not work; the mother would have antigens, substances that her immune system would be able to protect her against, which the child did not.

Emmimarie Jones readily agreed to the operation on herself and her daughter. Monica agreed as long as she could have lots of comic books. So, shortly before Easter 1956, Emmimarie and Monica left their English home, armed with adventure comics and destined for the secret location of their secret operation. Consultations began among the research team, blood specialists, and plastic surgeons, and the grafts were done both ways: Emmimarie was transplanted with her daughter’s skin, while Monica wore her mother’s.

Through all of this battery of tests to find a virgin birth, Emmimarie Jones and young Monica were in good company. Theirs was simply the post-war, boom-time contribution to a long list of virgin mothers, from saviour gods to supernatural impregnations – or so the stories go. Almost always in these tales of virgin birth, the hand of God is involved, and there seems to be no culture that does not tell the tale.

The pantheon of gods is populated with virgin births, in heaven and on earth. The river nymph Nana was miraculously impregnated by a falling pomegranate, and her son Attis became the lover of Cybele, the mother of Greek gods (making Nana the grandmother of the