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

that one woman in a million might produce a child which never had a father, this would in no way undermine the miraculous character of Our Lord’s conception and birth.

Quite so.

The Church’s diplomatic handling of the issue was not an example followed in the scientific community, who were far less enthusiastic about the statistics. This remains a little surprising, when you consider that there was actually no plausible scientific explanation at that time for why women should not be able to reproduce without men. In the lab, after all, scientists had already succeeded in inducing pregnancy in rabbits without mating. The researchers had discovered that all it took was cooling down the Fallopian tubes, the tubes that connect the ovaries to the womb. Yet, a Lancet report that appeared around the time of the tabloid search declared, ‘No “reasonable man” would even entertain the possibility that a woman might become pregnant without a single sperm entering her uterus.’

Once Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood samples were found to be a match, the test results were checked and double checked, then presented for debate. ‘Doubting doctors,’ as the Pictorial put it, ‘who had in effect set themselves the task of breaking down the mother’s story became less certain that they were on the winning side.’ The paper went on to note that ‘several of the medical men who had been sceptical about the outcome of the investigation now became keenly interested’. Based on the new evidence, they certainly should have been. If a daughter had a father, the likelihood that the battery of tests to which the Joneses had been subjected would have yielded such a clear agreement between mother and daughter was less than one in a hundred.

It was Helen Spurway’s husband, Jack, who worked out the maths – he was the person who did the calculations to measure the similarity between Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood. Jack was known to the world as J. B. S. Haldane, and the two eminent scientists had been wed nine years previous to the virgin birth investigation. At the time of their marriage, Spurway was one of Haldane’s students, and twenty-five years his junior. He may have been one of the most prescient scientists of the twentieth century, but this founder of modern genetics was also famously colourful and eccentric, well known for experimenting on himself. In the name of medical research, for example, he once shut himself in a room full of carbon monoxide and swallowed bicarbonate of soda with hydrochloric acid, although not all at the same time.

This temperamental tendency was shared by husband and wife. As a couple, they loved to shock and argue – loudly, and especially in public. The pair often took their students out to the pub, to discuss work, politics, and people. On one occasion, Spurway drank three and a half pints of ale, staggering thoroughly drunk into the street, and straight on to the tail of a policeman’s dog. The policeman remonstrated, at which she shouted, ‘That’s what dogs’ tails are for!’ – then punched the policeman in the stomach, adding, ‘And that is what policemen’s stomachs are for.’ She was fined £20, but refused to pay it, choosing instead to be arrested and serve a two-week stretch in Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway.

When it came to her science, however, Spurway was better behaved. Unlike her husband, she was no great theoretician, but she was a meticulous observer, and always committed to honesty about the facts. She took pains to stress to her students the absolute importance of writing down what they saw, not what they would have liked to see but what actually appeared. And this would be key to her final interpretation of Emmimarie and Monica Jones’s remarkable results.

Despite the complete match between the Joneses’ blood, there was a problem with the skin graft test. They were, apparently, incompatible with Spurway’s hypothesis, and her expectations. The bit of Monica’s skin grafted on to her mother had been shed in approximately four weeks, and the skin from Emmimarie grafted on to Monica had remained healthy for longer. It took six weeks before that graft from the mother began to lose its blood vessels, a sign that the skin would soon detach. In other words, Monica’s skin contained something that Emmimarie’s immune system did not recognize, while Emmimarie’s skin did not offend Monica’s system as badly. Was this a sign that Monica had DNA that her mother did not have? Was it a father’s genes that caused the mother to reject her daughter’s skin?

Eight months after the search for a virgin mother had been announced, the Pictorial published a world exclusive on Emmimarie and her daughter, relating their biographies and the battery of tests. For the serious medical reader, the full details were revealed in The Lancet, which published, ‘Parthenogenesis in Human Beings’ by Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. Balfour-Lynn, supported by a pantheon of distinguished doctors, had put the mother–daughter candidates through the necessary medical tests. On the point of skin grafts, The Lancet piece concluded that they indicated that Monica’s genes did not in fact match her mother’s, despite all evidence to the contrary. Emmimarie and Monica had failed the final and, in Spurway’s expert opinion, the most conclusive of the compatibility tests.

But there was a curiosity planted in the centre of this scientific result. What any parthenogenetically conceived child certainly could not have, unless they had mutated, were any genes that had not come from the mother in the first place. This is why the skin graft from a virgin-born child would be expected to take when implanted on his or her mother, but one from the mother would not necessarily take on her virgin-born child. Yet, the opposite had happened in Emmimarie and Monica’s test. What could be going