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

In such a case, Balfour-Lynn wrote in The Lancet, interpretation was difficult, making rigorous proof impossible. The one thing that was clear, however, was that Emmimarie must have believed what she claimed to be true. It was unlikely she would have set out to deceive people into accepting a virgin birth hoax, especially once she learned of the battery of medical tests that she and her daughter would have to go through. Yet, she happily agreed to run the full gauntlet. The medical journal compared Emmimarie’s belief with cases in which the absence of ‘pre-knowledge’ has been taken by courts of law to constitute proof of the rightness to a claim. Unfortunately, the absence of pre-knowledge is not something that can be precisely evaluated by science. And so the final conclusion of the controversial study was that Emmimarie Jones’s claim that her daughter was fatherless must be taken seriously, and that the doctors and scientists involved would have to admit that they had been unable to disprove it. The Sunday Pictorial’s triumphant interpretation of that verdict: ‘Doctors have been unable to prove that any man took part in the creation of this child.’

While the tabloid version might be true in the most literal sense, there is no getting away from the issue that the study was in fact entirely inconclusive. The doctors’ analyses of the Joneses was consistent with what would have been expected in a case of a female-only reproduction, except for the skin grafts. But did the fact that mother and daughter rejected each other’s skin grafts mean that Monica was or was not the result of parthenogenesis? The only way to know for sure would be to get hold of some DNA from Emmimarie and Monica, and perhaps from Emmimarie’s parents, because today, analysis of the subjects’ DNA would reveal – or, at the very least, suggest – reasons for the intense similarities between the two Joneses.

It is safe to say that the odds are, overwhelmingly, that Emmimarie Jones was no virgin mother. She is also unlikely to have set out to deceive the scientists, which opens the possibility that she may well have been taken advantage of during the hospital stay during which she must have become pregnant. But it is also intriguing to consider that the tabloid-dishing scientists had found something extremely rare – something that would not be recorded again until forty years later, when a boy was identified who had his mother’s blood, but not her skin.

At the end of a report published in the October 1995 issue of the journal Nature Genetics, three photos capture a toddler boy identified only as FD. The centre portrait depicts a lovely cherub who could have easily fronted a promotional campaign for some wholesome baby food. To the right and the left, there are pictures of him in profile: the image of perfection from the right, but from the left, a puzzling confusion. The lower half of the boy’s face is underdeveloped, out of sync with the rest of his body.

FD first came to his doctors’ attention because of a blood test. The test had come back with an unusual result: FD had two X chromosomes – for a boy, one X chromosome too many. So, even though he had testes and a penis, FD should have been a girl.

Strictly speaking, to be a boy you do not always need a whole Y chromosome. There are particular sections of the Y chromosome, notably one called SRY, that are essential to making a man a man. In cases like FD’s, it is often found that these important sections of the Y chromosome attach to an X chromosome – just enough to make someone male. But FD showed no sign of having Y-chromosome genes on either of his X chromosomes. And yet, he was very clearly, at least when it came to his physique, a bouncing baby boy.

Next, FD’s doctors decided to analyse skin from his right ankle to see if they could shed some light on his ‘true’ gender. In FD’s skin, but not his blood, they found evidence of some Y chromosome material. So whereas his blood said that he was some kind of abnormal female, his skin said he was a genetically normal male. It wasn’t so much that FD was both male and female but that the toddler was a chimaera: different parts of his body appeared to have been made from cells containing different DNA – that is, from different beings altogether.

The question was, how did the child get this way? One possible answer might be seen in the case of a woman, known in the literature only as ‘Jane from Boston’, who had needed a kidney transplant. Jane had three sons, all of whom were willing to donate a kidney to her, if they proved to be a suitable donor. And the likelihood was that, since children share half their DNA with their mother, at least one would turn out to be a good match. Jane had every reason to expect good news when the test results came in. Instead, she found herself opening an officious letter from the hospital informing her that two of her three sons were not actually her kin.

Since Jane had conceived all of her sons naturally with her husband (who DNA tests showed was definitely their father), the results effectively suggested that she had somehow given birth to another woman’s children. That, of course, she deemed an impossibility, especially since mistakenly swapping not one, but two, children at birth would have been a highly improbable coincidence. Further checks had to be done. Doctors tested DNA from other tissues, including Jane’s thyroid gland, mouth, and hair. And that was how they discovered that this woman’s body was composed of two genetically distinct groups of cells. Jane, like FD, appeared