Free Republic

One human chimera came to light when a 52-year-old woman demanded an explanation from doctors after tests showed that two of her three grown-up sons were biologically unrelated to her.Although the woman, "Jane", conceived them naturally with her husband, tests to see if she could donate a kidney suggested that somehow she had given birth to somebody else's children.A study in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr Margot Kruskall, of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, Massachusetts, showed that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals - non-identical twin sisters - whose cells intermingled...

An experiment that led to the deliberate creation of a hermaphrodite human embryo was condemned as irresponsible by fertility scientists yesterday. The chimera - named after the Greek monster that was part lion, part serpent and part goat - was formed by placing cells from a newly-conceived male embryo into a three-day-old female embryo. The resulting embryo was part male, part female and could potentially have developed into an apparently healthy foetus. The American fertility doctor behind the experiment claimed the creation of chimeras could eventually be used to treat genetic diseases. But mainstream scientists said the research was pointless...