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Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Theological Q&A > (No Subject)
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/30/2003 3:24 AM (GMT -6) |   | OK, very weird science here.
I was listening to the BBC the other day. They had this American woman on (mother of three children I think) and were interviewing her. A few years back she needed a kidney transplant and her husband and children were among a number of people who were having their blood tested to see if they were compatible donors. When her children’s blood tests were ran, this lady’s doctor told her there was no possible way her kids could be her kids. The blood types were incompatible. They were not her biological children. She and her husband both knew the kids were hers though. Repeated tests showed the same incompatibility.
I’ll make the story real short. Turns out this lady is the result of a fusion of non-identical twin embryos and possesses in her one body two complete and different DNA’s from each of what were initially twins. It’s rare, but it does happen. This lady’s mother conceived non-identical twin girls, each with their own DNA. Very early (late enough for biologically independent embryos to have formed but early enough for this to happen without creating a biological monster) the embryos were fused together. The result was one embryo, one person, with the DNA of BOTH twins. She carries both DNAs in different parts of her body! Her blood happens to be one DNA type, her skin the other, and so forth. She can receive organs from either DNA type.
Strange, eh?
OK, here’s what is REALLY interesting about this story. Are there any implications here for theories about when an embryo comes into the possession of a “spirit”? When is the divine given to an embryo (if that’s even the right way to ask the question)? You know, most Christians argue that conception is the magical moment when, zap, there’s a “person” there, a person with a “spirit.” Well, in this case, there were TWO separate persons and spirits that fused.
Come on. Stop laughing at me! Does anybody else see something strange here?
Iconoclast? I know I can count on you for strange ideas. Come on. Let's stir it up.
Tom  | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/30/2003 3:36 AM (GMT -6) | | By the way, babies born as the result of such prenatal fusion are called “Chimera” twins (after the Greek mythological fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, body of an Evangelical, etc.). Here’s an NPR radio story on this lady:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/11/1345228&mode=thread&tid=134
Here's a medical definition of the condition:
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=8905
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Laika
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2003
Total Posts : 2433
| Posted 12/30/2003 3:49 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by TGB
By the way, babies born as the result of such prenatal fusion are called “Chimera” twins (after the Greek mythological fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, body of an Evangelical, etc.).
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/TWIN1.HTM
Here's the case I was talking about:
quote:
Jennifer and June Gibbons were born 35 years ago, the youngest children of Aubrey Gibbons, a West Indian technician for the British Royal Air Force. The girls communicated with each other in a self-made dialect and were elective mutes with the rest of the world. By the time they were 11, they refused to sit in the same room with their parents or siblings. Their mother delivered their meals on a tray and slipped mail under the door. They taught themselves to read, and eventually locked themselves in their bedroom, writing literally millions of words in diaries.
Later they lost their virginity to the same boy within a week of each other, triggering jealous rage. Jennifer tried to strangle June with a cord, and June tried to drown Jennifer in a river. When publishers rejected their work, they went on a spree of arson and theft, and were committed to Broadmoor, England's most notorious institution for the criminally insane.
"Nobody suffers the way I do," June wrote in her diary "This sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment."
In another passage, Jennifer described one lying in the bunk bed above her: Her perception was sharper than steel, it sliced through to my own perception. l read her mind, I knew all about her mood. My perception. Her perception...clashing, knowing, cunning, sly."
After more than a decade of confinement, they were set free. That same afternoon, Jennifer was rushed to the hospital with viral myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, and that night she died. The pathologist who saw her heart seemed to be speaking poetically of their lethal passion when he described Jennifer's illness as "a fulminating, roaring inflammation with the heart muscle completely destroyed." June, the survivor, has said that she was "born in captivity, trapped in twinship." Eventually, June claims, they began to accept that one must die so the other could be free. Today, June lives in Wales.
inside you the time moves and she don't fade
the ghost in you she don't fade | | Back to Top | | |
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Starkman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 12/31/2003 3:50 AM (GMT -6) | | Hmm! Interesting. As God knows conception, as it happens in this Chimera manner, the one thing I think that should still be understood, as I see it, is that regardless of when the breath of life (the spirit, soul, etc.) is breathed into the process, the embryo is still a human being, a person, deserving all of the respect for the right to life as in non-Chimera conceptions.
If the Chimeral embryo started out as two and fuses into one, there is still a human being produced through this process. That to me is what's really important. I don't know enough about the issue, though, to comment on when the spirit/soul thing happens. Weird!
Starkman | | Back to Top | | |
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