Believe It or Not! Literally this medical phenomenon could be on "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" This man is not the father of his bouncing baby boy, his unborn twin is.
Imagine the surprise! So how did the Washington state-based parents become aware of this medical mystery?
Last year the parents gave birth to their baby boy, but learned his blood type did not match either of his parents. As Medical Daily reports, the coupe initially thought something must have gone wrong when the baby was conceived using in vitro fertilization. Possibly the hospital inseminated the mother with another man's sperm.
Dr. Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford University told BuzzFeed the parents were quite angry. "You can imagine the parents were pretty upset. They thought the clinic had used the wrong sperm."
Further testing revealed, although the man was not the son's father, he was his uncle. Dr. Starr confirmed the "uncle" was dealing with a rare genetic phenomenon called chimerism. Most people have two sets of DNA, one from each parent. An individual dealing with chimerism has multiple sets of DNA and in this case, that extra set was "from a long lost twin... [he] absorbed while still in the womb."
According to The Daily Beast, chimeras can also gain their extra DNA as the result of a blood transfusion, organ transplant, or between a mother and her fetus while it is still in vitro. Also, chimeras can be born with interesting features like "two-toned striped skin, two different eye colors, or even two sets of sex organs." The father reports he used to say he was a burn victim in order to avoid testing on his two-tone skin.
Chimeras are considered rare, but the condition may be more common than one would think. According to a study in the Oxford Journal, "one in every eight single births started as a multiple set at conception. One twin often dies early on in the pregnancy. In some cases, the remains of this twin get absorbed into the remaining sibling during a process called vanishing twin phenomenon."
Incredible! However, most chimeras are unaware of the phenomenon because the condition is only detectable in certain organs. As Medical Daily states, "to date, there have only been about 100 cases of human chimerism reported in medical literature, and most cases were discovered by chance."
Seems to be the case here.