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There is plenty that I do not understand about genetics, but the idea that this could occur, and that the effect could possibly be criminally exploited, is eye-opening, for me at least.
Short Version: Three months after his bone marrow transplant, a man learned that the DNA in his blood had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor. Four years after his lifesaving procedure, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor.
Short Version: Three months after his bone marrow transplant, a man learned that the DNA in his blood had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor. Four years after his lifesaving procedure, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor.
Man who had transplant finds out months later his DNA has changed to that of donor 5,000 miles away
Chris Long’s sheriff’s office colleagues have been using him as a human guinea pig, writes Heather Murphy
Tree months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nevada, learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful of messages with.
He’d been encouraged to test his blood by a colleague at the sheriff’s office, where he worked. She had an inkling this might happen. It’s the goal of the procedure, after all: weak blood is replaced by healthy blood, and with it, the DNA it contains.
But four years after his lifesaving procedure, it was not only Long’s blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA – but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor. “I thought that it was pretty incredible that I can disappear and someone else can appear,” he said.
Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up – beyond blood – has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
Article Continues, discussing potential forensic and legal consequences:
Examples:
In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: the man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.
[...]
In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
