DNA evidence alone would not convince me beyond a reasonable doubt. If DNA 'positive match' wasn't already being abused as evidence then this would have little impact. DNA should only be used to prove someone is innocent (DNA doesn't match) or support other evidence they are guilty. There are also actual instances of problematic matches noted in the article as well.
Yea, but there is definitely a gradient or propensity of evidence that is often lost. For instance, touch transfer DNA can deposit your DNA on a crime scene if you interacted with the EMTs earlier in the day (Anderson case, 2012) [1] which means very little, but if a suspect's fingerprint is in the victim's blood, it's very likely the suspect was present during an attack. In the later case, I think DNA evidence, the victim's in the case, would be evidence of guilt, but needs to be part of a larger, coherent case.
I don't know if there's more to this rabbit hole, but a few self-reported cases (placebo effect?!) and a theory with some gaping holes don't seem to me like "well documented cases".
If there are physical changes you can expect some effect on personality - say if a new heart is able to more efficiently transfer blood the patient might find herself more prone to physical activity. Or a better kidney and liver might affect food preferences. New blood type might offer have some wider effect but even that's a still very much questionable field of research.
To latch onto the example given in all your links, there are no taste receptors in the heart and neither is there any indication that memories are saved in the heart. Spinal cord - yes, especially if it's about movement. But not in organs like the heart which give much more basic input and have far fewer connections to the rest of the neural network. There is no chicken nugget and beer neutral network linked to the heart - and if there was, chances are any organ transplant would have severed them.
It's been suggested that gut microbes affect mental functioning - maybe a surgery/transplant could affect the immune system (not to mention immunosuppressive drugs would be a given, right?) which in turn would affect which microbes thrive, and therefore personality.
White blood cells frequently infiltrate soft tissues in order to do their duty so it's quite plausible that some donor DNA sequence will be found in other organs.
I couldn't seem to find a link to the original report in the linked article however it would not surprise me if some of the forensic techniques replied on testing for mitochondrial DNA as it tends to be better preserved in the natural environment. Human cells are known to exchange mitochondria so mtDNA is more likely to display chimerism, especially in this case where the donor is matched to the recipient.
Of course we do not know exacty but there are multiple levels of evidence now that chimerism is very rare. One example would be cancer sequencing were you compare DNA from the cancer to a control tissue. I haven't heard of any of those mentioning any cases. The other case would be the recent GTEx concortia that sequenced upto 40 tissues of 600+ humans and did not detect any obvious chimera cases.
Different colored eyes one the other hand my be caused by a lot of things like no-genetic reasons, but also somatic (i.e post egg fertilization) mutations like loss of one chromosome copy and others.
My friend donated marrow to his brother. We always joke about how his brother can commit crimes willy nilly and then pin it on him, or better yet, they could commit crimes together and get away with it by taking advantage of the doubt that would be introduced by them both having the same DNA.
There was a case in the news like that, where a pair of twins were implicated, and they tried to argue that since it was impossible to tell which one of them it was, neither could be convicted.
Probably makes a better movie than reality. I wouldn't bet my future on that.
A prosecutor might jail one arbitrarily by spinning the story the right way.
An acquaintance of mine has an identical twin. For a time, they shared a car, and one of them got nabbed by a red-light camera. His face was captured rather faithfully, but not in enough detail to distinguish between the twins. Both showed up to court, both plead the fifth; case closed, no ticket.
> The most unexpected part was that four years after the procedure, the DNA in his semen had been entirely replaced by his donor’s.
That blew my mind. Because it's my understanding that the germline is too well segregated from somatic tissues. Even stem cells.
But then, I see that the patient previously had a vasectomy. So there are arguably no sperm in his semen. And it's not surprising that the donor's stem cells have replaced his prostate etc.
Things like this story, epigenetics, etc. should really have us questioning our understanding of gentics. We don't seem to be as static and unique as we thought. There seems to be more going on here. More yet to be known.
The Finnish skier Eero Mäntyranta probably owed much of his success to his polycythemia, significantly increasing the number of red blood cells and thus the oxygen-carrying capacity of his blood. Since red blood cells are produced in the bone marrow, a transplant could be used to deliberately induce polycythemia. However, a quick search for bone marrow transplants for polycythemia yielded only results about curing the disease with transplants.
Probably not a great idea, especially considering it would likely be considered a form of doping and get banned.
The procedure to get a bone marrow transplant is horrific. It involves incredibly painful procedures combined with necessary immune system suppression.
