I ran across this interesting bit of medical news:
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 - the most likely explanation is that Jane's mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. The link: human chimera Essentially, around the 3rd or 4th day, the twins merged with one twin 'owning' certain portions and the other owning the others. If the merging happened a day or 2 later, they would have been 'Siamese twins'. Knowing who the mother is is pretty absolute so they went searching for an answer - can you imagine the same circumstance except it was the father - no one would have bothered to look for any other explanation than cucholdry

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it happens, but is exceedingly rare.
And the person surviving is even more rare, usually there are all kinds of problems with organs and parts of organs being rejected (as would happen with transplant patients without special medication) even before birth, resulting in a stillborn child.

it happens, but is exceedingly rare.
And the person surviving is even more rare, usually there are all kinds of problems with organs and parts of organs being rejected (as would happen with transplant patients without special medication) even before birth, resulting in a stillborn child.

Yep - even rarer than Siamese twins.

So, is she/are they single or double souled? The 'theological' implications and/or questions raised are, to say the least, interesting.

I saw it first on CSI! Though I predicted that one, oddly enough. Not the means, but the result.

I'd say it is more likely the lab got the samples mixed up.

I'd say it is more likely the lab got the samples mixed up.

Um, what samples? It is true that when the results came back that she was not the mother of the boys, the samples were retested but once the results were reproducible (this is one of the key tests of science - reproducibility) then they tested her and found that she had the dna of 2 people.

If you are actually interested in this phenomenon try Ask a geneticist or Wiki - Chimera

The question I pose is:
Assume she is a chimera composed of fraternal twins
then
she is 2 people
so
does she have 2 souls?

I saw it first on CSI! Though I predicted that one, oddly enough. Not the means, but the result.

That is where I first ran across the reference; later when I was trying to come up with an assassin with an uncompromisable cover for a story I was telling, I did more research and found the reference to 'Jane'.
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