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You guys, what if I told you that you could leave DNA behind at a crime scene and it wouldn't actually be your DNA?
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Now, this isn't like a lab mix-up and this is something that could actually happen in real life. So, okay, imagine
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this. You take one of those like at-home DNA tests. Maybe you want to learn more
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about your ancestry or you want to connect with relatives, whatever. But, you get the results back and it
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basically says that you're a completely different person. Like different ancestry, different background, nothing
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matches your life. Well, I actually stumbled across a Reddit thread where someone said they were spiraling. It was
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a 19-year-old man born in Baghdad. He took a DNA test expecting the results to show him that he was Iraqi Arab, right?
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But, his results came back showing that he was largely of Indigenous American Mexican ancestry, which made absolutely
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no sense to him based on his identity, appearance, and family history. So, he's like, "Okay, the lab had to have messed
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up. Maybe they mixed up my samples with someone else's, whatever." So, he contacts customer support and they
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insist that the results were correct. So, then he's thinking like, "Oh my god, was I adopted?" But, that seemed
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extremely unlikely given the cultural context between the United States and Iraq 20 years ago. Well, he ended up
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learning the real explanation. As a child, he had a serious blood disorder. He underwent chemotherapy and a bone
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marrow transplant. The DNA test was likely picking up his donor's DNA, not his original DNA. Now, there's a real
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medical reason this can happen and it's called chimerism. Sometimes after a bone
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marrow transplant, your body starts producing someone else's DNA because bone marrow is what creates your blood
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cells. So, your blood might not match you anymore. In the case of the person who posted on Reddit, instead of a lab
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error or an identity crisis, his body now carries genetic material from his bone marrow donor. In some other
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documented cases, people ended up with their own DNA in like their hair and their skin, but then their donor's DNA
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in their blood and even their body fluids. Which means, if some DNA shows up at a crime scene, it could point to
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the wrong person. And while it's super rare, apparently it has happened. Now, DNA is often looked at as this like gold
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standard in solving crimes, but in rare cases, there may be a more complicated investigation ahead. And that doesn't
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mean that the science is wrong. It just means that there may be more to the story. I'm dying to know if you had ever
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heard of chimerism before. I had not. What other things you want us to explore next in our exploration of all things
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weird DNA?