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Article PreviewThis is a preview of the full article. New Scientist Full Access is available free to magazine subscribers. To continue reading log in now, on the right. The Stranger within
EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year-old woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother. Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children. This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news. Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that two of her three sons ... The complete article is 2580 words long.
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