Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by charles brough

GOTCHA! As I said, the eggs came from the FETUS. That means that Jane was the GRANDMOTHER.

Oh, you’re a tricky one!

As TBD alludes to, the father’s relationship to the healthy baby is more complex. He’s both the baby’s father and grandfather – a not uncommon relationship in a currently fairly small fraction of human society, and the norm among many non-human animals.

Nobody in the thread’s yet mentioned mitochondrial ancestry. Although most IVF fertilization involving a surrogate pregnancy and birth mother involves the implantation of an intact fertilized ovum from the genetic mother, so the child’s nuclear and mitochondrial mother are the same, the strange procedure charles describes sounds as if it could involve nuclear transfer, in which the surrogate mother’s egg’s nucleus is replace with the nucleus of one of the nuclear parent (Jane’s aborted fetus). In this case, the baby literally has one father and two genetic mothers – a consequential condition, as mitochondrial genes can dramatically effect trait ranging from health to physical size to athletic and (likely) mental ability.

If that’s not strange enough, NT could permit the child’s nuclear “mother” (the aborted fetus) to be male.