Like a Virgin (11 page)

Once Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood samples were found to be a match, the test results were checked and double checked, then presented for debate. ‘Doubting
doctors,’ as the
Pictorial
put it, ‘who had in effect set themselves the task of breaking down the mother’s story became less certain that they were on the winning
side.’ The paper went on to note that ‘several of
the medical men who had been sceptical about the outcome of the investigation now became keenly
interested’. Based on the new evidence, they certainly should have been. If a daughter had a father, the likelihood that the battery of tests to which the Joneses had been subjected would
have yielded such a clear agreement between mother and daughter was less than one in a hundred.

It was Helen Spurway’s husband, Jack, who worked out the maths – he was the person who did the calculations to measure the similarity between Emmimarie’s and Monica’s
blood. Jack was known to the world as J. B. S. Haldane, and the two eminent scientists had been wed nine years previous to the virgin birth investigation. At the time of their marriage, Spurway was
one of Haldane’s students, and twenty-five years his junior. He may have been one of the most prescient scientists of the twentieth century, but this founder of modern genetics was also
famously colourful and eccentric, well known for experimenting on himself. In the name of medical research, for example, he once shut himself in a room full of carbon monoxide and swallowed
bicarbonate of soda with hydrochloric acid, although not all at the same time.

This temperamental tendency was shared by husband and wife. As a couple, they loved to shock and argue – loudly, and especially in public. The pair often took their students out to the
pub, to discuss work, politics, and people. On one occasion, Spurway drank three and a half pints of ale, staggering thoroughly drunk into the street, and straight on to the tail of a
policeman’s dog. The policeman remonstrated, at which she shouted, ‘That’s what dogs’ tails are for!’ – then punched the policeman in the stomach, adding,
‘And that is what policemen’s stomachs are for.’ She was fined £20, but refused to pay it, choosing instead to be arrested and serve a two-week stretch in Her
Majesty’s Prison Holloway.

When it came to her science, however, Spurway was better behaved. Unlike her husband, she was no great theoretician, but she was a meticulous observer, and always committed
to honesty about the facts. She took pains to stress to her students the absolute importance of writing down what they saw, not what they would have liked to see but what actually appeared. And
this would be key to her final interpretation of Emmimarie and Monica Jones’s remarkable results.

Despite the complete match between the Joneses’ blood, there was a problem with the skin graft test. They were, apparently, incompatible with Spurway’s hypothesis, and her
expectations. The bit of Monica’s skin grafted on to her mother had been shed in approximately four weeks, and the skin from Emmimarie grafted on to Monica had remained healthy for longer. It
took six weeks before that graft from the mother began to lose its blood vessels, a sign that the skin would soon detach. In other words, Monica’s skin contained something that
Emmimarie’s immune system did not recognize, while Emmimarie’s skin did not offend Monica’s system as badly. Was this a sign that Monica had DNA that her mother did not have? Was
it a father’s genes that caused the mother to reject her daughter’s skin?

Eight months after the search for a virgin mother had been announced, the
Pictorial
published a world exclusive on Emmimarie and her daughter, relating their biographies and the battery
of tests. For the serious medical reader, the full details were revealed in
The Lancet
, which published, ‘Parthenogenesis in Human Beings’ by Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn of Queen
Charlotte’s Hospital in London. Balfour-Lynn, supported by a pantheon of distinguished doctors, had put the mother–daughter candidates through the necessary medical tests. On the point
of skin grafts,
The Lancet
piece concluded that they indicated that Monica’s genes did not in fact match her mother’s, despite all
evidence to the contrary.
Emmimarie and Monica had failed the final and, in Spurway’s expert opinion, the most conclusive of the compatibility tests.

But there was a curiosity planted in the centre of this scientific result. What any parthenogenetically conceived child certainly could not have, unless they had mutated, were any genes that had
not come from the mother in the first place. This is why the skin graft from a virgin-born child would be expected to take when implanted on his or her mother, but one from the mother would not
necessarily take on her virgin-born child. Yet, the opposite had happened in Emmimarie and Monica’s test. What could be going on?

In such a case, Balfour-Lynn wrote in
The Lancet
, interpretation was difficult, making rigorous proof impossible. The one thing that was clear, however, was that Emmimarie must have
believed what she claimed to be true. It was unlikely she would have set out to deceive people into accepting a virgin birth hoax, especially once she learned of the battery of medical tests that
she and her daughter would have to go through. Yet, she happily agreed to run the full gauntlet. The medical journal compared Emmimarie’s belief with cases in which the absence of
‘pre-knowledge’ has been taken by courts of law to constitute proof of the rightness to a claim. Unfortunately, the absence of pre-knowledge is not something that can be precisely
evaluated by science. And so the final conclusion of the controversial study was that Emmimarie Jones’s claim that her daughter was fatherless must be taken seriously, and that the doctors
and scientists involved would have to admit that they had been unable to disprove it. The
Sunday Pictorial
’s triumphant interpretation of that verdict: ‘Doctors have been unable
to prove that any man took part in the creation of this child.’

While the tabloid version might be true in the most literal sense, there is no getting away from the issue that the study
was in fact entirely inconclusive. The
doctors’ analyses of the Joneses was consistent with what would have been expected in a case of a female-only reproduction, except for the skin grafts. But did the fact that mother and
daughter rejected each other’s skin grafts mean that Monica was or was not the result of parthenogenesis? The only way to know for sure would be to get hold of some DNA from Emmimarie and
Monica, and perhaps from Emmimarie’s parents, because today, analysis of the subjects’ DNA would reveal – or, at the very least, suggest – reasons for the intense
similarities between the two Joneses.

It is safe to say that the odds are, overwhelmingly, that Emmimarie Jones was no virgin mother. She is also unlikely to have set out to deceive the scientists, which opens the possibility that
she may well have been taken advantage of during the hospital stay during which she must have become pregnant. But it is also intriguing to consider that the tabloid-dishing scientists had found
something extremely rare – something that would not be recorded again until forty years later, when a boy was identified who had his mother’s blood, but not her skin.

At the end of a report published in the October 1995 issue of the journal
Nature Genetics
, three photos capture a toddler boy identified only as FD. The centre portrait
depicts a lovely cherub who could have easily fronted a promotional campaign for some wholesome baby food. To the right and the left, there are pictures of him in profile: the image of perfection
from the right, but from the left, a puzzling confusion. The lower half of the boy’s face is underdeveloped, out of sync with the rest of his body.

FD first came to his doctors’ attention because of a blood test.
The test had come back with an unusual result: FD had two X chromosomes – for a boy, one X
chromosome too many. So, even though he had testes and a penis, FD should have been a girl.

Strictly speaking, to be a boy you do not always need a whole Y chromosome. There are particular sections of the Y chromosome, notably one called
SRY
, that are essential to making a man a
man. In cases like FD’s, it is often found that these important sections of the Y chromosome attach to an X chromosome – just enough to make someone male. But FD showed no sign of
having Y-chromosome genes on either of his X chromosomes. And yet, he was very clearly, at least when it came to his physique, a bouncing baby boy.

Next, FD’s doctors decided to analyse skin from his right ankle to see if they could shed some light on his ‘true’ gender. In FD’s skin, but not his blood, they found
evidence of some Y chromosome material. So whereas his blood said that he was some kind of abnormal female, his skin said he was a genetically normal male. It wasn’t so much that FD was both
male and female but that the toddler was a chimaera: different parts of his body appeared to have been made from cells containing different DNA – that is, from different beings
altogether.

The question was, how did the child get this way? One possible answer might be seen in the case of a woman, known in the literature only as ‘Jane from Boston’, who had needed a
kidney transplant. Jane had three sons, all of whom were willing to donate a kidney to her, if they proved to be a suitable donor. And the likelihood was that, since children share half their DNA
with their mother, at least one would turn out to be a good match. Jane had every reason to expect good news when the test results came in. Instead, she found herself opening an officious letter
from the hospital informing her that two of her three sons were not actually her kin.

Since Jane had conceived all of her sons naturally with her
husband (who DNA tests showed was definitely their father), the results effectively suggested that she had
somehow given birth to another woman’s children. That, of course, she deemed an impossibility, especially since mistakenly swapping not one, but two, children at birth would have been a
highly improbable coincidence. Further checks had to be done. Doctors tested DNA from other tissues, including Jane’s thyroid gland, mouth, and hair. And that was how they discovered that
this woman’s body was composed of two genetically distinct groups of cells. Jane, like FD, appeared to be a mixture of two different people.

The most likely explanation was that Jane’s own mother had conceived non-identical twin girls, who would have been no more alike genetically than two siblings conceived at separate times.
At an early stage of the pregnancy, however, these twin embryos had fused, to form a single embryo. Because Jane’s blood cells presumably carried DNA from one twin, and her ovaries and the
majority of her eggs carried DNA from the other, a quick DNA test threw out the result that she was not the mother of two of her own children. Speaking in terms of DNA only, Jane’s unborn
twin was, in fact, the mother.

Yet, in one very significant way, FD was not like Jane at all.

Getting pregnant in the normal way is a hit-or-miss process; a couple has only around an eighteen percent chance that the man’s sperm will penetrate the woman’s egg
at her peak period of fertility, assuming, of course, that they are having unprotected sex. Then, there are the odds that a fertilized egg will transform into an embryo, and make it to full term.
Jane’s foetal life had been very rare – two different eggs developing into two different embryos and then fusing together. Which makes the way in
which FD began
life all the more incredible. FD had originated from only one egg. What is more, that egg had broken the laws of nature and developed into an embryo without waiting to be fertilized. His blood with
its two X chromosomes was the product of parthenogenesis.