Amy Boddy

It's multiple individuals existing in one host body.

Like if you see organ transplantation or something like that, where you have a large tissue, right, that's from someone that is a completely different individual, you can consider that person a chimera.

So according to Amy... It can be infrequently as one in a million cells, but we have 30 trillion cells in our body.

I have to admit it, even though I think there are some functional properties of these cells, but they could just be hanging out.

There's some studies that show that these cells actually help the host body.

And so there's ideas out there that, yeah, this is a good feature to have.

So, for example, there have been studies to look at if someone has a C-section and they look at the tissue in the C-section.

Suggesting that they are there helping heal the gestational parent's body.

And that's maybe one of the biggest criticisms of they're just there.

There's a few of them.

You're just trying to find a purpose to this randomness of cells there.

If a mouse gets an ear injury, the fetal cells will migrate up to the tissue.

It seems like they're primed to be able to go in and kind of help recover and heal the maternal body.

Yeah.

There was a mouse model where the heart was injured and they saw these cells, these fetal cells migrating to the injury, specializing in helping repair.

So you could just be pregnant and be like, I'm basically an endurance athlete.

No wonder I hated it.

So it's quite fantastic, I think, in thinking about the coolest, weirdest biology.

It might be helpful during pregnancy.

It might be helpful in the postpartum period.