Bird Pinkerton

And, you know, you can put tracers in mice, like we mentioned before, but mice are not humans.

Like, mouse pregnancy just looks different than human pregnancy, which could lead to different effects.

They're routinely having like eight pups all at the same time, for example.

And meanwhile, you can't, like, inject human fetuses with glow-in-the-dark tracers or cut up human parents in the same way as mice to see what's going on.

And then even if you do have sort of some tissue that you're looking at from a human, finding these cells isn't easy, right?

It's a couple of cells in a million.

And so it's kind of like looking for a needle in the haystack if the needle looked like a lot like hay, right?

Because it's actually got half the hay's DNA.

And then one extra wrinkle that I talked about with both Lee and Amy, but which I've sort of been saving for the end,

is that microchimerism isn't just about fetuses passing cells to their parents.

It's actually a lot more complicated because it goes both ways.

So not only am I kind of giving you my cells, but when I was in your womb, you gave me some of your cells as well.

Of course.

Which means that you're not just sort of a chimera of me and my sister Chloe and any miscarriages that you might have had.

You also have my grandmother, Madi's cells, swimming around inside of you as well.

So it is also possible that your mom, so my grandmother, gave you some of your grandmother's cells.

So any researcher sort of looking, Mama, at your tissue would be saying, is this cell from Ann Bird Platt?

Or is it from her daughter Chloe or her daughter Bird or her mother or her grandmother or a miscarriage she had?

Right.

Or, like, what?