Bird Pinkerton

And so she was telling me that basically whenever you have a living thing that's made up of pieces of more than one individual, that's a chimera.

So you can find them in plants.

You can find them in animals.

You can even find them in humans.

So this is not like the goat-lion hybrid version of a chimera, right?

It's just bits of two genetically different people.

Mm-hmm.

But so technically, Mama, Amy was telling me that this process that you and I went through, where some of my cells left my body, kind of went into your body, that is considered chimerism on like a tiny scale.

So they literally call it micro chimera because you just have like a few cells.

So cells from me, cells from my sister, Chloe, and also potentially from any like miscarriages that you might have had.

So a trillion is like a million million, right?

So if you're doing the math, could potentially be...

30 million cells from me floating around in you.

Oh.

Yeah, but so some people have more.

Some people have fewer.

They're usually more during pregnancy, and then your immune system kind of gets rid of a lot of them.

But around the 1990s is when researchers started to realize that some cells were really sticking around in the parent long term.

like potentially for the parent's whole life, which was surprising, right?

And a lot of these cells are probably stem cells.