Bird Pinkerton
speaker
1,078 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 5d ago
Bird Pinkerton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It's mysterious in ways that are amazing and awe-inspiring, obviously, but also in ways that can hurt parents or at least confuse them.
And so the story that I was telling my mom is kind of this perfect example of a lot of the things I learned about pregnancy over the course of my reporting.
Like, it has got a wonder element, but it also has an element of just the frustrating reality that we are still very, very far from satisfying answers.
All right, so let's just start with the basics here.
This whole idea of my giving you my cells, right, it's actually a subset of something called chimerism, which you know what a chimera is, right?
Yes, I do.
You want to describe that for me?
Not exactly.
So a chimera is like a, it's the mythical creature from like Greek myth.
So you have like, it has like a lion head and like a snake tail and like a goat body.
Okay.
Like a griffin's a chimera, a sphinx, a manticore.
Right.
Let the record show that my mother did know what a chimera was and was unfairly put on the spot.
So that is a chimera in myth.
But to understand a chimera in biology and what it has to do with pregnancy, I reached out to Amy Boddy, who is a biologist at UC Santa Barbara.
And Amy says that in biology, the definition of chimera is a little bit broader than in myth.
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.
Showing 941–960 of 1,078 · page 48 of 54
← Previous
Next →