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Chapter 1: What fascinating discovery did Bird Pinkerton share with her mother?
Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, so I'm recording. Do you want to just first start by, can you say your name and how you know me?
My name is Anne Bird Platt, and I am Bird Pinkerton's mother.
That's my mom. And I called my mom after I found out this fascinating thing. Basically that some cells from my body are probably hanging out inside of her body and have likely been there for three decades, like ever since she carried me in her womb.
And as I told her, those cells, cells that are genetically me, it seems like some of them might have stuck around in your body and become a part of you. you. And I am curious what you make of that. You can't have the back.
You want to use a quote, use that quote.
Great. Thank you for telling me how to do my job. So my plan here was to explain to my mom very briefly sort of what those cells could be doing inside her and what similar cells are doing to parents all over. And that plan went without a hitch. Can you, I mean, now, since you're helping me out, can you ask me what are they doing inside my body? What are these cells doing inside my body?
Can I ask it as a statement?
What do you mean, can you ask it as a statement? I hope these cells... are behaving themselves. You know, they're playing nicely with myself.
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Chapter 2: How do fetal cells integrate into a parent's body?
Okay, so a stem cell is like the... the really basic cells that then develop into other tissues. So they're kind of like a jack-of-all-trades flexible cells. They can turn into any kind of cell. So you can basically imagine like the fetus has these flexible cells, right?
And then some of those cells travel into the placenta, which Amy was telling me is kind of like the main connector between the fetus and the parent. It's this super highway. So the fetus's cells sort of travel along this highway into the parent's body, hitching a ride in the circulatory system probably, right?
And they finish their road trip eventually in the heart, say, or the lungs or the brain, sort of all over the body. And then they can reshape themselves into a heart cell or a lung cell or a brain cell, whatever they're around, and kind of braid themselves into that tissue. So they're doing work in the parent's body, even though genetically they're different from the cells around them.
I'm intrigued, but I'm also puzzled. It basically opens up more questions than it even begins to answer. Welcome to the show.
So starting around the 1990s, these researchers were sort of like, All right. Like, what is going on here? Like, if these cells are sticking around and becoming part of the body, are they affecting it in some way? Like, what are they doing? We don't know. But we have some ideas. First of all, Amy told me that it is very possible that At least potentially, they are doing nothing.
I have to admit it, even though I think there are some functional properties of these cells, but they could just be hanging out.
Like, it is possible that my cells are just like... The tchotchkes that you love to collect, right? Like your little figurines that don't really do anything. They're just kind of there. It's possible that my cells are just the equivalent of that. Like you have some tiny little cell-sized tchotchkes of me inside of you. Yeah.
I don't do, like, little things anymore. I bought this huge piece of granite the other day in Barron, and I lugged it all the way home, which was kind of silly.
You bought granite? Like, you can find granite on the ground. Well, but this was polished.
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Chapter 3: What is chimerism and how does it relate to pregnancy?
So there's this possibility, this possibility that they're involved in autoimmune diseases, right? And then the other possibility, which you are not going to like, is that these microchimera might also play a role in cancer. Okay. Lay it on. Just lay it on. So basically, cancer is almost one of the best examples of maybe this is helpful, maybe this is harmful. Yeah.
Right now, it's just kind of deeply confusing. Amy was saying she actually got interested in microchimera when she was studying breast cancer. So she was sort of like reading through these papers.
And some women had higher amounts of fetal cells in their body and were diagnosed with cancer.
which would suggest that there could be some kind of a connection again, or like a correlation, right? Like more cells from the fetus, more cancer potentially.
But then there's other papers. This is where it gets really confusing. There's other studies showing that No, actually, those cells might be in there trying to help fight the cancer. And actually, these cells are protective. And so it's a big like, we don't know what they're doing. Are they fighting the tumor?
Are they making, you know, the immune system more aggressive in making this cancer worse? And we don't know the answer to that.
So, again, there are a lot of questions here, right? But if we can figure this stuff out, like, if we can figure out exactly the effects that microchimera have on our body in terms of cancer or also autoimmune diseases, like— That could potentially be huge, right? Amy was saying that maybe we could figure out if people are high risk for certain issues and help them early, for example.
The other exciting thing is some people are, again, seeing these potential fetal cells helping with wound healing. And the thought is that it could be a therapy as well, providing a boost of stem cells to actually help fight a disease or help heal.
Right now, because this is all such a mystery, like, we're still a very long way away from these kinds of applications, right? Which I guess kind of just left me wondering why, right? Like, why do we still have so many questions instead of answers here and know so little? That is a good question.
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