Opinion: How DNA testing may wrongly nail your wife, by Tunde Odesola

(First published in The PUNCH on October 25 and November 1, 2021)

For a breath of fresh air and to maintain my sanity, I’ll desist from talking about the retired General Muhammadu Buhari in this article. Also, I’ll resist talking about murderous Boko Haram, terrorist Fulani herdsmen, nationwide bandits, humongous corruption and bleeding nepotism which the Buhari regime will bequeath to the incoming Presidency in 2023, if Nigeria exists till then, luckily.

I understand why it’s not easy for Nobel laureate, Professor Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, to give up hope on his 61-year-old country, Nigeria: no parent will nurture an Abiku from infancy through childhood to adolescence, and incautiously watch the heartless child climb a pawpaw tree with vegetable stalk – without shouting gbajare!

 

So, I understand the patriotic zeal which, for almost 70 unbroken years, has fired Soyinka up to engage in an eternal struggle for a better Nigeria.

 

At a point in 1965, Soyinka justifiably held, at gunpoint, the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, Ibadan, despite security presence; landed in jail over a pro-Biafra article in 1967, at another point, and escaped into exile in 1994 when he was sentenced to death by the rogue General, Sani Abacha, who was dragging Nigeria to the point of no return. Doubtless, the sagacious Soyinka had a brush with the law one time too many over his conviction.

 

The last time the white-mane literary icon wrote a novel, Season of Anomy, was 1973. His new novel, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, is his third, while The Interpreters written in 1965, was his debut.

 

It’s the mighty shame of a nation that the same themes of corruption, hypocrisy, nepotism, ignorance, blood-letting, poverty that are Soyinka’s preoccupations in his 1965 and 1973 novels, remain his motifs in his 2021 novel.

 

While some global issues which Soyinka spoke to in his works have changed for the better, it’s excruciatingly painful that his country, Nigeria, remains rooted to the bottomless pit of underdevelopment despite decades of his literary and social advocacy for change.

 

I wish I could measure the heaviness of the soul of Africa’s foremost literary figure, Soyinka, seeing his Nigeria, the Abiku, swimming in crocodile-infested pond while giant gators glide to gobble the Abiku, together with its defiance and charmed bangle-feet.

 

For Soyinka, appearance and reality in Nigeria are siamese even though he faults the depiction of Nigerians as ‘happiest people on earth’ in his latest work. Soyinka’s Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is a stinging irony of the sorrowful Nigerian populace described by total strangers as joyful.

 

However, Appearance and Reality weren’t the same for me some decades ago when I served in the National Youth Service Corps in Umuopu and Aji communities of Igbo-Eze North Local Government Council of Enugu State.

 

Then, I had a shapely girlfriend, whose name flirts on the periphery of memory now. I think she’s Eucharia. UK, for short. Then, I shared a top-floor two-bedroomed flat with a fellow corper, James Umor, now deceased, in a storey building owned by a traditional shrink called Enwe Nwanjo,who had a son, Emma, who had a beautiful wife, and a baby girl called Kasie. Emma and his family lived on the ground floor of the main building with us. Enwe Nwanjo had died a few years before my NYSC posting, but I still met his legend in Aji as a great healer of sick minds.

 

UK, an ebony beauty with a dimpled smile, lived in another apartment on the top floor with us. One night something happened.

 

I had just returned from a journey late in the night. And the whole compound had gone to sleep. I had come out on the verandah to have a drink and smoke a cigarette. Then I heard the bed creak in UK’s room. Sleep fled from my eyes and the hair on my head stood on end.

 

“But UK told me she was going to Nsukka to see her parents this weekend?” I recalled silently as I tip-toed towards her door in the dark hallway.

 

I peeped through the keyhole, darkness stared back at me. Then, slowly, very slowly, my mind dismantled the darkness. I saw two human forms, one lying behind the other, on the small metal bed by the curtained window…

 

I stayed all night on the verandah smoking and shacking whiskey as the harmattan wind froze my bones, but I kept my gaze on UK’s door while I intermittently patrolled the other louvered window to her apartment, which wasn’t in full gaze.

 

Then, another thing happened. Around 5:30am, or thereabouts, I heard a crowd of people chatting from a distance on the hazy road to our apartment. Then, some male and female students, who lived in the compound, together with a teacher, Florence Enwe, who’s the sister of Emma, and my smiling UK, burst into view. They were all coming back home from a vigil in their catholic church!

 

I quietly sneaked into my apartment, relieved but still curious. I heard UK’s footfalls as she climbed the stairs and I re-emerged from my apartment. She greeted me and asked smilingly, “You no dey sleep, Kopashon?” She knocked on her door. A preteen girl of about 10 years, whom she described as her sister from Nsukka, opened the door drowsily, stretching and yawning. “Tunde, see ya life,” I said to myself silently.

 

This is my own experience with Appearance and Reality. While Soyinka sees Nigeria for what it truly is, the Appearance I saw in Enugu Ezike was far from Reality.

 

What did the 178-year-old British newspaper, The Economist, see when it described the Buhari regime as incompetent, last week? Appearance or Reality? Or both? I’ve vowed not to talk about Buhari in this piece, and I wish to be faithful to my promise. I’ll leave Buhari for now and go ahead to explore DNA testing as a realm of science where results may not always be accurate.

 

Despite a woman’s fidelity to her man, a DNA testing could wrongly label the faithful woman a cheat if she gave birth to a chimera baby.

 

Unlike the generality of humanity possessing a single and distinct set of genes, chimera individuals have at least two sets of genes, which can result in a false negative result when the genetic composition of their tissue which was sampled for DNA testing is different from their reproductive tissue.

 

The case of American Taylor Muhl, a 37-year-old female singer, songwriter and dancer, brings into keener perspectives the issue of genetics and the probability that DNA testing  could go wrong.

 

Though the multiple sets of genetic compositions in chimeras differ from one individual to another, in the case of Muhl, she was her own twin. This means that her embryo swallowed the twin embryo in her mother’s womb.

 

The fusion of the embryos could be in the gonads, testicles, abdomen, hand, transplanted parts of the body or any part of the body.

 

If it was in the testicles, for instance, the child fathered by the seminal fluid of the chimera individual would likely carry the gene of the other unborn, infused twin – such that DNA tests on the children produced by the chimera will prove negative.

 

There’s the case of another American woman, Karen Keegan, whose own children were disproved by DNA testing, until a US court ruled that the pregnancy she had at the time in question should be recorded.

 

Despite being video recorded at childbirth, DNA testing conducted on Keegan’s new baby also proved that she wasn’t the mother of the child.

 

When the blindfolded head drops on the hard floor, kpi!, like the back-kick of an angry horse, please, know that not all guillotined heads are guilty.

That is why the Yoruba say, “Ori yeye ni Imogun, t’aise lo po.” Imogun is the Yoruba Golgotha; the place of skulls, where many innocent heads have rolled down the pit of death, spurting hot blood.

If man didn’t reach for the sky at Babel, and all languages were one, I wouldn’t be saddled with the burden of translating this Yoruba proverb into English. But, it’s ok, I’ll try.

“Ori yeye ni Imogun, t’aise lo po” alerts the heedful to the limitations of human judgment and the evil that lurks in man’s heart.

 

I felt like going beyond the translation of the proverb into English. So, I went in search of the Araba of Osogbo, Chief Ifeyemi Elebuibon, to unravel for me the story behind the proverb.

“Once upon a time,” Elebuibon began, “Ogunda and his friend, Irosun, had an argument. Ogunda contended that many of those beheaded at Imogun are guiltless, but Irosun disagreed, saying, “Ika to ba se, l’Oba nge,” meaning: “It’s only the offending finger that the king cuts.

 

“So, one night, Ogunda killed an antelope in the forest. He sneaked into Irosun’s house and smeared his sleeping friend’s hands with the blood of the kill even as he sprinkled the blood on the ground, all the way to the king’s pen.

“Very early the following morning, Irosun was still sleeping when the king’s guards broke down his door and arrested him for killing the king’s antelope. Irosun pleaded his innocence, but he was dragged away, all the same, his toes barely touching the ground.

 

“The guillotine was the final journey for anyone that stole from the royal farm. Irosun’s fate was sealed. He must honour a date with death.

“On the Day of Death, many people trooped out to Imogun, to watch how the thief’s head would tumble down the headful dumpsite, squirting blood.

“The masked hangman with bulging biceps and a razor-sharp sword curved at the tip like Go-to-hell advanced slowly towards the shackled Irosun. He stood at arm’s length and raised up his shiny sword to heaven for the swift strike that would cut off the neck bone, separating the head from the body.

“He brought down his sword impatiently as Ogunda stepped out, and told the truth. Irosun was shaken back to life, sweat and urine had soaked his clothes. Ogunda asked his friend if it was only the guilty that got punished. A shivering Irosun answered, ‘Ori yeye ni Imogun, t’aise lo po’.”

Globally, many women and men have been wrongly accused of not being the mothers and fathers to their biological children because they are chimeras.

Who should she forgive – DNA testing machine or her unbelieving husband – the woman wrongly accused of infidelity because the genotype of her child doesn’t match that of the biological father? Can she even ever forgive?

Who should he blame, DNA testing machine or his fate, the man wrongly denied the joy of fatherhood because he is a chimera?

What is chimerism?

According to the European Journal of Medical Genetics, scientificamerican.com, and healthline.com, a chimera is generally an animal or human that contains the cells of two or more individuals – that is, their bodies contain two different sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms.

Natural chimerism

Scientificamerican.com says, “One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a foetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells are “absorbed” by the other twin. The remaining foetus will have two sets of cells, its own original set, plus the one from its twin.”

Healthline.com says microchimerism, which is another form of natural chimerism, most commonly occurs in humans when a pregnant woman absorbs a few cells from her foetus, adding that the opposite may also happen, where a foetus absorbs a few cells from its mother. “These cells may travel into the mother’s or foetus’s bloodstream and migrate to different organs,” it says.

Tetragametic chimerism

This is also a form of natural chimerism. It happens when two different sperm cells fertilise two different egg cells. Then, these cells all fuse together into one human embryo with crossed cell lines.

Artificial chimerism

“Artificial chimerism,” according to healthline.com, “occurs when a person receives a blood transfusion, stem cell transplant, or bone marrow transplant from another person and absorbs some of that person’s cells. This is called artificial chimerism.

“Artificial chimerism was more common in the past. Today, transfused blood is usually treated with radiation. This helps the transfusion or transplant recipient to better absorb the new cells without permanently incorporating them into their body.”

Cases of chimerism

In its September 2020 publication, the European Journal of Medical Genetics says human chimeras have been described for nearly 70 years by experts but the phenomenon gained public attention in the last 20 years with three high-profile media reports of coincidental findings during parentage testing.

The issue of the American woman, Karen Keegan, mentioned in the first part of this article, was a high-profile case of chimerism reported in 2002, in Boston, when genetic tests were conducted on her as she prepared to receive a kidney from any of her family members. After the tests, it was ‘discovered’ that two of Keegan’s three sons were not hers.

Another high-profile case of chimerism was that of another American, Lydia Fairchild, who had to be videoed at childbirth when genetic tests showed that she wasn’t the mother of her two sons when she applied for assistance for them from the State of Washington. She was subsequently charged with fraud. Even her third childbirth showed she wasn’t the mother of the child. After an extensive medical investigation, however, the genetic composition of her children matched a second DNA lineage found in the narrow tube that connects her vagina to her uterus.

The third reported case of chimerism was that of an unnamed 34-year-old man in California who, in 2015, failed a paternity test after the child was found to have AB blood group while both parents were A. According to an article, How a Man’s Unborn Twin Fathered His Child, published in Times magazine, the sperm that fertilised the wife’s egg belonged to the man’s unborn twin.

A June 2021 article published by The Embryo Project Encyclopedia paraphrased Policy Professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, Sheldon Krimsky, and genetics expert, Tania Simoncelli, warning in their 2012 book, Genetic Justice: DNA Databanks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties, that human chimerism could potentially upend the US court system’s reliance on DNA evidence, citing Fairchild and Keegan as case studies.

But, in a response, legal professor David H. Kaye, in an article, Chimeric Criminals, published in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology in 2013, debunks the assertion by Krimsky and Simoncelli.

Kaye, however, ‘acknowledges human chimerism should be a consideration in DNA testing, given its unknown frequency, but rejects the statement that it is a significant obstacle to its use in forensic investigation’.

Kaye also agrees that any human could display some traits of chimerism because there are numerous ways one could be considered a chimera.

Appearance and Reality are, oftentimes, at variance. When serious nations of the world are honestly fighting corruption, the Nigerian government has done everything to shield its son, DCP Abba Kyari, from facing criminal prosecution in the US for fraud.

I watched the video of Kano Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, dancing with a spurting hose as he washed a vehicle at a car wash inauguration. I think Nigerians shall soon see the launching of the babaringa with the biggest pocket in Kano.

NB: I thank Kemi Samuel, secondary schoolmate and London-based registered nurse, for sharing her knowledge on chimerism with me. God bless Kemo!

 

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Twitter: @tunde_odesola

Facebook: @tunde odesola

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