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Article Length : 549 Words

One of the most significant findings in modern clinical biochemistry is currently being talked about with tremendous excitement.

Professor Yuk Ming Dennis Lo and his team at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have found that pregnant women carry the DNA of their children inside their own blood plasma. During a pregnancy, the child’s DNA pumps through all four chambers of the mother’s heart!

Among other things, this remarkable finding means that DNA diagnosis of infant health can potentially be done by drawing a sample of the blood from the child’s mother. The developing child need never be particularly disturbed by such a process and the mother is also treated with far greater sense of dignity.

The questions of how difficult it will prove to be to separate mother’s DNA from the child’s and whether it will be possible to compile large enough amounts of infant DNA to analyse thoroughly, remains to be seen. The expectation is high however that in the future, the testing of any child for any inherited syndrome or genetic disease will be as simple as drawing blood from the mother at some fairly early stage of her pregnancy.

The fact that infant DNA penetrates the placenta and moves into the bloodstream of the mother is certainly very strange and it brings on major questions in the fields of early child development, biochemistry and clinical medicine. It has long been known, for example, that a pregnant woman has a problem of sorts, in that her body regards all foreign objects as being a danger to her life. So her own immune system must be temporarily suppressed for a child to develop in higher safety. Pregnant women are in fact only able to bear children because their bodies decide on a policy of tolerance. But what actually creates that policy change is not at all understood.

It may be shown, in future experiments, that this event of "foreign" DNA rushing through her entire body, through her bloodstream, is somehow the trigger to subdue her immune response.

It may even be that in doing this, the child partly co-opts the mother’s cells for its own purposes. DNA is not like any other kind of molecule, in that they are strictly and purely ‘informational’. So the question would seem to be, what purpose does mother nature have in mind by sending the child’s DNA on a round trip through the mother?

Infant DNA converted to infant RNA in the mother’s cells can also potentially create any infant protein inside any mother cell. So one possible consequence of Professor Lo’s discovery is that if infant RNA is also found within the mother’s own cells, we should also expect to see the mother’s liver cells, say, producing proteins useful to the baby! Exactly how much of the mother’s body is co-opted for the development of the child is entirely unknown.

Only one thing is certain, the most productive molecule ever discovered, DNA, plays a more complicated role in infant development than was previously imagined.

The potential clinical applications seem great. The relationship between DNA, child and mother may also need complete revision. It’s all unknown for now - it’s future science and like all science so far it’s surely going to prove bizarre, no matter how it all turns out.