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  • 2017-06-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Do Women Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Ever Slept With? (en)
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  • On 23 June 2017, frequent purveyor of misinformation YourNewsWire.com posted an article (Women Absorb and Retain DNA from Every Man They Have Sex With) that made the claim that a new study demonstrates that cells transferred from a man to a woman during intercourse become integrated into that woman’s body after sex. Every single time. In actuality, however, that study (which was published in PLOS ONE in 2012, despite being billed as new in 2017) demonstrated for the first time the presence of genetically distinct male cells in the brains of women (who had been examined in autopsy). The existence of male cells in the bodies of females, in general, is not news. As discussed in a PLOS ONE blog post describing that 2012 study, their presence is typically ascribed to cells from a male fetus from a prior pregnancy: The significance, in the case of that specific research paper, was that it demonstrated that these male cells — wherever they came from — were able to cross what is known as the blood-brain barrier — a semi-permeable membrane that prevents most chemicals in the blood from entering the brain. The linked study, in fact, does not once mention sexual intercourse as a proposed mechanism. This is as close as you will get from the PLOS ONE paper: At least that’s what they want you to think, according to YourNewsWire: In an odd chronologic twist that necessitates abandoning the notion that time progresses linearly in one direction, YourNewsWire then used text from a paper published in 2005 to support the argument that scientists buried this salacious truth, discovered in 2012, in other sub studies. That 2005 paper, which does indeed show the presence of male cells in women who had never given birth to males (or, in some cases, at all), makes only passing reference to the possibility that sexual intercourse alone could contribute male microchirality to women, noting that the issue has yet to be studied: That explanation is the authors' speculative fourth suggestion (out of four) after three more plausible, and actually researched, theories: A paper published, fittingly, in the journal Chimerism in 2015 investigated this topic further, concluding that — potentially — all of those potential mechanisms may contribute. That paper, which was fairly limited in its dataset, makes it clear that the sexual intercourse transfer of male chimerism remains entirely speculative: Far from demonstrating that 100 percent of a woman's male sexual partners have male cells that de facto become part of their body, the studies cobbled together by YourNewsWire show that even if sexual intercourse transferred cells from a male that later became incorporated into the female partner’s body (which science has only speculated about at this point), it clearly wouldn't happen in all cases. We are also unsure, for the record, what motivation would exist for scientists to hide the truth about male microchimerism in the first place. (en)
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