Among stories in the AHSC Top Media Mentions for the week of Aug. 4-7, 2015, was this item that includes University of Arizona Department of Medicine professor and physician scientist Dr. Ken Ramos:
Ahwatukee Foothills News
Things I Tell My Mom: Can Your Body Contain DNA That Isn't Yours? Yes! Chimerism
In an episode of “House, M.D.” his team finds cells clumped together in different parts of a boy's body, including his brain, that are functioning abnormally and causing his various symptoms. In the fictional world, the doctors were able to quickly create a probe for the foreign DNA, find all the cells that were different and remove them, also removing the symptoms, including the alien hallucinations. This episode is so wildly out of the realm of current medical ability and practice – so much so that I participated in a discussion all about the science and "science" found in this episode. To watch highlights from this discussion, which included Kenneth S. Ramos, MD, PhD, PharmD, associate vice president for precision medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center (Science Fiction TV Dinner: House, MD, from Science & the Imagination) on Vimeo or to listen to the whole podcast click here. I questioned whether there could actually be two different genomes in this boy’s body and can this actually happen in real life? If so, how? The answer is yes, and it's called a “chimera” or “chimerism.”
Written by Dr. Cathy Seiler, program manager for the tissue biorepository at St. Joseph's Hospital and Barrow Neurological Institute. Read more...
See other stories included in the original AHSC newsletter with the above news item.