A mother can carry a living piece of her child for the rest of her life, and not as a metaphor. During pregnancy some of the baby's cells cross into her body and lodge in her organs, even her brain, and male DNA has been found in a woman's brain as late as the age of 94

A mother can carry a living piece of her child for the rest of her life, and not as a metaphor. During pregnancy some of the baby's cells cross into her body and lodge in her organs, even her brain, and male DNA has been found in a woman's brain as late as the age of 94

A section of brain from a woman who died at 69, obtained from a tissue bank in Belmont, Massachusetts, was placed under fluorescent probes for the X and Y chromosomes. Some of the cells in it carried a Y. She never had one. That specimen was one of 59 examined for a 2012 paper in PLOS ONE, which reported male DNA in the brain tissue of 37 of them. The oldest woman in whom it was detected was 94. The study, Male Microchimerism in the Human Female…