Virgin birth and the boy of both sexes

One plus one makes 3(or more) has been the concept behind making a family and if you were from populous countries like India, China, etc., you would see such slogans with a limit prescribed by the government being 2 children. When we look at history, this hasn’t always been the scenario. Just to make clear, I’m not speaking about the birth control programme, but the math of one plus one involved in here. From West to East, our history was full of myths about godly children, and most of the times these children were the direct offspring of God himself.

Myths and Virgin Birth

Jesus, whose mother Mary was considered as a Virgin, gave birth to him after a holy spirit. In Indian Mythology, you’ll find Kunti, who was a Virgin then, being blessed by Surya Bhagavan(Solar deity) of a boy child when she was testing a boon given to her. Similarly, In a version of Chinese Myths, you’ll find Jiang Yuan giving birth to ‘Hou Ji‘ as a result of stepping on the footprints left by the god ‘Shangdi‘. Virgin birth was considered a sacred one and as a result, people ended up worshipping these women. Though some of these women were married, it took nothing more than a Snap of God to impregnate them. Hence the part of men involved here was zero.

The above scenarios of impregnating without the role of men is not a big thing when it comes to animals. This kind of reproduction is known as Parthenogenesis, where the growth and development of an embryo occur without the Fertilization by sperm. In short, they don’t need a male to get pregnant. This kind of behavior can be seen in some

• ‌Plants
• ‌Invertebrates(common in some bees, scorpions, mites, Roundworms, Eelworms,etc.,)
• ‌Vertebrates(Extremely Rare in birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, etc.,)

Since Parthenogenesis is prevalent among so many species, it may seem that replicating such a phenomenon is not that impossible. But mammal’s body is not designed for that. Parthenogenesis requires an egg to activate itself and develop all the components needed for a foetus to grow. Even though some species are capable of achieving this, mammal’s eggs capable of developing nerve cells and bones of the embryo needs sperm to develop the skeletal muscles. So even if a female’s egg were to activate itself, it’ll collapse as it doesn’t have enough components to build the entire embryo. This makes Parthenogenesis impossible in humans as we too are mammals.

The Boy

But in 1995, a research article in Nature Genetics (Vol.11) spoke about a boy they called FD. The boy who was three years old then, had an asymmetrical face accompanied by mild learning difficulties, occasional aggressive behaviour, and unusually small testes. In general, every human will have 23 pairs of chromosomes with the last pair determining sex(either XX or XY).

If you are a male, mostly you’ll be having XY pairs( X from mother and Y from father). If you are female, you’ll be most probably h XX pairs(one X from mother and another X from father) altogether. These chromosomes are what determines your sex.

When taken a blood sample of FD, it showed that the boy had only XX. This meant that the boy is biologically a girl. Even after a sensitive analysis, his blood sample showed no traces of the Y chromosome. But when examining his skin, they were surprised to find the chromosome pairs being XY. His skin data suggested that he is a male. When studying further, it showed that all the X chromosomes found in his body were from the mother. Our boy, FD, is genetically male from outside and female from inside.

Though the researchers weren’t able to describe how this miracle boy happened, they do have a theory. The mother’s Ovary would have got itself activated and started dividing cells. If this division of cells had gone in the same way, it would have collapsed after some time. But at just the moment before this was to happen, sperm would have entered the egg thus making it fertilized and giving all the components required to grow. Since the ovary would have initiated producing some parts of the foetus by itself before the Fertilization, we are not able to find any male chromosomes in those regions.

Like the support given to a building under construction, human ovary needs sperm even if it could do a major role by itself. FD is probably the first case recorded to have been born from an egg that was undergoing unfertilized division. Though it had some effects on him like the asymmetric face, all of us have some asymmetry, and it is just distinct in FD’s case. His story shows how far can the biology of humans be taken near Virgin birth. But the possibility of having successful Parthenogenesis is human is still a big zero. So the myths can stay as myths for now.

-Vivek Karunakaran

References

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