Is the Early Embryo a Person?

In a phone conversation, July 17, 1997, Dr. Howard Jones said he personally knows of twenty cases in which one can argue that fusion took place. He sent an article indicating a number of cases of human hermaphrodites, i.e., humans having not only a substantial number of XX chromosomal cells to produce female sex organs but also a substantial number of XY chromosomal cells to produce male sex organs (1970). The case he and Dr. Bias present has a 46XX/46XY chromosome complement. While acknowledging that this can be explained in a number of ways, Dr. Jones postulates that it is due to the fusion of two embryos. He named this condition a case of “genetic chimerism,” i.e., the presence of different cell lines due to different zygotes and he distinguished it from “mosaicism” in which different cell lines originate from a common zygote (Jones and Bias 1970, 377, 382). Since neither Grobstein who is eager to argue that recombination can occur in humans (1988) nor Moore (1993) postulate that the XX-XY phenomenon is due to fusion of two embryos, it appears that the “fusion interpretation” is not generally accepted by embryologists.

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