Like a Virgin Read online

  Take, for example, the telling statistic that in many parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, marriages between close biological relatives account for up to sixty percent of all unions. These geographic areas share a long history of exposure to malaria. Indeed, the five hundred million to eight hundred million people who are married to a ‘blood’ relation mostly live in the world’s malarial regions. There are simply more consanguineous marriages in places where there is more Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan parasite that makes its way into humans through the bite of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito and causes the most lethal form of malaria.

  In 1949, Professor Haldane noted an apparent connection between malaria and a high prevalence of thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder. Thalassaemia gets its name from the Greek for ‘sea’ (thalassa) and ‘blood’ (haema), since one type of the disease is especially prevalent in regions circling the Mediterranean. The condition causes the body to make fewer healthy red blood cells and less haemoglobin, the iron-rich protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen around the body. In people with thalassaemia, this undersupply of red blood cells and haemoglobin leads to an undersupply of oxygen in the bloodstream. In its mild form, thalassaemia may cause tiredness, but when severe the spleen becomes enlarged, and the person may suffer from liver, heart, and bone ailments. Haldane believed that, for some reason, malaria seemed to be ameliorated among patients with thalassaemia. Could it be that the presence of malaria parasites in the environment had promoted the survival of the inherited genes that caused the disorder?

  In humans today, the gene that causes the α+ type of thalassaemia is the single most common disorder caused by a mutation on a single gene, what is known as a monogenic disorder. Over five hundred million people carry the gene, and they live primarily in regions where malaria is or was endemic (in the past, malaria was endemic around all of the Mediterranean, including much of Southern Europe). As the Red Queen hypothesis would predict, when malaria emerged ten thousand years ago, humans adapted to the threat. In regions where malaria parasites were present, the population has much higher rates of gene variants – and not just those for inheriting thalassaemia – that decrease the likelihood that you will die from malaria if you are infected.

  The variants that protect against malaria tend to change the structure or function of red blood cells. Among them are the genes responsible for sickle-cell anaemia (which changes the shape of red blood cells); the abnormal haemoglobin C (found mostly among Yoruba populations in West Africa); and the Duffy antigen negative blood group (which affects the protein on the blood cells on to which Plasmodium parasites attach). Having the gene for α+ thalassaemia, for instance, does not stop you from being infected with malaria, or from developing the symptoms of the disease. But it does reduce the risk of developing severe malaria, especially malarial anaemia, and therefore the risk of dying. (Although no one is as yet exactly sure why or how, people with thalassaemia also appear to be protected against developing severe anaemia, with or without malaria, and have greater resistance to lower respiratory tract infections.)

  The practice of consanguineous marriages appears to map to those geographical regions most hit by malaria, and while that might be due to an assortment of factors, one of them is likely to be because inbreeding accelerates the selection of the α+-thalassaemia gene. Indeed, people with two copies of the protective gene variant have better survival odds against malaria than those with one or no copies. And, of course, to inherit two copies of the gene, both of your parents had to be carrying at least one, and there is more chance of this if they are related, even distantly. On average, twenty percent more of the children from consanguineous unions would survive malaria as compared to those from marriages between unrelated people. Inbreeding can sometimes be good for your health.

  The usefulness of the adaptations that sex or inbreeding can provide assume that we must adapt to our environment to survive. For many humans living today, however, adaptation works the other way round. With the benefit of modern medicines and technology, we are increasingly able to adapt our environments to ourselves. Yet, in our globalized world, in which populations are mixing more than ever before, and offer less of the protections of inbreeding as a result, diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS are among the leading causes of death. Both killers are caused by pathogens similar to Plasmodium in that they might be thwarted if a person possesses particular co-dominant or recessive genes – that is, by adopting the accelerated genetic resistance that comes from inbreeding. But sex is not designed to benefit the individual; it is designed to benefit the population. That is, in a nutshell, why it became such a popular strategy in nature. For most animals, the benefits to the species gained through sex are so great that they would only ever reproduce without sex under the most extreme conditions.

  Men and women considering having a family will likely be thinking more about the individual benefits, costs, and consequences than the survival of the species. If humans had the option of reproducing without sex, would we do it that way? What sorts of extreme conditions might make us seek a virgin birth?

  3

  DESPERATELY SEEKING A VIRGIN BIRTH

  Some people assert, and positively assert, that a female mouse by licking salt can become pregnant without the intervention of the male.

  Aristotle, Historia Animalium, 350 BCE

  Emmimarie Jones is thirty years old and completely absorbed in her domestic life, like any typically busy housewife. She has one daughter, eleven-year-old Monica, who is a happy English schoolgirl. Despite the utter normality of their daily experience, the mother and daughter seem somewhat strange to those who meet them. They share the same likes and dislikes regarding people, food, and clothes. And they share an uncanny physical resemblance.

  Monica must have been conceived in the summer of 1944, when her mother was being treated for rheumatism in a women’s hospital in Hanover, in Emmimarie’s native Germany. Emmimarie recovered, but three months after she left the ward, her weakness returned. So she visited a doctor, intending to come away with a tonic to cure her ills. The consultation did not go as she had imagined. After examining her, the doctor said he was not surprised that she was feeling unusually tired – she would be, since she was pregnant. She smiled momentarily, in disbelief; she was sure he had made a stupid mistake. Emmimarie knew the facts of life, and she knew she had not been with a man. In fact, at the time she was supposed to have become pregnant, she was confined to the hospital, surrounded only by women – patients and staff.

  Emmimarie insisted to the doctor that all she needed was a pick-me-up – some vitamins, perhaps, to help her feel a little less run-down. But the doctor was firm. He told Emmimarie that she would soon see that he was right.

  Six months later, Emmimarie crawled out of the deep underground cellars where she had been sheltering from the Allies’ bombing of Hanover. During the attack, her home had been destroyed and the city flattened for miles around, leaving a landscape of ruins. The draughty cellar would prove a difficult place to carry a child, but now she had nowhere else to go; it was her home. Her baby, Monica, spent the first two years of life underground.

  After the war, Emmimarie married a Welsh soldier stationed in Germany with the Royal Engineers. When his service there ended, he took mother and child back with him to Britain. And it was in Britain that Emmimarie found herself embroiled in an international news exclusive.

  The front-page headline of the Sunday Pictorial of 6 November 1955 shouted that virgin births were no myth, and a scientist could prove it. Find the Case, it commanded. Emmimarie could not believe her eyes. Here, finally, was a chance to uncover the truth about the circumstances of Monica’s birth. She nervously put pen to paper, and wrote to the researcher quoted in the article:

  Dear Madam

  For ten year I have been wondering and worried about the Birth of my Daughter. I honestly belief that she has no father. If you care to have all the facts please let me know. Before you write to me I must tell you th
at I am German in case you don’t want anything to do with a German. I am married to a Welshman and have been in England over seven years.

  Yours Sincerely

  Emmimarie Jones

  The letter was to reach the desk of a geneticist named Helen Spurway, also known as ‘Britain’s blonde biologist’, the woman who had first grabbed the tabloid’s attention.

  Late in 1955, while working as a lecturer at London’s University College, Spurway had found what she considered to be conclusive evidence that males were not necessary for making babies. Her conclusive evidence was that if you separate female guppies from males at the time they are born, the female fish still go on to reproduce. Further, the broods these virgin females hatch are unusual – they are almost entirely female. How could this be possible? Spurway wondered. There were only three likely explanations. One, that the mother fish somehow had contact with sperm while it was still an embryo in its own mother’s womb. Two, that the ‘female’ was in fact a hermaphrodite – an animal like earthworms, snails, and indeed other species of fish that carry both eggs and sperm and could, therefore, self-fertilize. And three, that the fish were true virgins, and had no need of males for reproduction, in other words they underwent parthenogenesis.

  Spurway knew that parthenogenesis was quite common in some insects, where the egg would start dividing inside the female without being fertilized, through some hormonal trigger. In the 1950s, scientists had even managed to force the eggs of cats and ferrets to develop into embryos all on their own, without sperm involved, so the process could conceivably occur in mammals. But these experiments had been highly artificial – the stuff of lab dishes, not of actual animals. Still, whether created inside a lab dish or an animal, a normal egg still only has one set of DNA. Whatever the species, this means that any offspring produced through parthenogenesis in a female could never have features that its mother did not. And that, Spurway thought, was the key to recognizing and proving a case of true virgin birth in a human.

  Spurway decided to announce her guppy findings at a public talk entitled ‘Virgin Births’, presented at her university. At the end of her lecture, she mentioned her thoughts on using DNA to prove a virgin birth, said as something of a throwaway comment, a moment of speculation. But she did very openly suggest that there may actually be women out in the world who had given birth without having sex. It would be very rare, if it happened at all – otherwise, she noted, there should have been reports of fatherless pregnancies in women’s prisons or other places of complete segregation. Perhaps, she proposed, there were women who suspected that they had experienced a virgin birth, but didn’t mention it for fear of ridicule or social stigma. But if such women knew that their cases could be studied by scientists and doctors, even potentially verified, they might be more likely to come forward and speak about what had happened to them. Spurway added that odds were that a candidate child would be a girl and the spitting image of her mother. ‘No faking would be possible,’ she said. ‘Blood grouping and skin grafting would give the proof.’

  Spurway’s words had been confined to the hallowed halls of University College and the ears of her fellow scientists, but her lecture had come to the attention of Audrey Whiting, an enterprising young journalist at the Sunday Pictorial, who had attended the event. After the talk, Whiting approached Spurway, asking for an interview, but the biologist waved her away, quipping that she did ‘not speak to the popular press’. The journalist pushed ahead anyway with a report on Spurway’s theory, and the editors put it on the front page.

  The story, sporting the headline DOCTORS NOW SAY IT DOESN’T ALWAYS NEED A MAN TO MAKE A BABY, ran next to stiff-lipped assurances that the price of coal would not rise, advertisements for Brylcreem and Palmolive soap, and snapshots of demure starlets wrapped in demure bathing suits. Whiting informed her readers that there could be ten, maybe more, women in Britain who had given birth to a child without having sex with a man. But even for the tabloids, this was clearly outrageous, so Whiting had interviewed a number of doctors to offer opposing views. One issued a stern warning to the paper’s readers, lest they got too carried away. ‘Girls must not get silly ideas,’ he said. ‘The chance of a girl having a virgin birth would be twenty times less likely than her winning a football pool.’

  Halfway down the page appeared the three words, in bold block capitals, that had stunned Emmimarie Jones – and doubled the newspaper’s distribution for the day. Under the ‘Find the Case’ subheading, the Pictorial invited women to come forward, in confidence, if they believed their daughters were the result of a virgin birth. It stipulated that these women must be prepared to submit to examination by a panel of leading doctors, who were excited by the chance to identify a virgin birth in real life. To design the tests and interpret their results, advice was sought from the Medical Research Council, Britain’s foremost authority in the area. If any woman’s case was proved correct, she and her daughter were set to make medical – indeed, human – history. The tabloid’s invitation ended with a quote from Helen Spurway lifted from the medical journal The Lancet: ‘Remember, some of the unmarried mothers cited as curiosities by their contemporaries may well have been telling the truth.’

  Remarkably, nineteen candidates came forward in response to the appeal. Of course, they included some of the ‘innocent unmarried mothers cast out in disgrace by their families’ that the paper had made sure to mention. Eleven of these women were immediately eliminated: they had thought that an intact hymen must indicate they had had a virgin birth, as for many societies, an intact hymen is a mark of virginity. But in some women the hymen can rupture spontaneously or through physical activity – playing vigorously as a child. And remnants of the hymen can persist in some women after vaginal intercourse, sometimes even after childbirth. Plus, the hymen is semi-permeable, so penetration is not required for fertilization (though in these situations, pregnancy is much harder). In any case, the presence of a hymen (or its remains) didn’t mean that these candidates were truly virgins, and it certainly didn’t mean that no sperm could have reached their eggs.

  So the Pictorial published a more transparent explanation under the banner, YOU ASK WHAT EXACTLY IS A VIRGIN BIRTH? The newspaper’s answer:

  Normally a man provides the seed which makes a child grow inside the mother. But in parthenogenesis (virgin birth) no man – and nothing from a man – is involved in any way at all. A virgin birth child need not be a woman’s first child, and certainly need not be the child of a virgin.

  After that, just eight candidates were left.

  Of the eight women who were tested further, six didn’t pass muster. The daughters had a different blood type from their mothers. Another mother–daughter pair was thrown out because their eye colour did not match.

  Only one mother and daughter remained who passed all the preliminary tests: Emmimarie and Monica Jones. They also stood up to several more sophisticated trials. For example, they shared the ability to taste phenylthiourea, a chemical that has the unusual property of either tasting very bitter or being virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic make-up of the taster. Mother and daughter Jones were ushered into a consulting room and required to take a sip from each cocktail glass along a long row. Monica noted that the drink in several of the glasses tasted funny; Emmimarie thought so, too, and for the identical drinks. Monica said the experiment had been great fun; she reported to the Pictorial that the doctors’ rooms looked like a bar.

  Then they took a substance secretor test. Around eighty percent of people with a European ancestry come up with a positive result in this test, which looks at whether or not you have the so-called secretor factor, something like an honorary blood group. The genes that make you a secretor are found on chromosome 19, so the test was a crude way of determining whether Emmimarie and Monica had the same genes at that location. Being a non-secretor seems to have several disadvantages. It is associated with insulin resistance syndrome, where the body becomes less efficient at lowering blood sugar levels, and
lowered levels of antibodies, which put you at greater risk of infection and illness. Non-secretors are especially prone to Candida organisms, such as the yeast that causes thrush, and tend to have more problems with heart valve disturbance as a result of infections after dental work. They may also be at increased risk of recurrent urinary tract infections and a variety of autoimmune diseases, including reactive arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which can lead to fusion of the spine. All of which shows how a small change of one gene on one chromosome could manifest itself as a big difference between a mother and a daughter.

  Now, if you are a secretor, your blood type – the classic A, B, AB or O – will show up not just in your blood, but in your saliva, sweat, tears – and in your semen, if you are a man. If you are not a secretor, your type will not show up in these other fluids. Emmimarie and Monica were both blood type A, and the saliva of neither mother nor daughter contained substance-A secretions. So again, Monica was indeed the spitting image of her mother.

  The final preliminary test looked at patterns in the blood-serum proteins of mother and child. These proteins were separated by size, and an image created that showed the line-up of the proteins, which could be compared. The Joneses were an identical match at every size.