Like a Virgin Read online

  But there was one final test that the pair was required to pass, should they be willing to take it. Helen Spurway saw it as the test that could provide the conclusive proof that Monica was fatherless, and had no genes other than those of her mother. Other scientists, however, believed its results would be obscure, at best. Nevertheless, absolute secrecy was assured, because if the doctors found out that Emmimarie Jones was not, in fact, a virgin mother, not one word would ever have been published to the world. The test in question was a skin graft.

  When skin is grafted on to a body, the body’s immune system will work to reject it as a foreign body, unless the donor is genetically similar to the recipient. This is why many graft surgeries involve taking donor skin from another site on the person’s own body, known as an autograft, and why people who have undergone a graft from another person (who is not an identical twin) or another species must take immunosuppressant medications long after the surgery. The test Spurway proposed was to take a piece of Monica’s skin and graft it on to Emmimarie’s body. If the mother’s body allowed this graft to persist indefinitely, without breaking it down, that would prove they were a genetic match – that there was nothing in Monica’s skin that was considered to be ‘alien’ to Emmimarie’s body. Spurway also realized that doing a graft the other way round, from mother to child, would not work; the mother would have antigens, substances that her immune system would be able to protect her against, which the child did not.

  Emmimarie Jones readily agreed to the operation on herself and her daughter. Monica agreed as long as she could have lots of comic books. So, shortly before Easter 1956, Emmimarie and Monica left their English home, armed with adventure comics and destined for the secret location of their secret operation. Consultations began among the research team, blood specialists, and plastic surgeons, and the grafts were done both ways: Emmimarie was transplanted with her daughter’s skin, while Monica wore her mother’s.

  Through all of this battery of tests to find a virgin birth, Emmimarie Jones and young Monica were in good company. Theirs was simply the post-war, boom-time contribution to a long list of virgin mothers, from saviour gods to supernatural impregnations – or so the stories go. Almost always in these tales of virgin birth, the hand of God is involved, and there seems to be no culture that does not tell the tale.

  The pantheon of gods is populated with virgin births, in heaven and on earth. The river nymph Nana was miraculously impregnated by a falling pomegranate, and her son Attis became the lover of Cybele, the mother of Greek gods (making Nana the grandmother of the gods). Hera, the wife of Zeus and thus the queen of heaven, renewed her virginity every year at the holy waters of Kanathos. She spurned the unfaithful Zeus, and all mortal men, to conceive her son Hephaestus. Zeus impregnated Leto, who bore the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, just two of the many children he sired by virgins. Artemis and her half-sister Athena were said to be virgin mothers too. Kausalya gave birth to the king Rama, the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, after drinking nectar that had been made in offering to the gods. The virtuous Sita, Rama’s wife, was the offspring of the land itself. Kunti of the epic Mahabharata was impregnated by the sun, Surya, when she recited a mantra that summoned him to her for that purpose. Queen Maya of Nepal, who hadn’t become pregnant in twenty years of marriage, claimed she was spirited away in her sleep to a mystical lake, where a white elephant, holding a lotus in its trunk, circled her and then entered her womb, to later emerge on earth as the Buddha. The Aztec Coatlicue fell pregnant with Huitzilopochtli through the touch of a ball of feathers as she napped in a temple. In Babylonia, creation itself came about when a divine wind hovered over a female abyss called Tiamat; and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, has been perversely worshipped as a virgin.

  Pre-dating them all was Isis, the sister and wife (and in some versions the mother) of Osiris, who was fabled in Egypt for having been deflowered in her own mother’s womb, a bit like Helen Spurway thought her guppies may have been. In the land of the pharaohs, there was also the queen Mautmes, who was visited by the ibis-headed Thoth, the messenger of the gods, and informed that she would bear a son, though she was a virgin. Carved on the wall of the temple of Luxor, there are scenes depicting Mautmes as she is escorted by the holy spirit Kneph and the goddess Hathor to the crux ansata, the cross that symbolizes life, through which she could be impregnated with a touch of her lips. Setting aside the need to hold her mouth to the cross, this story might sound quite familiar to anyone who has heard the tale of Mary, mother of Jesus (who was also one of many virgin mothers with a form of that name, including Myrrah, the mother of Adonis, and Maia, mother of Hermes).

  Among the ancient peoples circling the Mediterranean, the idea of a mystical birth probably gathered popularity through the veneration of a scroll about a virgin mother goddess based at Sais, an ancient Egyptian town in the western Nile Delta. The patron deity of the town was Neith, a goddess that the Greeks, including Herodotus and Plato, would later identify with Athena, since Neith, like Athena, was both the goddess of war and the goddess of weaving and the domestic arts. Because of this, Neith was the protector of women and a guardian of marriage. But her original role, dating to around 3000 BCE, was probably as a symbol of creation and fertility.

  Neith was a goddess praised as a virginal mother and nurse, a mysterious mixture of virgin female and fertile mother that had great resonance among those who imagined it. So that many of the great men – the saviours, philosophers, and conquerors – were cemented into a demi-godly status with reports that they had come into the world over which they had power through such a birth. These virgin birth celebrities included Confucius, Plato, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.

  The legends of virgin birth are a counterpoint to the ancient notions of how regular babies were made. Over the thousands of years during which doctors and scientists said that women were just a vessel for carrying babies, not a contributor in creating them, nearly anything seemed capable of making a woman pregnant. Things like exposure to the sun or the wind (as recounted in myth) or to a fire. Or perhaps you ate pomegranates or magical fish or licked salt, like Aristotle’s mouse. Or, you made a wish, stood under a shadow, happened upon a holy spot, or were breathed on by a god. These were all possible reasons why a woman might be pregnant, because no one understood then what was really going on.

  In post-war Britain, however, there were few such illusions, and a virgin birth was, for the most part, held up as a rare, immaculate occasion, reserved for very special cases and very special storytelling. The Sunday Pictorial received complaints about the story’s effect on younger readers, who it was believed were being exposed to far too many particulars about the mechanics of sex and pregnancy. To that, one of the doctors advising the newspaper retorted that any children old enough to read the tabloid should know about childbirth.

  Most of the angry letters, of course, came from people worried that a virgin birth involving an ordinary human would ‘undermine the character of Our Lady’s virginal conception’ and shake the foundational beliefs of people adhering to the Christian faith. The reaction from the Church was more deliberated. A Catholic publication, called Universe, carried a 450-word response, printed five days after the Pictorial’s front-page article, that drew on scientific evidence as well as matters of faith:

  Parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is not entirely unknown in the economy of nature... Now if God could have endowed such creatures with life, and then bestowed upon them this otherwise unknown method of propagation, would it have been difficult for Him to bring about the birth of his only begotten son in a parthenogenetic manner? He who can do the one can just as easily perform the other wonder. If it were true, as Dr Spurway has confidently asserted, that one woman in a million might produce a child which never had a father, this would in no way undermine the miraculous character of Our Lord’s conception and birth.

  Quite so.

  The Church’s diplomatic handling of the issue was not an e
xample followed in the scientific community, who were far less enthusiastic about the statistics. This remains a little surprising, when you consider that there was actually no plausible scientific explanation at that time for why women should not be able to reproduce without men. In the lab, after all, scientists had already succeeded in inducing pregnancy in rabbits without mating. The researchers had discovered that all it took was cooling down the Fallopian tubes, the tubes that connect the ovaries to the womb. Yet, a Lancet report that appeared around the time of the tabloid search declared, ‘No “reasonable man” would even entertain the possibility that a woman might become pregnant without a single sperm entering her uterus.’

  Once Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood samples were found to be a match, the test results were checked and double checked, then presented for debate. ‘Doubting doctors,’ as the Pictorial put it, ‘who had in effect set themselves the task of breaking down the mother’s story became less certain that they were on the winning side.’ The paper went on to note that ‘several of the medical men who had been sceptical about the outcome of the investigation now became keenly interested’. Based on the new evidence, they certainly should have been. If a daughter had a father, the likelihood that the battery of tests to which the Joneses had been subjected would have yielded such a clear agreement between mother and daughter was less than one in a hundred.

  It was Helen Spurway’s husband, Jack, who worked out the maths – he was the person who did the calculations to measure the similarity between Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood. Jack was known to the world as J. B. S. Haldane, and the two eminent scientists had been wed nine years previous to the virgin birth investigation. At the time of their marriage, Spurway was one of Haldane’s students, and twenty-five years his junior. He may have been one of the most prescient scientists of the twentieth century, but this founder of modern genetics was also famously colourful and eccentric, well known for experimenting on himself. In the name of medical research, for example, he once shut himself in a room full of carbon monoxide and swallowed bicarbonate of soda with hydrochloric acid, although not all at the same time.

  This temperamental tendency was shared by husband and wife. As a couple, they loved to shock and argue – loudly, and especially in public. The pair often took their students out to the pub, to discuss work, politics, and people. On one occasion, Spurway drank three and a half pints of ale, staggering thoroughly drunk into the street, and straight on to the tail of a policeman’s dog. The policeman remonstrated, at which she shouted, ‘That’s what dogs’ tails are for!’ – then punched the policeman in the stomach, adding, ‘And that is what policemen’s stomachs are for.’ She was fined £20, but refused to pay it, choosing instead to be arrested and serve a two-week stretch in Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway.

  When it came to her science, however, Spurway was better behaved. Unlike her husband, she was no great theoretician, but she was a meticulous observer, and always committed to honesty about the facts. She took pains to stress to her students the absolute importance of writing down what they saw, not what they would have liked to see but what actually appeared. And this would be key to her final interpretation of Emmimarie and Monica Jones’s remarkable results.

  Despite the complete match between the Joneses’ blood, there was a problem with the skin graft test. They were, apparently, incompatible with Spurway’s hypothesis, and her expectations. The bit of Monica’s skin grafted on to her mother had been shed in approximately four weeks, and the skin from Emmimarie grafted on to Monica had remained healthy for longer. It took six weeks before that graft from the mother began to lose its blood vessels, a sign that the skin would soon detach. In other words, Monica’s skin contained something that Emmimarie’s immune system did not recognize, while Emmimarie’s skin did not offend Monica’s system as badly. Was this a sign that Monica had DNA that her mother did not have? Was it a father’s genes that caused the mother to reject her daughter’s skin?

  Eight months after the search for a virgin mother had been announced, the Pictorial published a world exclusive on Emmimarie and her daughter, relating their biographies and the battery of tests. For the serious medical reader, the full details were revealed in The Lancet, which published, ‘Parthenogenesis in Human Beings’ by Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. Balfour-Lynn, supported by a pantheon of distinguished doctors, had put the mother–daughter candidates through the necessary medical tests. On the point of skin grafts, The Lancet piece concluded that they indicated that Monica’s genes did not in fact match her mother’s, despite all evidence to the contrary. Emmimarie and Monica had failed the final and, in Spurway’s expert opinion, the most conclusive of the compatibility tests.

  But there was a curiosity planted in the centre of this scientific result. What any parthenogenetically conceived child certainly could not have, unless they had mutated, were any genes that had not come from the mother in the first place. This is why the skin graft from a virgin-born child would be expected to take when implanted on his or her mother, but one from the mother would not necessarily take on her virgin-born child. Yet, the opposite had happened in Emmimarie and Monica’s test. What could be going on?

  In such a case, Balfour-Lynn wrote in The Lancet, interpretation was difficult, making rigorous proof impossible. The one thing that was clear, however, was that Emmimarie must have believed what she claimed to be true. It was unlikely she would have set out to deceive people into accepting a virgin birth hoax, especially once she learned of the battery of medical tests that she and her daughter would have to go through. Yet, she happily agreed to run the full gauntlet. The medical journal compared Emmimarie’s belief with cases in which the absence of ‘pre-knowledge’ has been taken by courts of law to constitute proof of the rightness to a claim. Unfortunately, the absence of pre-knowledge is not something that can be precisely evaluated by science. And so the final conclusion of the controversial study was that Emmimarie Jones’s claim that her daughter was fatherless must be taken seriously, and that the doctors and scientists involved would have to admit that they had been unable to disprove it. The Sunday Pictorial’s triumphant interpretation of that verdict: ‘Doctors have been unable to prove that any man took part in the creation of this child.’

  While the tabloid version might be true in the most literal sense, there is no getting away from the issue that the study was in fact entirely inconclusive. The doctors’ analyses of the Joneses was consistent with what would have been expected in a case of a female-only reproduction, except for the skin grafts. But did the fact that mother and daughter rejected each other’s skin grafts mean that Monica was or was not the result of parthenogenesis? The only way to know for sure would be to get hold of some DNA from Emmimarie and Monica, and perhaps from Emmimarie’s parents, because today, analysis of the subjects’ DNA would reveal – or, at the very least, suggest – reasons for the intense similarities between the two Joneses.

  It is safe to say that the odds are, overwhelmingly, that Emmimarie Jones was no virgin mother. She is also unlikely to have set out to deceive the scientists, which opens the possibility that she may well have been taken advantage of during the hospital stay during which she must have become pregnant. But it is also intriguing to consider that the tabloid-dishing scientists had found something extremely rare – something that would not be recorded again until forty years later, when a boy was identified who had his mother’s blood, but not her skin.

  At the end of a report published in the October 1995 issue of the journal Nature Genetics, three photos capture a toddler boy identified only as FD. The centre portrait depicts a lovely cherub who could have easily fronted a promotional campaign for some wholesome baby food. To the right and the left, there are pictures of him in profile: the image of perfection from the right, but from the left, a puzzling confusion. The lower half of the boy’s face is underdeveloped, out of sync with the rest of his body.

  FD first came to his doctors’ attention bec
ause of a blood test. The test had come back with an unusual result: FD had two X chromosomes – for a boy, one X chromosome too many. So, even though he had testes and a penis, FD should have been a girl.

  Strictly speaking, to be a boy you do not always need a whole Y chromosome. There are particular sections of the Y chromosome, notably one called SRY, that are essential to making a man a man. In cases like FD’s, it is often found that these important sections of the Y chromosome attach to an X chromosome – just enough to make someone male. But FD showed no sign of having Y-chromosome genes on either of his X chromosomes. And yet, he was very clearly, at least when it came to his physique, a bouncing baby boy.

  Next, FD’s doctors decided to analyse skin from his right ankle to see if they could shed some light on his ‘true’ gender. In FD’s skin, but not his blood, they found evidence of some Y chromosome material. So whereas his blood said that he was some kind of abnormal female, his skin said he was a genetically normal male. It wasn’t so much that FD was both male and female but that the toddler was a chimaera: different parts of his body appeared to have been made from cells containing different DNA – that is, from different beings altogether.

  The question was, how did the child get this way? One possible answer might be seen in the case of a woman, known in the literature only as ‘Jane from Boston’, who had needed a kidney transplant. Jane had three sons, all of whom were willing to donate a kidney to her, if they proved to be a suitable donor. And the likelihood was that, since children share half their DNA with their mother, at least one would turn out to be a good match. Jane had every reason to expect good news when the test results came in. Instead, she found herself opening an officious letter from the hospital informing her that two of her three sons were not actually her kin.