"A chimera is essentially a single organism that's made up of cells from two or more 'individuals'—that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms."One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a fetus can absorb its twin...
A person can also be a chimera if they undergo a bone marrow transplant. During such transplants, which can be used for example to treat leukemia, a person will have their own bone marrow destroyed and replaced with bone marrow from another person...
More commonly, people may exhibit so-called microchimerism—when a small fraction of their cells are from someone else. This can happen when a woman becomes pregnant, and a small number of cells from the fetus migrate into her blood and travel to different organs.
A 2015 study suggested that this happens in almost all pregnant women, at least temporarily.... In some cases, fetal cells may stay in a woman's body for years. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the brains of 59 women ages 32 to 101, after they had died. They found 63 percent of these women had traces of male DNA from fetal cells in their brains....
Wow. That last one is kind of disturbing!
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