It’s a common trope in medical and legal dramas: identical twins have committed a crime, or gone missing, or otherwise become embroiled in scandal and danger. DNA testing is the modern identification miracle, but identical twins have the same DNA, so how do we know who has done what, or who has been where?

“It wasn’t me, your honor, it was my brother.” One is a killer, and the other is innocent. It’s script-writers' delight, but unfortunately for them, it’s about to change.

No replication system is perfect, even the mechanism of heredity. The human genome is composed of 6+ billion basepairs, which means 6+ billion opportunities for transcription and translation errors whenever a cell divides (mutations). Despite complex regulatory mechanisms, on rare occasion, an error slips through.

In other words, identical twins start with the same DNA, but they don’t quite end up that way. Mutations occur randomly, so over time, a pair of identical twins may accumulate a couple dozen single-point differences among 6+ billion basepairs. It’s certainly difficult to find them… but it’s not impossible.

“Normal” DNA testing targets a small percentage of a person’s genome, but to locate a small handful of errors (essentially a needle in a needlestack) the entire genome has to be sequenced. In the past, this wasn’t technologically feasible, but modern technology has brought the entire process down to a month or so.² In the case of murder or other heinous crimes, it’s time well-spent.

In a twist of medical fate, something similar happens every day in ORs. Young doctors work for many years to earn the right to hold a scalpel. They sacrifice time with family, friends, and usually more than a decade of their lives to become cardiothoracic surgeons. Yet all that can be undone by a silent assassin, indistinguishable twins, as it were.

I’m talking about the CABG grafts themselves.

From the outside, a compromised graft looks exactly like a patent graft. To a surgeon’s five senses, the grafts may as well be identical twins. A nonpatent graft doesn’t commit murder in the traditional sense, but the outcome is the same—a dead person who should have lived.

In fact, there’s only one way to tell the difference while leaving the graft in its native state. And it doesn’t take a month. It only takes a few seconds while the patient is still on the table.

Click here to find out what it is.

Thanks for reading,

             Transonic System, Inc.

                                 The Measure of Better Results

References:

Human genome - Wikipedia

twin-dna-test-why-identical-criminals-may-no-longer-be-safe.pdf