welcome to the sausage of science i'm chris it's great to meet you first question is always about getting to know more about the person we're talking to how the sausage of the science is made starts with your background where you're from how'd you get into anthropology how did you find your way to microchimerism research we'll get to what that is in a few minutes

Yeah, great.

I'm so happy to be on here.

Huge fan of the show and love chatting about all these things.

I grew up in Michigan, so I was just outside of Metro Detroit, Michigan.

My undergrad, I mean, I didn't know what I was doing.

This is how I got into it is not knowing what I was going to do with my life.

Yes, yes.

Which would suggest that there could be some kind of a connection again, or, like, a, a correlation, right? Like, more cells from the fetus, more cancer, potentially.

But then there's other papers.

This is where it gets really confusing.

Um, there's other studies showing that no, actually, those cells might be in there trying to help fight the cancer, and actually these cells are protective.

And so it's a big, like, we don't know what they're doing.

Are they fighting the tumor? Are they making, you know, the immune system more aggressive and making this cancer worse? And we d- we don't know the answer to that.

There'll be sort of pushing, and pulling, and hurting, and healing, and, you know, it's a re-relationship we can explore forever and never fully untangle.

To be sure.