File this under things I don't have to worry about *exactly*:

The popular science journal Nature has a story on a woman donating her eggs to her own daughter, who has a medical condition that makes her unable of creating eggs of her own. It's the first time this has happened, and has ethicists raising their eyebrows. If the girl uses the donated eggs, her daughter will also be her own half-sister.

At least that's now Nature is pitching the story. There's a rather well thought-out reader comment that contradicts this. It's written by Joan Wheeler a woman who was adopted but didn't know it until later in life.

She has a problem with the technology in that women are told, "Oh, you can't create eggs on your own, but you can have a baby of your own," when (in Wheeler's view) the baby is really someone else's - the pregnant woman in this case is carrying someone else's child. Raising someone else's child. The pregnancy and child-rearing is a fictional parenthood - real parenthood has something to do with genes.

She's bothered by the idea of having a hidden history. That's the thing that I suppose I *do* have to worry about.

But I'm bothered by the idea that child-raising isn't what qualifies a parent as a "real" parent. I've written about memetics before; the idea that ideas themselves can be like genes - they replicate and get carried down through generations. Memes. The way I pause in mid-sentence while thinking (just like my dad) or the way I tell callers the person they're looking for went mad and we shot 'em (just like my mom) might go back thousands of years, and might well be continued in Daughter and son (son!) and their grandkids down the line.

This "real" thing - only DNA is real - that's a dangerous meme, isn't it? I'm afraid it might be contagious, too. How does one vaccinate against it?