On November 6 1955, a story appeared on the front page of the Sunday Pictorial that was to double the newspaper’s circulation in a single day. Sporting the headline, “Doctors now say it doesn’t always need a man to make a baby”, the tabloid shouted that virgin births were no myth, and that there was a scientist who could prove it. The rare biological process which would enable this to happen was known as parthenogenesis, the paper informed its readers.
But the Pictorial’s editors didn’t stop there. Halfway down the page appeared three words, in bold block capitals: “Find The Case”. Sensationally, the paper was inviting women to come forward if they believed their daughters were the result of a virgin birth. If any woman’s case was proved correct, by a panel of leading doctors, she and her daughter were set to make medical – indeed, human – history. For the next year, the search for a virgin mother would grip the nation, and the world. The paper’s circulation figures, meanwhile, grew to an unprecedented six million.
One of the readers most intrigued by the invitation was Emmimarie Jones, a housewife in her thirties. Despite the normality of her existence, Emmimarie had a secret. She was convinced her 11-year-old daughter, Monica, was the result of a virgin birth. Monica would have been conceived in the summer of 1944. Her mother was being treated for rheumatism in a women’s hospital in Hanover, in Emmimarie’s native Germany. Emmimarie recovered, but three months later, her weakness returned. When she visited her doctor, he said her unusual tiredness was simply explained – she was pregnant. Emmimarie smiled in disbelief. She knew the facts of life, and she had not been with a man. In fact, at the time she was meant to have conceived, she was confined to the hospital, surrounded by female patients and staff. Emmimarie insisted that she just needed a pick-me-up – some vitamins, perhaps. But the doctor told Emmimarie that she would soon see that he was right.
Six months later, Emmimarie crawled out of the deep underground cellars where she had been sheltering from the Allies’ bombing of Hanover, to have her child. Emmimarie’s home had been flattened during the attacks and, afterwards, she and her baby, Monica, would return to the cellars for another two years. After the war, Emmimarie married a Welsh soldier stationed in Germany, returning with him to England when his service ended.
Emmimarie could not believe her eyes when she read the Pictorial’s front page. Nervously, she wrote to the newspaper in her halting English, describing the ten years she had been “wandering and worried about the birth of my daughter.” “I honestly belief that she has no father,” she said. “If you care to have all the facts please let me know.
The letter reached the desk of the geneticist Helen Spurway, the woman who had first grabbed the tabloid’s attention. In 1955, the biologist had found what she considered to be conclusive evidence that males weren’t necessary for conception. She had discovered that if you separate female guppies from males when they are born, the females still go on to reproduce. Further, the broods these virgin females hatch are almost entirely female. How was this possible?
For Spurway, the most likely explanation was parthenogenesis, the process whereby an egg starts dividing inside a female without being fertilised, through some hormonal trigger. Spurway knew parthenogenesis occurred in some insects. In the Fifties, scientists had even managed to force the eggs of cats and ferrets to develop into embryos, without sperm being involved, so the process could conceivably occur in mammals. As Spurway knew, a normal, unfertilised egg only has one set of DNA. This means that any offspring produced through parthenogenesis could never have features that its mother did not. That, Spurway thought, was the key to proving a case of true virgin birth in a human.
Spurway shared her findings at a public talk, suggesting there might be women who suspected they had experienced a virgin birth, but didn’t mention it for fear of ridicule. But if such women knew that their cases could be studied by scientists, they might come forward. Spurway added that the odds were that a candidate child would be a girl and the spitting image of her mother. “No faking would be possible,” she said. “Blood grouping and skin grafting would give the proof.” Audrey Whiting, a Sunday Pictorial journalist, had attended the talk, and she knew a scoop when she saw one. The paper’s search for a virgin mother was born.
Remarkably, 19 candidates came forward. Eleven were immediately eliminated: they had thought that an intact hymen must indicate they had had a virgin birth. But remnants of the hymen can persist in some women after vaginal intercourse. Under the banner, “You ask: what exactly is a virgin birth?” the Pictorial published a clearer explanation: a virgin birth child need not be a woman’s first child, and certainly need not be the child of a virgin. After that, just eight candidates were left. Of those, six daughters had a different blood type from their mothers. Another pair was thrown out because their eye colour did not match.
Only one mother and daughter remained: Emmimarie and Monica Jones. Along with all the preliminary tests, they stood up to more sophisticated trials; both had the ability to taste phenylthiourea, a chemical which has the property of either tasting very bitter or being virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic make-up of the taster. Then they took a substance secretor test, which looks at whether you have the so-called secretor factor, something like an honorary blood group. The genes that make you a secretor are found on chromosome 19, so the test was a way of determining whether the pair had the same genes at that location. Again, Monica was the spitting image of her mother.
The final preliminary test looked at patterns in the blood-serum proteins of mother and child. They were an identical match. But there was one final test they were required to pass. Spurway believed it could provide the conclusive proof that Monica was fatherless. The test was a skin graft.
Spurway proposed taking a piece of Monica’s skin and grafting it onto Emmimarie’s body. If the mother’s body allowed this graft to persist indefinitely, it 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. Shortly before easter, in 1956, the pair left their tidy English home for the secret location of their operation. The grafts were done both ways: Emmimarie was transplanted with her daughter’s skin; Monica wore her mother’s.
Once Emmimarie’s and Monica’s blood samples had been found to be a match, the results had been made public. The newspaper noted that “several of the medics who had been sceptical about the investigation now became keenly interested”.
But there was a problem with the skin grafts. The piece of Monica’s skin grafted onto her mother was shed in four weeks. The skin from Emmimarie grafted onto Monica remained healthy for longer, but after six weeks started to detach. In other words, Monica’s skin contained something that Emmimarie’s immune system didn’t recognise, while Emmimarie’s skin didn’t offend Monica’s system as badly. Was this a sign that Monica had DNA that her mother did not? 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. The full details of their tests were also revealed in The Lancet, which published “Parthenogenesis in Human Beings” by Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. On the skin grafts, The Lancet concluded that they indicated that Monica’s genes did not in fact match her mother’s, despite all the previous evidence to the contrary. Yet there was a scientific curiosity here. 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 her mother, but one from the mother would not necessarily take on her child. Yet, the opposite had happened in Emmimarie and Monica’s test. What on earth was going on?
In such a case, Balfour-Lynn wrote, interpretation was very difficult, making rigorous proof impossible. True, the Joneses had failed the most stringent test, but that didn’t negate the validity of the first three; it only muddied the waters. The study concluded that Emmimarie’s claim that her daughter was fatherless must be taken seriously. “Doctors have been unable to prove that any man took part in the creation of this child”, screamed the Sunday Pictorial.
Nowadays, of course, we wouldn’t have to rely on such proxy methods of testing as skin grafts: we can look into our genomes, using our knowledge of DNA to run things like paternity testing. If we had Emmimarie and Monica’s skin, or blood or saliva samples today, there would be no room for doubt as to whether or not she had a father. Furthermore, in 1984, geneticists finally discovered a mechanism wrapped around our DNA that made natural virgin birth in humans – and all mammals – an absolute impossibility. Some of the genes that we inherit from our mother are locked so as to be unreadable, and these restrictions mean no female mammal could simply pass on all of her genes to create a child that was 100 per cent her own. Half of our code must come from a male. The one thing that seems clear, however, is that Emmimarie must have believed her claims. To doctors and journalists alike, she came across as a highly sincere, well-adjusted human being. It also seems unlikely she would have persisted with a virgin-birth hoax once she learned of the long battery of tests that she and her daughter would have to submit to. Were she a con artist, she would also need to have genuinely believed that she could pull the wool over the eyes of a panel of esteemed doctors – or risk being exposed as a fraud. But how did Emmimarie fall pregnant in the first place? We shall never know for certain, but surely the most likely explanation is that she was taken advantage of, perhaps under sedation, during her long stay in hospital.
But it is also intriguing to consider that the scientists had still discovered something extremely rare – something that would not be recorded again until 40 years later, when, in similar circumstances, a boy was identified who had his mother’s blood, but not her skin.
The child, known in his medical records only as FD, had been taken for a blood test by his parents, to investigate a facial abnormality he’d developed. When samples of his blood and skin were analysed, what DNA they contained intimated that a fascinating and highly improbable sequence of events had taken place around the time of his conception. FD had originated from an egg that had broken the laws of nature. Activated by some hormonal trigger, as Helen Spurway had speculated 40 years earlier, the egg had become an embryo without waiting to be fertilised. Next, miraculously, along came a sperm from his father. It should have arrived too late to have any effect, since normally, after an egg is activated, a cascade of chemical signals tell the egg’s outer layer to harden. But it found a way through.
The unfeasibly rare process is known as “partial parthenogenesis”. As a result, there were parts of FD that contained only his mother’s genes – when his blood was tested it contained only XX (female) chromosomes, whereas his skin had both X and Y chromosomes. Were the intense similarities between Monica and her mother also the result of this process? Although we shall never know definitively without DNA samples, it’s clearly a possibility.
For Emmimarie herself, in her firm belief that her daughter had no father, the medical “proof” was as good as she was going to get. A Harley Street psychologist was called in to give her advice on how she should break the unusual news to her daughter. Emmimarie told the Pictorial, “I made a cup of tea and Monica and I sat down together...I told her that, unlike other people, there were only two of us.” Monica showed no signs of shock. After a few minutes’ silence, and with a big smile, Monica hugged her mother, saying, “Well, that makes it all the better really. We’re just two very close people – aren’t we mummy?”