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Call it a scientific oddity-or a medical miracle. A girl who grew up with a serious genetic immune disease was apparently cured in her 30s by one of her chromosomes shattering into pieces and reassembling. Scientists traced the woman's improvement to the removal of a harmful gene through this scrambling of DNA in one of her blood stem cells-a recently identified phenomenon that until now had only been linked to cancer.

The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta between the mother and the fetus, taking up residence in many organs of the body including the lung, thyroid, muscle, liver, heart, kidney and skin. These may have a broad range of impacts, from tissue repair and cancer prevention to sparking immune disorders.

The team was grafting skin from one strain of mice to another. The new skin tended to get destroyed by the recipient animals' immune systems. But when the group injected cells from the donor mice into developing fetuses, the mice that were born were much more likely to accept the skin graft. It seemed they had been primed to the foreign cells while in the womb, and developed a tolerance.