The Science of a Soap Opera Plot Twist

My sister Kristina and I, both scientists and natural skeptics, find that it’s more difficult for us than most people to suspend our disbelief when it comes to soap operas. In a make-believe world where cataclysmic-explosion amnesiacs occur every summer, evil look-alikes saunter about seducing the unsuspecting at every turn and wayward distant relatives shake down family trees as often as Shakira shakes the sweat off her hips, it’s easy to dismiss storylines into the “ain’t never gonna happen” category. But every now and then, we find ourselves wondering:

Me: Did you watch “One Life to Live” today?
Kristina: Yeah, can you believe that Nicki claimed that her twins were fathered by two different men?
Me: And I’m supposed to buy the fact that it happened a week apart? Seriously, I’m not dumb!
Both of us: Ha! Ha!
Both of us: (Silence)
Me: Do you think that can really happen?

Well, it turns out it can. It’s called heteropaternal superfecundation and it’s ridiculously rare, but it’s not impossible. So, my defiant attitude toward soap operas tempered, I decided to investigate strange-but-hey-maybe-it-could-happen story lines of the legendary character Erica Kane, a former actress, model, author, and talk-show host played to immense popularity by Susan Lucci. Her life on “All My Children” was full of mysteries:

Mystery 1: Erica Kane is living as peacefully as can be expected with her eighth husband, Dmitri Marick, when a young woman named Kendall Hart shows up on her doorstep. Kendall accuses her of being the mother that abandoned her at birth and offers no proof other than her word and a strange birthmark on her neck. Can a birthmark really prove that Erica Kane is Kendall Hart’s baby mama?

Can it really happen? While I highly doubt that the birthmark defense could stand on its own in a court of law, it’s not impossible. The majority of birthmarks born to infants fade during childhood. However, the ones that linger stubbornly into adulthood are often the result of cutaneous vascular malformations. They occur where localized regions of blood vessel formation, or angiogenesis, are disrupted. In some families, these normally sporadic occurrences can recur through generations with a dominant inheritance pattern. Since Mona, Erica’s mother, recognized Kendall’s birthmark as one she and Erica both had, it is safe to say that the birthmark was passed on from one generation to the next.

Mystery 2: Erica and her fifth husband, Travis Montgomery, expect a baby girl, Bianca, but Erica develops toxemia late in her pregnancy. Considering her risk factors, how likely is she to develop this?

Can it really happen? Maybe. Pregnancy-induced toxemia, also known as pre-eclampsia, is a fairly common cluster of problems including high blood pressure and excessive protein excretion. It affects about 7% of all pregnancies but is not linked to a specific cause.

African-American women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with pre-eclampsia than Ms. Kane and the rest of lily-white Pine Valley. Obese women are also more likely to be diagnosed. Erica was an ex-runway model. (She also stands a mighty 5’2”, which sheds doubt on her supposed modeling career, but that’s not the issue here.)

On the other hand, women who were born small for their gestational age have a higher risk of developing pre-eclampsia during their own pregnancies. The petite frame of the author of “Raising Kane” seems to fit that description well. Hypertension also increases the risk, and considering that during her pregnancy she had not only been shot by her half-sister Silver’s mother, Goldie, but also harbored a secret attraction to the baby’s father’s brother, I’d venture to say she may have had high-blood pressure from stress.

Mystery 3: Erica Kane hires Josh Madden to produce her talk show, “New Beginnings.” Josh lines up his father, Greg Madden, a well-known fertility expert, to be one of the first guests. Erica can’t place where she had met Dr. Madden until a bizarre series of events reveals that Dr. Madden had not only performed her abortion a few years back but developed a creepy obsession with her and implanted her aborted embryo into his own wife using a revolutionary new technique.

Can it really happen? There are so many things wrong with this, I can’t even wrap my brain around it. The biggest hurdle with this particular story line is that the techniques by which abortion is performed don’t exactly lend themselves to excising an embryo viable enough to survive in another woman’s womb. A more plausible scenario might find Dr. Madden harvesting Erica’s eggs during the abortion.  While it seems unlikely that he could pass off such an invasive procedure without her knowledge, a ne’er-do-well anesthesiologist in Greg’s villainous clinical staff could explain away a multitude of questions. Eggs, once harvested, could be matured with hormone treatment and then fertilized. At that point, Mrs. Madden, for no particularly reasonable explanation other than to move the plot forward, could elect to transfer Erica’s fertilized egg into her body and carry it to term.

The Unlikely Verdict:
Using Erica Kane’s currently known offspring as an example, it seems that the science behind the drama of soap story lines isn’t entirely incorrect. But maybe that’s not as surprising as it seems. A lot of weird and crazy things pop up in scientific and medical research. Who, for example, would have thought you could grow a human ear on the back of a mouse? Who would have believed that one day we could make fluorescent green pigs? Keeping in mind those miracles of nature might help suspend the disbelief the next time a pint-sized, ringlet-haired child soap star “grows” into a sultry brooding teenager after a summer “away.” Hey, it could happen.

References:
Barden. Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2006.
Mulliken and Glowacki. Plast Reconstr Surg. 1982.
Trogstad, Skrondal, Stoltenberg, Magnus, Nesheim and Eskild. Am J Med Genet A. 2004.
Vikkula, Boon and Mulliken. Matrix Biol. 2001.
Zetterstrom, Lindeberg, Haglund, Magnuson, and Hanson. BJOG. 2007.