If you’re at the hospital and you get pumped full of blood, how come it doesn’t change your genetics? Is blood unrelated to that sort of thing and I’m just stupid?
In: Biology
For the same reason that getting a bacterial infection doesn’t change your genetics. Those cells you get aren’t part of your body, they’re just swimming around in it. Humans aren’t just one organism, we’re colonies of trillions of organisms. Some of those organisms, the human cells, are directly related to one-another like a big family. Other organisms, like bacteria in the small intestine, are friends we’ve picked up that help us digest food and fight off mean bacteria, but that aren’t related to us and aren’t passed down to our kids. Yet other organisms, like malaria parasites, are things that live inside us but that we’d rather didn’t do that.
We take foreign DNA inside us all the time, and very little of it modifies our own DNA. The only ones that do are some kinds of viruses, and they only do it to the cells they encounter, so only a small portion of the body is modified by those viruses. On average, your DNA remains unchanged.
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