The Mail on Sunday reports that a French woman received a kidney of Princess Diana’s in Toulouse in 1997 and is now peppering her conversation with fragments of English. There are a number of suspicious elements to the story, however.
bq. “I found myself speaking English to my friends, something I don’t normally do because I have no reason to,” she says. “I cannot explain why I did this.”
bq. Is this evidence of a fanciful nature, or an indication she had indeed received an organ from an English-speaker? Improbable though it sounds, there are many documented accounts of organ recipients taking on characteristics of their donors. …
bq. Scientists have termed this phenomenon ‘cellular memory’. Professor Candice Pert, a molecular biologist, believes every cell has its own mind and, if transplanted, the cells of the first body carry messages into the second body.
I think Stephen King must have done something on this.
My liver would probably confer fluent Polish on its container
Haha – I think a lot of my students over the years have come to my lessons hoping for some kind of a miracle without actually having to do anything. It’s a good job they hadn’t read this story and been foolish enough to believe it, or they might have attacked me with scalpels! Talk about putting your heart into your work!
I don’t know, David – there may be something in it. Don’t you think it’s suspicious that at more or less the same time this woman started speaking English, Princess Diana stopped?
Il punto è: la donna dice qualcosa di interessante? Da quel che mi ricordo Diana era abbastanza insipida.
In fact the good perfessor’s name seems to be “Candace Pert”.
Des: well, I presume it’s pronounced Candice. Unfortunately the other names led nowhere, did they? I was checking up for Isabella.
Isabella: Diana came out with one or two good phrases in her TV interview, but I presume she was coached for that. Apparently this woman is just producing fragments. It would be interesting if she were saying ‘There were three of us in this marriage’!
>>It would be interesting if she were saying ‘There were three of us in this marriage’!