APA Dictionary of Psychology

chimera

Updated on 04/19/2018

an organism composed of two or more kinds of genetically dissimilar cells. For example, a chimera may have received a transplant of genetically different tissue, such as bone marrow, or it may have been produced by grafting an embryonic part of one animal onto the embryo of a genetically different animal; the graft may be either from a different species (a xenograft) or from a genetically nonidentical member of the same species (an allograft).
an illusion of the imagination, sometimes something desired but impossible to realize. —chimeric adj.

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