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Like many kids, I once dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

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For Scientific American Science Quickly, non-invasive prenatal blood testing, or NIPT, has been a fairly routine aspect of pregnancy care. This testing searches a pregnant person's blood for fragments of DNA that have been shed by the placenta.

NIPT is designed to spot chromosomal disorders in the fetus, but in rare cases the blood test can detect something else.

Cancer in the parent.

My guest today is Laura Herscher, a genetic counselor and director of student research at the

Sarah Lawrence College Joan H. Mark's graduate program in human genetics.

She recently wrote a piece for Scientific American about the researchers working to understand

how NIPT finds cancer in some pregnant people.

She's here to tell us more about the incidental detection of

maternal neoplasia through non-invasive cell-free DNA analysis study, or Identify for short.

Laura, thank you so much for coming on to chat today. So you recently wrote about something

called the Identify study. How did you get interested in the story? Well, the first time I heard about

...