Taddy, I'm normally among the first to leap to the defence of 'science' but I think Pintohoo had a point. The problem here appears, from the story as reported in the OP, to have been that the authorities placed too much trust in the 'science' (or at least in the technology, derived from the science) over and above the apparently obvious observable factual situation. However, I'm not sure that was 'arrogance' merely an acceptance of incomplete science by those who didn't fully understand the science. It's worth mentioning that good science is virtually the opposite of arrogance - good science accepts the possibility of being wrong (or incomplete), and embraces good observation that makes the science seem wrong, as that helps make the science better.
Further, there's a twist. Science stories are often poorly reported in the popular press, and it appears that may have happened in this case. The Wikipedia article states: "A breakthrough came when a lawyer for the prosecution found an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about a similar case in Boston involving a woman named Karen Keegan.[2] He realised that Fairchild's case might also be caused by chimerism. Fairchild's prosecutors suggested this possibility to her lawyers, who arranged further testing." So (if this is correct) the authorities were far from arrogant or 'blindly trusting'. Sorry Pintohoo.
