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 |  Subject: ~~Astonishing story of twins separated at birth ~~  Mon Jun 18, 2012 12:44 am | |
|  THEY were the ultimate guinea pigs -- cruelly separated and secretly studied as part of a research project into whether human behaviour is the result of nature or nurture.
For 35 years, identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein didn't know the other existed.
Their remarkable reunion three years ago and their experiences of trying to make up for lost time are emotionally laid bare in their jointly written book: Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited.
Their recollections have again stirred outrage over the clandestine medical research conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by one of the world's leading experts in child psychiatry, New York psychiatrist Dr Peter Neubauer. Dr Neubauer worked in collaboration with adoption agency Louise Wise Services in New York at the time of his study. A consultant to the agency, child psychologist Dr Viola Bernard, believed twins should be separated to improve their psychological development.
So Schein and Bernstein were sent to different families in New York and studied secretly. Separating twins was outlawed in New York State in 1980.
From 1953 to 1997, Dr Neubauer studied five sets of identical twins and one set of triplets from the Wise agency. Four in the study are still unaware they have a twin.
Schein and Bernstein were dropped from the project as infants because they were developing at different rates. They were adopted in 1968.
Dr Neubauer's research was the only nature-versus-nurture social study of its kind in history that looked at twins from birth.
"When the families adopted these children, they were told their child was part of an ongoing child study. But of course they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes," Bernstein told America's National Public Radio.
The archives of Dr Neubauer's work will remain secret until 2066, after being donated to Yale University. In Identical Strangers, published this week in the US, Bernstein and Schein say Dr Neubauer told them it would be harmful if those in the study saw the data. Speaking from his New York office, Dr Neubauer told the Sunday Herald Sun the study was "done to benefit the twins, not in order to damage them". He said the twins in the study were separated by the agency and not by the research team.
"They have been suggestions that we were participants in the separation, which is incorrect," he says.
He refused to discuss the study's research findings.
"From the beginning, we have been asked for our findings and we have refused to do so for various clinical reasons," he said.
BERNSTEIN, a freelance writer and mother of two, and Schein, a writer and filmmaker, were born to a 28-year-old who suffered bipolar disorder and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
They found out about each other by chance. In 2002, Schein was living in Paris and had not bothered searching for her birth mother. But when she turned 33 - the age at which her mother died - her curiosity took her down a remarkable path.
She contacted the New York State Adoption Information Registry. About six months later, a letter from Louise Wise Services arrived, telling her: "You were born at 12.51pm as the 'younger' of twin girls."
It was stunning revelation. Bernstein got a similar jolt when she received a surprise call from the registry telling her she was an identical twin and her sister wanted to track her down. She told The Brooklyn Paper she was "in a physical state of shock, so I just went into reporter mode and took notes. Then I broke down into tears".
They met over coffee in New York's East Village in 2004.
"We kind of gingerly patted each other, which was funny, there was no tearful hug," Bernstein told public radio.
"And then we began to inspect each other. It was like, you know, monkeys in a zoo that we were kind of inspecting each other's bodies. I remember I said, 'Do you have chubby knees?'
"And I glanced down below the hem of her skirt and saw her knees were quite cute and I always thought of mine as kind of chubby. So I thought: 'Why did she get the cute knees?'
"It was just a natural instinct to start comparing . . . we had 35 years to catch up on. How do you start asking somebody, 'What have you been up to since we shared a womb?' "
THEY discovered similarities: they both sucked the same pointer and middle fingers, began their menstrual cycle before 13, studied film at university, edited their high school newspapers and took pride in their typing speed.
Bernstein said: "Twins really do force us to question what is it that makes each of us who we are. Since meeting Elyse, it is undeniable that genetics play a huge role - probably more than 50 per cent.
"It's not just our taste in music or books; it goes beyond that. In her, I see the same basic personality. And yet, eventually, we had to realise that we're different people with different life histories."
As they pieced together their pasts, the question of why they were separated was staring at them. Schein and Bernstein tracked down Dr Neubauer, who agreed to talk to them in an informal meeting, but would not be quoted.
When they first rang him, Schein writes in Identical Strangers, it was "like he's the evil scientist and we are the lab rats who have come back to haunt him," and that they both "crack up laughing".
Schein told the Sunday Herald Sun "he still expresses no remorse". As Bernstein put it: "He had a clinical interest in us. But we didn't want to give him the satisfaction of studying us. We stonewalled him."
Legal action crossed their minds, but they wanted to get on with their lives and not become victims.
"We felt that our lives were orchestrated by these puppet masters who put their own psychiatric research before the needs of us and these twins and triplets and we were furious about that," Schein says. While the twins were dropped from the research project, Dr Neubauer continued his work on the other subjects. The project was funded in part by America's National Institute of Mental Health. Lawrence Wright, author of Twins, which examines twins studies, said Dr Neubauer believed "twins posed such a burden to parents and to themselves in the form of certain developmental hazards that adopted twins were better off being raised separately, with no knowledge of their twinship".
The children in the study were filmed, researched and quizzed.
"Twins have offered a unique opportunity to study to what extent nature versus nurture influences the way we develop, the people that we turn out to be," Wright told the public radio. He noted that the Neubauer study was different from others because it followed twins from infancy.
"From a scientific point of view, it's beautiful. It's practically the perfect study. But this study would never happen today," Wright said.
THE most famous of the group in Dr Neubauer's research was identical triplets Eddy Galland, Robert Shafran and David Kellman, who were reunited when they were 19 in a strange twist of events in 1980, according to New York newspaper Newsday.
Shafran went to study at New York's Sullivan County College in Loch Sheldrake, but his classmates mistook him for a student - Galland - who had been enrolled the previous semester.
Kellman, studying at Queens College, saw the Newsday pictures and contacted the pair -- he looked like them.
They became overnight sensations and even had a few bit-part acting jobs in Desperately Seeking Susan and Cheers.
Galland killed himself in 1995, Newsday reported.
As Bernstein and Schein write in their book: "After Mengele's monstrous experiments on twins in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, the studies dwindled. The idea that behaviour was inborn was generally frowned upon and even considered racist."
Dr Phill Brock, chairman of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said the debate of nature versus nurture had moved on to "nature via nurture".
Dr Brock said the field of epigenetics showed pre-programmed genes and cells were activated by experience, circumstance and environment. He said things in nature require nurture for them to be turned on and then it is a cascade effect.
"You have genes govern where the actual nerve cells go to, or what sorts of nerve cells they become," he said, adding that meant "the old sort of dilemma -- is it nature or is it nurture -- was no longer a scientifically valid question".
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