Separated At Birth, But Why?

novy.

Posted to SciTech on Sat Jan 05, 2008 at 08:27:20 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

On 9 October 1968, twin girls were born in New York and put up for adoption. As part of some study being conducted by "a leading US child psychologist with the co-operation of prestigious New York adoption agency Louise Wise Services ... to discover how identical twins would react to being raised in different family backgrounds", they were placed in separate families and never told about one another.

In 2003, one of these girls decided to find out more about circumstances of her birth and found out about her twin. She made arrangements to meet her, and they have become very close. So close that they cooperated in writing "Identical Strangers", their memoirs as sisters separated and then reunited.

They discovered that they had been dropped from that twins study very early on, and then they decided to confront Dr. Peter Neubauer about what had happened to them. At first he wouldn't speak to them, but later agreed to meet. One twin commented,

"It was quite surreal ... we were his kind of 'lab rats' coming back to see the great doctor. We had all these questions for him. But he was very quick to turn the tables and it was clear that he was seeing this as an opportunity to continue his study. He wanted to see how we turned out and question us about our development... I really was hoping that he would take responsibility for what he had done so many years ago. He refuses to be open to the possibility that they were wrong. No matter what, we can't make up for the 35 years that we lost. We are different people because of being separated."

Not only did Dr. Neubauer refuse to consider any possibility that what he had done was morally wrong or answer any of their questions, but as it turned out all records of that experiment have been sealed until 2066, presumably after both they and Neubauer have died. They have concluded that his experiment was about "nature versus nurture" and about "hereditariness of mental illness" (their birth mother spent part of her life in psychiatric care).

But who authorises these sorts of experiments on innocent people? Who seals relevant documents and enforces their secret status? Were these twins victimised by another previously undisclosed unethical secret CIA experiment?  What would happen if they sued to unseal those records? What should happen? How many other similar experiments may be ongoing even now? Can anything be done to stop them?