Exploring Twinhood, Adoption, and Ethics

Do they, at this point, do they know that they're twins? Some do, some don't. So that's another issue, of course. I don't know how to handle it myself. How, you know, how many twins are there and how many are... Are aware that they're twins and how many are not. I mean, what's the scope of the problem in that sense? I don't get it, I don't want to talk about that. Let's go. Hey, My name is Howard Burak. Born in New York City. I guess I found out later on when I was smart enough to know any better that I was adopted. We have two loving parents that were my mom and dad for sure. I mean there could be no other. I grew up in Westbury, Long Island, New York and then we moved up to Brookline, Massachusetts. And my parents always used to tell me that I was more special because they chose me as opposed to just had me. It seemed like something special to be adopted, I don't know. It's a little bit more involved than just, you know, our mother gave us up for adoption because she couldn't handle us and, you know, they ended up separating us. I'm sure that happens, but this was by design. Some scientists in 1960s were deciding to study nature versus nurture. Evidently they found a way through the adoption agency to place twins with different families. My father and mother were never told that there was a twin brother. And I were put in strangely similar family backgrounds. Our fathers were both business executives, mothers were housewives. We both had sisters three years older. Sent the paperwork, I got a call from someone from the Louise Wise Agency, and she proceeded to tell me that I have an identical twin brother, which pretty much out of the blue floored me. I mean, what do you say to that? That was... It's tough because every day I just had that on my mind, every day. Who is this guy? Where does he live? How do I find him? She said I had a twin brother who had been looking for me for a couple years and said I almost drove off the road when I heard that because that was the last thing I was ever expecting to hear. Looking out in our pool where we like to spend a lot of our time when the weather is real nice. It's not been very good to us today. These are pictures of the children when they were quite small. Debbie's and Doug's children. Well, we were married a couple of years, and we figured we'd try and have a baby. And nothing happened. And we said, let's try adoption. And that's how we got to Louise Wise. They gave us Douglas and said, we'll let you have this child, but we're going to monitor it. So it was a question of, if I say no, they won't give me the child. I think there was a certain amount of coercion to our permitting them. to conduct the study. They made it sound like this was to everybody's benefit to see how smart this kid is, because I don't know him. Here we're adopting a child, we don't know him, we don't know his background. But it never dawned on me, why are they coming back so many times? Oh! I thought you had it. I want, I want Sigali and Anderson. The kids had a playroom downstairs. The two of them would play. But all of a sudden, I don't want to play anymore. And he'd just slam everything away from him. And Debbie would come upstairs. She says, he's playing so nice, he doesn't want to play with me. I went down, I said, what's wrong, Douglas? Nothing. Something was missing in this kid's life. As happy as we thought he was, he was not happy. He'd fight with kids in school. He'd have, uh, uh, he'd interrupt his playing and suddenly erupt in anger. There's very little question in my mind. Doug's original anger revolved around the fact that he knew there was something missing in his life, but he didn't know what it was. So the Louise Wise Agency was an adoption agency, placed children... from unwed mothers, but it also advised mothers, primarily Jewish ones, who were pregnant, how they could manage their infants, who they were relinquishing for adoption. I guess they sought outside assistance to do this in the best way possible. And one of their contacts was Dr. Viola Bernard, a psychiatrist from Columbia University. Twins were... purposefully being separated because of a misguided, unproven notion on the part of Viola Bernard that twins are better off being in separate families. There is nothing, no basis to ever support that. Albert, the effeminate boy, arrives late. The therapist welcomes him. Albert is cautious, though seemingly not too frightened. Note how Albert delicately pats his hair and adjusts his collar. His movements are not characteristic of a real boy. JBG, Jewish Board of Guardians, had a number of floors, and some of them were clinical operations. It was all for young children. So there were some clinics going on. There were other research projects that were happening there. The Child Development Center was run by Neubauer, who was a very prominent child psychoanalyst. So he was my ultimate boss. But I didn't see him very much. He didn't come in that often. And I was only part-time. So when I was hired on in 1968 as a research assistant, I was mainly supposed to help with the organization analysis of the data. We wanted to see if we could tease out some of the subtleties of these child-rearing processes and family dynamics and how that might affect the development of these two individuals who were genetically identical. but are being raised in totally different families. It was amazing how disorganized the project was. When I realized that, see I went into this with the idea that I was going to get a dissertation out of it and that I would carve out some piece that would be my dissertation and then I discovered that it was just chaos. Flying out there and I... I remember being more nervous about that one event than anything. I was out of my mind on that whole plane ride. Hi! Dude, my God! How you doing? Oh, man. Wow. A little bigger. Good eating, good living. What was I saying? I mean, same luck, same luck. Look in the mirror. Oh, man. It's definitely an eerie feeling. You're talking about, look at you. I'm telling you. The mind thing going on. It's not two hours. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm Ronnie. Nice to meet you. I have champagne at home. Oh, Jesus. I'll take the edge off you. Right off the bat, we pretty much hit it off, and I felt like I knew this person my whole life. It was like I knew him my whole life. I think we lived a parallel life. We lived similar, parallel. We got married the same year. We got married the same year. We had kids the same year. They both keep their wallets in their front pocket. They both don't use any condiments at all. It's not just ketchup and mustard. It's condiments in general. It was the first question Diane asked, does Doug use condiments? And I'm like, he has no use for them. If Doug had a salad, there'd be no dressing on it. You really don't meet a lot of people that would never even have salad dressing or try ketchup. And Howard's the same way. I mean, that's not usual. I mean, that's really very, very different. I know that I've said this on numerous occasions when I was growing up and I don't think I really understood it but I really felt like I was missing something in my life. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't touch it. I couldn't feel it. It's amazing that I had a twin brother and maybe that was why. Love relationships, we have sibling relationships, we have kinship relationships, but of all of those relationships, the most unusual and rare is the identical twin relationship. It's a clone. It's a replicant of you. It's precious in a way. People who are twins talk about how there's nothing else like it. Well, if it's true that the twin relationship is perhaps the closest relationship in nature, that you are closer emotionally to your twin than anyone else you will ever meet, then that has been taken away from you. You have lost that relationship, and it's incalculable. There's nothing I can think of in science that is more political than twin studies. These studies have been used to justify racism, classism, and Nazism, you know, many of the worst features of our society. And so they're potent and explosive politically, and yet they're also really useful and very helpful if you look at them soberly. Because what the studies don't say is that our genes are responsible for everything. No, they don't say that. What they say is that we're inclined to be one person or another. Sir Francis Galton in England is considered the father of the twin method. He wrote about this in the 1870s. He didn't know about the biological differences between identicals and fraternals. Nobody did. But he correctly surmised that look-alike twins shared 100% of their genes and non-look-alike twins shared some portion of their genes. And by comparing the two, then you could get some information about nature and nurture. The Neubauer study was unique in a number of ways. First, it was because twins were purposely being separated. Secondly, you never study people without their full knowledge. Families in the New York area... Had no knowledge of a twin study. They were told. They were misinformed that it was a child development study. And that is hiding basic facts. When these children grew up, some of them met. And that's really how this got exposed. Now one of the most remarkable stories I've seen in some time. A story about triplets. They were born 19 years ago and then given up. at birth for adoption, each one growing up in a different family, totally unaware that he even had a brother, let alone two. Two weeks ago, this man, Robert Chaffron, checked into a college in upstate New York. I got up there and everybody seemed to know me. Eddie, how are you? What's going on? I didn't know you were coming back. This was Bobby. Yes, this was Bobby. I was being questioned. And Bobby said, my name isn't Eddie, it's Bobby. Girls were kissing me on the mouth, and guys were slapping me on the back, and people were greeting me like I was... just an old friend and I just didn't know what was going on. And this is really Eddie, Eddie Godlin. He went to the same college last year, coincidentally. Friends discovered the connection and Eddie and Robert were reunited. It was like a choreographed thing, although it was unrehearsed. We both went, oh my God. Oh my God, oh my God, holy crap. And it was, it truly was a mirror image. Somehow, through the grapevine, Newsday got involved. The Daily News, the New York Post, AP or UPI, it was everywhere. They thought they were twins, but then David Kelman saw their picture in the paper. They looked just like him. A friend of mine came up to me with a newspaper that had a picture of two of me. It didn't have birthdays, it didn't have any hospital information, but it was painfully obvious, at least. But again, it was so surreal, I almost didn't believe it. I saw him coming to the door, and I opened it, and I looked at him, and then I closed it. And then I opened it and I looked at him and I closed it again. And he's doing what I would be doing. He's opening up the door, looking, saying, holy shit, closing the door. And then he opens the door again. He goes, oh, my God, he closes the door. And by the time I got to the door, he was opening the door. And then he says to me, you haven't seen me in 19 years, and you slam the door on my face. And I walked in and we kissed and we hugged. They really were almost identical. Their hairstyle, they had giant afros. But if anybody had an afro, they had a bigger one. You all smoked the same brand of cigarettes? Yes, yes, we did. You were all wrestlers at one time? Yes. Do you all feel like... Like you've known each other for 19 years even though you've not... Definitely. Yeah. Totally. How? Feeling. We feel it. We're all the same as soon as we start discussing our personalities. Our personalities are the same. We always talk at the same time. We can't... I'll start a sentence and he'll finish it. It was not an energy, it was a synergy. And synergy is when a combination of particles creates something much better than each individual could possibly hope for. That's what synergy means. And that's what it was. They went to Louise Wise to confront them about the fact that there were not only two, which they had acknowledged after only being forced to acknowledge, but actually three, which they had not even mentioned. And obviously... set up the study and then started to test them to see the effect of nurture in nature. And Louise Wise Stonewall then said that none of that was true. And Mort, they said, if it was a study, where was it published? I'd like to read the study. And it was never published. Alright, here are my notes. Here are interviews. And one of my very last interviews was Dr. Viola Bonnard. Okay, I've got it on now. So, say again, the emphasis of the twins is... However, occasionally there were some identical twins. If it was good for them to be placed separately... And the existing literature at the time, and this I have to emphasize, the child psychiatry literature at the time that we were talking about was of the opinion that the placement of twins who were identical in separate homes had advantages for the children. I couldn't find such literature. I wanted to cite such studies, but I never, in my research, came across anything really substantial that made the case that Dr. Bernard was making to me. Viola Bernard has talked about literature that says that twins are better off being raised apart. I know of no such studies. I've never seen anything, nothing in the literature, and I've read pretty widely, I've never seen anything that argues for the separation of twins as being better for them. Here's another interview with Dr. Neubauer. Another Peter Neubauer here. Tell me a little bit about the scope of the study and how many people were involved in it. The ATTs, for special reasons, which if I were to go into it you would understand, the study was only based on a small number of identical twins separated at birth. Yeah, I'm sure there aren't that many that one could work with. Yeah, I'm about many, many reasons to reach into this. I don't want to talk about that now. It was a true prospective study. One of the only ones. Really unusual. Yeah. I don't think he ever really acknowledged The damage that they might have done to the twins themselves and the trauma that they were preparing these children to have when they grew into adulthood and one day discovered that they were twins and that they had been deprived of that relationship their entire lives by scientists who wanted to study them. Have there been ethical questions raised about this study? Yeah, there were questions raised by a number of people when we looked for these kind of prints. I spoke once to the New York Foundling Home and she said, I said to her, but you are in the field of adoption. You separate mother and child all the time. I didn't know I was pregnant until I was in about my fourth month. I was 19 and I told my mother and she was not happy about it. You were the worst when you were pregnant and unwed. Then I went to Louise Why Services and they sent me to their home in Staten Island for unwed mothers. I was there and I'd say from about my fifth or sixth month until after I delivered. They were beautiful. A friend of mine picked me up at the home and took me to my father's house, and I know I would stay in the bathroom crying for hours on end because it broke my heart to give them up. But then I thought it would be better for them. I felt incredibly, incredibly loved. Incredibly loved. My parents were the most nurturing people ever. My mother would say things like, if I took a lie detector test, I would pass a lie detector test saying that I gave birth to you. Like, she really was just so thrilled to have both of us. I would say that I had a great childhood. I would say that I also had a lot of sadness. I have a thousand pictures of me pouting. I would pout and my mother would take a picture and how cute I am pouting. I think I ran away like 20 times. I threw more temper tantrums. It's only now as a parent thinking back about my children that I can see that maybe raising me was not the easiest thing in the world. I was able to hire a private investigator, and she said, I found your sister, but unfortunately, she's deceased. Well, the only thing I can say is, professionally, the less public I am, the more appropriate it is in my field. I don't want to be seen. Now, I got a phone call from a woman who asked, who said to me, is Marjorie here? And this was 11 years after she died, and I thought, gee, somebody must be going through some old records. And she said, who are you? I said, well, I'm her mother. What's it about? And she said, well, her twin sister is looking for her. And I fell to the floor. And I was so angry because when we were with the first child at the agency and the second child at the agency, my husband said, we love twins. If you have a pair of twins, we'll take them. This is the day we brought her home, and here she is meeting her brother for the first time, her brother meeting her. Um, yeah, March 1961, meeting Marge. She was very glum, didn't smile a lot. I just thought, okay, our son was a happy kid, she was a glum kid. There were serious people and cheerful people and everything in between, so... She didn't have many friends. She was much of a loner. We always had animals. She had a bird, Albert. She had her music. Her first suicide attempt was when she was 17. Even when she was on medication, she was still depressed. She also had guns from time to time and would go target practice, and that's how she finally killed herself. I called the police in the neighborhood, and I told them that I think something happened. I think my daughter might have shot herself. You never get over the guilt. You never get over it. That's why this is painful. And here they go and separate them of all the terrible things. Terrible, terrible thing. You know, because I often think, what would it have been like if they'd been raised together? Might it have been better? You see? Was the gloom caused because of the way they were separated? And Marge was alone a month, all by herself, after never being alone for that little brief lifetime. I went to the cemetery because now I knew where she was. And I can't tell you the feeling to look at a stone and see your birth date on a stone. I had this overwhelming desire to lie down on this spot. But I immediately went home and called my sister. mother and asked if I could plant a yew bush on there because I needed something on there. So that's me on there. How did this study come about? I tell you, I would rather not want to speak about it. Oh, really? Why? Until they have published it. Oh, uh-huh. When do you plan to publish it? I think we probably want to come out with the data in about a year or year and a half from now. Even if the study had provided some serious intelligence about behavior and so forth, even then it would be bad. But here, nothing came of it. There's no study, no anything. Bunch of locked files. It's ridiculous. I mean, there's absolutely no justification. For keeping this data out of the hands of these twins. This belongs to them. Robert, hey, it's Barry. Oh, listen, please don't give it a second thought. I'm good. I just wanted to give you a call just to touch base about some of the issues we were discussing earlier in the day about the twins study. No, not on speaker, just me. We're seeing to what extent we can get them access to documents that were generated. Documents and pictures and various other things that relate directly to them, but that apparently they've never seen. Viola Bernard Foundation here. by gives any interest, which it may have in the papers, to Columbia. So per this document, she kind of transferred any interest that they did have to Columbia. However, she did so in such a way that no one else would seem to have the ability to get access to their own materials until 2021. Well, I think your use of the term their own materials is key. You know, I mean, really, who owns this material? I mean, you know, how is it that, you know, her estate or any educational institution should be able to trump the individual's own interest in documents documenting them? The conduct that we're talking about here had the most dramatic effect on their lives. It's one thing if something like that is consensual and everybody's well informed and agrees and so on. It's another thing if... Somebody who's a health professional just sort of makes decisions unilaterally. According to the information we have, there are documents that were generated as a result of the study that are currently in the possession of Columbia University and Yale University. The study is long over. These people are, a lot of them are deceased. They're not practicing any longer. I think it's incumbent on all of us to take a good, hard, honest look at what happened. And to the extent possible, try to make it right. I'm aggravated that people are continuing to... Deny and stonewall and not accept the responsibility for what they did. I'm not looking for anything. I'm just looking for someone to say, yeah, that wasn't right. Here's your stuff. Sorry about that. You know, we're going to let those other twins know. That's important. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? Howard Purek. Hi. Larry Pearlman. Nice to meet you. Doug Roush. Nice to meet you too, Doug. It's been a while, huh? Yeah, 44 years. Exactly, yeah. Is that when you were six? Yes, yes. I actually pulled out the testing I did on you guys when you were exactly six. The way the study was set up is that during the first year of life, I think that they had visits four times a year, and then it went down to twice a year, and then once a year. So they had all this material that they didn't really know how to analyze. It wasn't a sophisticated research operation by any means. In fact, they didn't really know what they were doing from a research standpoint. But they had this terrific source of data because they had these twins who were being separated. Separated. So I know that there were ten twins at that time. Ten sets of ten? Ten altogether. It was five sets. He has researching it as a job, but for the people that were in it, it's people making decisions about your life that you have no control of, where some of them actively just lied to you outright. Lied to my parents anyway. So all this information that they gathered is locked up in these archives. What do you think is... in there that they're trying to keep from... No, there's going to be a lot of stuff there. There would have been home visits and films and there'll be psychological testing. I appreciate you acknowledging that we were part of this study because people said we weren't, so... Oh, see, that's just stupid. Well, that's what annoys you. No, you see, I just don't understand that. I mean, why would they lie? It got me thinking about... the damage that was done to the families, to the parents, who were kept in the dark about the fact that they had adopted twins. And that was a piece that I had never really thought through very much. You know, that made me sad. It really made me think how much of an injustice has been done to all of these twins who were subjects to this experiment. Nice out. I always thought there was something missing, always. And when I met my brothers, I felt that there was a piece of me that had been completed. And I can't say that what I thought I was missing might have been there. whole life was my brother's because how do you come up with something like that that's so far fetched but i can tell you that i felt complete we were babies we were babies and they had these psychologists they were going from house to house looking at a baby knowing that this baby's being deprived of his brother Eddie was the most gregarious of the three of us. Probably the best looking. If all our weight was the same, he was the best looking. I just remember his hand. He had this large hand. They all have these large hands, you know. He had this soft, large hand, and he put his hand out, and he shook my hand, and I just knew in that moment it was just, there was something very, very special about him. And we had a wedding at... The Swan Club, we did very traditional and I got pregnant literally I think right away and we had Jamie and you know she was just the apple of his eye. I loved him very deeply. It was a very rich relationship. We had so much to live for and I think that as much as he loved his brothers He had a hard time letting go of those stolen 18 years of their lives. I think he was devastated by it. I think that he was traumatized. And I don't think that he was ever at peace with it. I lost him through suicide. Tragic suicide. He shot himself. I found it hard to believe that he did it. I had to run a party the morning after my brother died. I had a staff walking around crying their eyes out. I had a commitment. That was the toughest thing I ever did. Losing Eddie was, if not the greatest loss of my life, one of them, probably the greatest loss of my life. What these people did were not just to those children. It was to those children. Most importantly, it was to those children, but it was to every single human being involved in that child's life. This keeps up here. Are you wanting that? Alright, let's see what happens. Break the disc before I do anything. There we go. It says film sequence, make data visit 11068. Most of this film sequence is powered being tested. This is Mrs. David. The most prominent feature of projective material was a pervasive sense of sadness, fears of deprivation and loss in his immediate environment, his sense of the instability of his environment. Unmodulated angry outbursts which began toward the end of the first year with headbanging and pounding on the floor. and continue in various forms throughout the study years. An expressed sense of loneliness. My strongest friend is me. It kind of bothers me that they did this and nothing ever came of it, or they never used the data, or did all this effort and did all this stuff to people. And, you know, what did it do to help anyone's lives? Nothing. Oh no, Trucker's the puppy, that's Sandy. Right? Yes. Okay. So here's where we told the world that you have arrived. There must be a reason that I'm finding this out now. Like, why didn't I find out 20 years ago? You know, does she need my help or do I need her help? You know, is there a reason for this? Because it kind of seems odd that within six months, you know, of having diagnosed with cancer that here, you have a twin. Like it just something seems like I don't even know how to put it. Something seems like we need each other. Anya, come here baby girl. What are you doing? You bring the spatula? So we went to Louise Wise because it was where you got a Jewish baby. If you want to do it the right way, go through Louise Wise. And we did. And they lied. We went in and they said, all right, now she's in a study. If you don't want to be in this study, let us know. Well, at that point, if they had said, if you can learn to fly, you can have a baby. Yeah, when we brought you home, you were very small, very tiny, and very clingy. And for the longest time, you were extremely clingy. You would let go of mom at all. I don't like being alone. Thanks for warning me about that one, guys. I never liked being alone. Never will like being alone. So I think it'll be very interesting to find out if your sister had the same personality type. The same clinging. I'm really very anxious for her sister to know exactly what's going on because she may have the same breast cancer and not know it. If you're going to do a study, at least show people what the study proved. You know, nature versus nurture. Okay, so what happened? That's what I wrote. Of course, is this true? Do I have a twin? An identical twin? Oh my god. I don't even remember writing this. Too much to process. Felt shocked. I had a stomach ache. My head was spinning. It was surreal. So it's so strange. It's real. This was the day I knew it was real that I have an identical twin. Seeing that book, I held that book and I couldn't let go of that book. Again, I needed to find her. That is my mission in life is to find her. Rollerball. Me too! That's a great movie. I must have just seen it. I love that movie. 82763. So we were still together at the end of August. This was probably two weeks before I was adopted. Placement dates. 9. 924. There it is. They were a little bit after me. You got answered one question, right? That's pretty disturbing. Said after adoption, both boys show decline in something and then they start rocking. Whatever that means. I was graduating college in 85. This is stuff they reviewed and revised in 86. So they're still messing around with this stuff. People sitting around dissecting your life. We felt that interaction between the twins was taking place by at least four to four and a half months. There was some interplay when they were together. Increased personal interaction between the twins during the past month. We see the twins pending adoption into separate homes as additional potential complications for separation individuation. Go back to how twins are bonded and whatever, I would assume that somehow if you tear them apart it has to have some effect. It's just wrong. What they did was really, really wrong. And the more stuff I read, the more wrong it kind of seems. And the more upsetting it gets. For Douglas and Howard, who were shifted from hospital to one foster home, then to another, then back to the first foster home, in the first half year. Prior to their separate adoption, the co-twin may have been the most stable human object in their environment. Usually Howard initiated contact with his twin, with Douglas then responding. This would involve them both in the twinning interaction. It's upsetting to know that these people were able to... affect our lives in a way that I didn't even understand. And I don't know why I'm getting emotional about it, but it's just, I mean, it's not really my nature, but it's just hard to, I'm not really introspective. And when you start looking, you start going, wow, maybe if that didn't happen, you know, maybe some of the hard spots wouldn't have been hard. I don't know. Early enough, in their very early birth, right after birth, then it was advantageous for them to have their own family. Uh-huh. It's, however, what was known as the twinning reaction, an attachment between the two twins, the two children. Uh-huh. It had time to develop in the earlier months. Then we were opposed to it. Because then we would be traumatically separating those who had an opportunity to be attached to each other. Oh my god, oh my god, like... The reaction to that is, it's a bunch of bullshit. Sick soaps. Now, I understand we're talking about an eminent psychologist. But we also may be talking about a liar. I thought it was a Nazi experiment that they had done. I thought it was dreadful, the most awful thing I had ever heard. They didn't give a damn for anybody, only what they were doing, their work. These are unconscionable people. They separated us after three months. So if they really truly believe this, then why place us together in one crib in foster care? I think it was not only a crime, but a sin. Who do you think you are that you could play God like that? If they're twins, they're meant to be together. They knew the effect had happened. They knew we'd been together for long enough for it to happen. And they didn't know shit about shit anyway. It's, to me, I'm ill by that. I'm made ill by that. She's, it's, to me, it's fraud. He's stalled. A childhood on some levels. Not that I wouldn't trade my life for anything, but you can't give back. You can't give that back.

Do they, at this point, do they know that they're twins? Some do, some don't. So that's another issue, of course.

I don't know how to handle it myself. How, you know, how many twins are there and how many are... Are aware that they're twins and how many are not.

I mean, what's the scope of the problem in that sense? I don't get it, I don't want to talk about that. Let's go.

Hey, My name is Howard Burak. Born in New York City. I guess I found out later on when I was smart enough to know any better that I was adopted. We have two loving parents that were my mom and dad for sure.

I mean there could be no other. I grew up in Westbury, Long Island, New York and then we moved up to Brookline, Massachusetts. And my parents always used to tell me that I was more special because they chose me as opposed to just had me.

It seemed like something special to be adopted, I don't know. It's a little bit more involved than just, you know, our mother gave us up for adoption because she couldn't handle us and, you know, they ended up separating us. I'm sure that happens, but this was by design.

Some scientists in 1960s were deciding to study nature versus nurture. Evidently they found a way through the adoption agency to place twins with different families. My father and mother were never told that there was a twin brother.

And I were put in strangely similar family backgrounds. Our fathers were both business executives, mothers were housewives. We both had sisters three years older.

Sent the paperwork, I got a call from someone from the Louise Wise Agency, and she proceeded to tell me that I have an identical twin brother, which pretty much out of the blue floored me. I mean, what do you say to that? That was... It's tough because every day I just had that on my mind, every day.

Who is this guy? Where does he live? How do I find him?

She said I had a twin brother who had been looking for me for a couple years and said I almost drove off the road when I heard that because that was the last thing I was ever expecting to hear. Looking out in our pool where we like to spend a lot of our time when the weather is real nice. It's not been very good to us today.

These are pictures of the children when they were quite small. Debbie's and Doug's children. Well, we were married a couple of years, and we figured we'd try and have a baby.

And nothing happened. And we said, let's try adoption. And that's how we got to Louise Wise.

They gave us Douglas and said, we'll let you have this child, but we're going to monitor it. So it was a question of, if I say no, they won't give me the child. I think there was a certain amount of coercion to our permitting them. to conduct the study. They made it sound like this was to everybody's benefit to see how smart this kid is, because I don't know him.

Here we're adopting a child, we don't know him, we don't know his background. But it never dawned on me, why are they coming back so many times? Oh! I thought you had it.

I want, I want Sigali and Anderson. The kids had a playroom downstairs. The two of them would play. But all of a sudden, I don't want to play anymore.

And he'd just slam everything away from him. And Debbie would come upstairs. She says, he's playing so nice, he doesn't want to play with me. I went down, I said, what's wrong, Douglas? Nothing.

Something was missing in this kid's life. As happy as we thought he was, he was not happy. He'd fight with kids in school. He'd have, uh, uh, he'd interrupt his playing and suddenly erupt in anger. There's very little question in my mind.

Doug's original anger revolved around the fact that he knew there was something missing in his life, but he didn't know what it was. So the Louise Wise Agency was an adoption agency, placed children... from unwed mothers, but it also advised mothers, primarily Jewish ones, who were pregnant, how they could manage their infants, who they were relinquishing for adoption.

I guess they sought outside assistance to do this in the best way possible. And one of their contacts was Dr. Viola Bernard, a psychiatrist from Columbia University. Twins were...

purposefully being separated because of a misguided, unproven notion on the part of Viola Bernard that twins are better off being in separate families. There is nothing, no basis to ever support that. Albert, the effeminate boy, arrives late.

The therapist welcomes him. Albert is cautious, though seemingly not too frightened. Note how Albert delicately pats his hair and adjusts his collar.

His movements are not characteristic of a real boy. JBG, Jewish Board of Guardians, had a number of floors, and some of them were clinical operations. It was all for young children. So there were some clinics going on.

There were other research projects that were happening there. The Child Development Center was run by Neubauer, who was a very prominent child psychoanalyst. So he was my ultimate boss.

But I didn't see him very much. He didn't come in that often. And I was only part-time.

So when I was hired on in 1968 as a research assistant, I was mainly supposed to help with the organization analysis of the data. We wanted to see if we could tease out some of the subtleties of these child-rearing processes and family dynamics and how that might affect the development of these two individuals who were genetically identical. but are being raised in totally different families. It was amazing how disorganized the project was.

When I realized that, see I went into this with the idea that I was going to get a dissertation out of it and that I would carve out some piece that would be my dissertation and then I discovered that it was just chaos. Flying out there and I... I remember being more nervous about that one event than anything.

I was out of my mind on that whole plane ride. Hi! Dude, my God!

How you doing? Oh, man. Wow. A little bigger. Good eating, good living.

What was I saying? I mean, same luck, same luck. Look in the mirror. Oh, man. It's definitely an eerie feeling.

You're talking about, look at you. I'm telling you. The mind thing going on.

It's not two hours. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm Ronnie. Nice to meet you.

I have champagne at home. Oh, Jesus. I'll take the edge off you. Right off the bat, we pretty much hit it off, and I felt like I knew this person my whole life. It was like I knew him my whole life.

I think we lived a parallel life. We lived similar, parallel. We got married the same year.

We got married the same year. We had kids the same year. They both keep their wallets in their front pocket.

They both don't use any condiments at all. It's not just ketchup and mustard. It's condiments in general.

It was the first question Diane asked, does Doug use condiments? And I'm like, he has no use for them. If Doug had a salad, there'd be no dressing on it. You really don't meet a lot of people that would never even have salad dressing or try ketchup. And Howard's the same way.

I mean, that's not usual. I mean, that's really very, very different. I know that I've said this on numerous occasions when I was growing up and I don't think I really understood it but I really felt like I was missing something in my life. I didn't know what it was.

I couldn't touch it. I couldn't feel it. It's amazing that I had a twin brother and maybe that was why.

Love relationships, we have sibling relationships, we have kinship relationships, but of all of those relationships, the most unusual and rare is the identical twin relationship. It's a clone. It's a replicant of you.

It's precious in a way. People who are twins talk about how there's nothing else like it. Well, if it's true that the twin relationship is perhaps the closest relationship in nature, that you are closer emotionally to your twin than anyone else you will ever meet, then that has been taken away from you. You have lost that relationship, and it's incalculable.

There's nothing I can think of in science that is more political than twin studies. These studies have been used to justify racism, classism, and Nazism, you know, many of the worst features of our society. And so they're potent and explosive politically, and yet they're also really useful and very helpful if you look at them soberly.

Because what the studies don't say is that our genes are responsible for everything. No, they don't say that. What they say is that we're inclined to be one person or another. Sir Francis Galton in England is considered the father of the twin method.

He wrote about this in the 1870s. He didn't know about the biological differences between identicals and fraternals. Nobody did.

But he correctly surmised that look-alike twins shared 100% of their genes and non-look-alike twins shared some portion of their genes. And by comparing the two, then you could get some information about nature and nurture. The Neubauer study was unique in a number of ways. First, it was because twins were purposely being separated. Secondly, you never study people without their full knowledge.

Families in the New York area... Had no knowledge of a twin study. They were told. They were misinformed that it was a child development study. And that is hiding basic facts.

When these children grew up, some of them met. And that's really how this got exposed. Now one of the most remarkable stories I've seen in some time.

A story about triplets. They were born 19 years ago and then given up. at birth for adoption, each one growing up in a different family, totally unaware that he even had a brother, let alone two.

Two weeks ago, this man, Robert Chaffron, checked into a college in upstate New York. I got up there and everybody seemed to know me. Eddie, how are you? What's going on? I didn't know you were coming back.

This was Bobby. Yes, this was Bobby. I was being questioned. And Bobby said, my name isn't Eddie, it's Bobby. Girls were kissing me on the mouth, and guys were slapping me on the back, and people were greeting me like I was...

just an old friend and I just didn't know what was going on. And this is really Eddie, Eddie Godlin. He went to the same college last year, coincidentally. Friends discovered the connection and Eddie and Robert were reunited.

It was like a choreographed thing, although it was unrehearsed. We both went, oh my God. Oh my God, oh my God, holy crap. And it was, it truly was a mirror image. Somehow, through the grapevine, Newsday got involved.

The Daily News, the New York Post, AP or UPI, it was everywhere. They thought they were twins, but then David Kelman saw their picture in the paper. They looked just like him.

A friend of mine came up to me with a newspaper that had a picture of two of me. It didn't have birthdays, it didn't have any hospital information, but it was painfully obvious, at least. But again, it was so surreal, I almost didn't believe it.

I saw him coming to the door, and I opened it, and I looked at him, and then I closed it. And then I opened it and I looked at him and I closed it again. And he's doing what I would be doing. He's opening up the door, looking, saying, holy shit, closing the door.

And then he opens the door again. He goes, oh, my God, he closes the door. And by the time I got to the door, he was opening the door. And then he says to me, you haven't seen me in 19 years, and you slam the door on my face. And I walked in and we kissed and we hugged.

They really were almost identical. Their hairstyle, they had giant afros. But if anybody had an afro, they had a bigger one.

You all smoked the same brand of cigarettes? Yes, yes, we did. You were all wrestlers at one time?

Yes. Do you all feel like... Like you've known each other for 19 years even though you've not... Definitely.

Yeah. Totally. How? Feeling. We feel it.

We're all the same as soon as we start discussing our personalities. Our personalities are the same. We always talk at the same time. We can't...

I'll start a sentence and he'll finish it. It was not an energy, it was a synergy. And synergy is when a combination of particles creates something much better than each individual could possibly hope for.

That's what synergy means. And that's what it was. They went to Louise Wise to confront them about the fact that there were not only two, which they had acknowledged after only being forced to acknowledge, but actually three, which they had not even mentioned.

And obviously... set up the study and then started to test them to see the effect of nurture in nature. And Louise Wise Stonewall then said that none of that was true. And Mort, they said, if it was a study, where was it published? I'd like to read the study.

And it was never published. Alright, here are my notes. Here are interviews. And one of my very last interviews was Dr. Viola Bonnard.

Okay, I've got it on now. So, say again, the emphasis of the twins is... However, occasionally there were some identical twins. If it was good for them to be placed separately... And the existing literature at the time, and this I have to emphasize, the child psychiatry literature at the time that we were talking about was of the opinion that the placement of twins who were identical in separate homes had advantages for the children.

I couldn't find such literature. I wanted to cite such studies, but I never, in my research, came across anything really substantial that made the case that Dr. Bernard was making to me. Viola Bernard has talked about literature that says that twins are better off being raised apart. I know of no such studies.

I've never seen anything, nothing in the literature, and I've read pretty widely, I've never seen anything that argues for the separation of twins as being better for them. Here's another interview with Dr. Neubauer. Another Peter Neubauer here. Tell me a little bit about the scope of the study and how many people were involved in it. The ATTs, for special reasons, which if I were to go into it you would understand, the study was only based on a small number of identical twins separated at birth.

Yeah, I'm sure there aren't that many that one could work with. Yeah, I'm about many, many reasons to reach into this. I don't want to talk about that now.

It was a true prospective study. One of the only ones. Really unusual. Yeah.

I don't think he ever really acknowledged The damage that they might have done to the twins themselves and the trauma that they were preparing these children to have when they grew into adulthood and one day discovered that they were twins and that they had been deprived of that relationship their entire lives by scientists who wanted to study them. Have there been ethical questions raised about this study? Yeah, there were questions raised by a number of people when we looked for these kind of prints. I spoke once to the New York Foundling Home and she said, I said to her, but you are in the field of adoption. You separate mother and child all the time.

I didn't know I was pregnant until I was in about my fourth month. I was 19 and I told my mother and she was not happy about it. You were the worst when you were pregnant and unwed.

Then I went to Louise Why Services and they sent me to their home in Staten Island for unwed mothers. I was there and I'd say from about my fifth or sixth month until after I delivered. They were beautiful. A friend of mine picked me up at the home and took me to my father's house, and I know I would stay in the bathroom crying for hours on end because it broke my heart to give them up.

But then I thought it would be better for them. I felt incredibly, incredibly loved. Incredibly loved.

My parents were the most nurturing people ever. My mother would say things like, if I took a lie detector test, I would pass a lie detector test saying that I gave birth to you. Like, she really was just so thrilled to have both of us. I would say that I had a great childhood. I would say that I also had a lot of sadness.

I have a thousand pictures of me pouting. I would pout and my mother would take a picture and how cute I am pouting. I think I ran away like 20 times. I threw more temper tantrums. It's only now as a parent thinking back about my children that I can see that maybe raising me was not the easiest thing in the world.

I was able to hire a private investigator, and she said, I found your sister, but unfortunately, she's deceased. Well, the only thing I can say is, professionally, the less public I am, the more appropriate it is in my field. I don't want to be seen.

Now, I got a phone call from a woman who asked, who said to me, is Marjorie here? And this was 11 years after she died, and I thought, gee, somebody must be going through some old records. And she said, who are you?

I said, well, I'm her mother. What's it about? And she said, well, her twin sister is looking for her.

And I fell to the floor. And I was so angry because when we were with the first child at the agency and the second child at the agency, my husband said, we love twins. If you have a pair of twins, we'll take them.

This is the day we brought her home, and here she is meeting her brother for the first time, her brother meeting her. Um, yeah, March 1961, meeting Marge. She was very glum, didn't smile a lot.

I just thought, okay, our son was a happy kid, she was a glum kid. There were serious people and cheerful people and everything in between, so... She didn't have many friends.

She was much of a loner. We always had animals. She had a bird, Albert. She had her music.

Her first suicide attempt was when she was 17. Even when she was on medication, she was still depressed. She also had guns from time to time and would go target practice, and that's how she finally killed herself. I called the police in the neighborhood, and I told them that I think something happened. I think my daughter might have shot herself. You never get over the guilt.

You never get over it. That's why this is painful. And here they go and separate them of all the terrible things.

Terrible, terrible thing. You know, because I often think, what would it have been like if they'd been raised together? Might it have been better?

You see? Was the gloom caused because of the way they were separated? And Marge was alone a month, all by herself, after never being alone for that little brief lifetime. I went to the cemetery because now I knew where she was.

And I can't tell you the feeling to look at a stone and see your birth date on a stone. I had this overwhelming desire to lie down on this spot. But I immediately went home and called my sister. mother and asked if I could plant a yew bush on there because I needed something on there. So that's me on there.

How did this study come about? I tell you, I would rather not want to speak about it. Oh, really?

Why? Until they have published it. Oh, uh-huh. When do you plan to publish it? I think we probably want to come out with the data in about a year or year and a half from now.

Even if the study had provided some serious intelligence about behavior and so forth, even then it would be bad. But here, nothing came of it. There's no study, no anything. Bunch of locked files.

It's ridiculous. I mean, there's absolutely no justification. For keeping this data out of the hands of these twins.

This belongs to them. Robert, hey, it's Barry. Oh, listen, please don't give it a second thought.

I'm good. I just wanted to give you a call just to touch base about some of the issues we were discussing earlier in the day about the twins study. No, not on speaker, just me. We're seeing to what extent we can get them access to documents that were generated. Documents and pictures and various other things that relate directly to them, but that apparently they've never seen.

Viola Bernard Foundation here. by gives any interest, which it may have in the papers, to Columbia. So per this document, she kind of transferred any interest that they did have to Columbia.

However, she did so in such a way that no one else would seem to have the ability to get access to their own materials until 2021. Well, I think your use of the term their own materials is key. You know, I mean, really, who owns this material? I mean, you know, how is it that, you know, her estate or any educational institution should be able to trump the individual's own interest in documents documenting them? The conduct that we're talking about here had the most dramatic effect on their lives.

It's one thing if something like that is consensual and everybody's well informed and agrees and so on. It's another thing if... Somebody who's a health professional just sort of makes decisions unilaterally. According to the information we have, there are documents that were generated as a result of the study that are currently in the possession of Columbia University and Yale University.

The study is long over. These people are, a lot of them are deceased. They're not practicing any longer.

I think it's incumbent on all of us to take a good, hard, honest look at what happened. And to the extent possible, try to make it right. I'm aggravated that people are continuing to... Deny and stonewall and not accept the responsibility for what they did. I'm not looking for anything.

I'm just looking for someone to say, yeah, that wasn't right. Here's your stuff. Sorry about that. You know, we're going to let those other twins know. That's important.

Hi. Hi. How are you doing? Howard Purek.

Hi. Larry Pearlman. Nice to meet you. Doug Roush. Nice to meet you too, Doug.

It's been a while, huh? Yeah, 44 years. Exactly, yeah. Is that when you were six? Yes, yes.

I actually pulled out the testing I did on you guys when you were exactly six. The way the study was set up is that during the first year of life, I think that they had visits four times a year, and then it went down to twice a year, and then once a year. So they had all this material that they didn't really know how to analyze.

It wasn't a sophisticated research operation by any means. In fact, they didn't really know what they were doing from a research standpoint. But they had this terrific source of data because they had these twins who were being separated.

Separated. So I know that there were ten twins at that time. Ten sets of ten?

Ten altogether. It was five sets. He has researching it as a job, but for the people that were in it, it's people making decisions about your life that you have no control of, where some of them actively just lied to you outright.

Lied to my parents anyway. So all this information that they gathered is locked up in these archives. What do you think is...

in there that they're trying to keep from... No, there's going to be a lot of stuff there. There would have been home visits and films and there'll be psychological testing. I appreciate you acknowledging that we were part of this study because people said we weren't, so... Oh, see, that's just stupid.

Well, that's what annoys you. No, you see, I just don't understand that. I mean, why would they lie? It got me thinking about...

the damage that was done to the families, to the parents, who were kept in the dark about the fact that they had adopted twins. And that was a piece that I had never really thought through very much. You know, that made me sad. It really made me think how much of an injustice has been done to all of these twins who were subjects to this experiment.

Nice out. I always thought there was something missing, always. And when I met my brothers, I felt that there was a piece of me that had been completed. And I can't say that what I thought I was missing might have been there.

whole life was my brother's because how do you come up with something like that that's so far fetched but i can tell you that i felt complete we were babies we were babies and they had these psychologists they were going from house to house looking at a baby knowing that this baby's being deprived of his brother Eddie was the most gregarious of the three of us. Probably the best looking. If all our weight was the same, he was the best looking. I just remember his hand.

He had this large hand. They all have these large hands, you know. He had this soft, large hand, and he put his hand out, and he shook my hand, and I just knew in that moment it was just, there was something very, very special about him.

And we had a wedding at... The Swan Club, we did very traditional and I got pregnant literally I think right away and we had Jamie and you know she was just the apple of his eye. I loved him very deeply.

It was a very rich relationship. We had so much to live for and I think that as much as he loved his brothers He had a hard time letting go of those stolen 18 years of their lives. I think he was devastated by it.

I think that he was traumatized. And I don't think that he was ever at peace with it. I lost him through suicide.

Tragic suicide. He shot himself. I found it hard to believe that he did it.

I had to run a party the morning after my brother died. I had a staff walking around crying their eyes out. I had a commitment.

That was the toughest thing I ever did. Losing Eddie was, if not the greatest loss of my life, one of them, probably the greatest loss of my life. What these people did were not just to those children. It was to those children.

Most importantly, it was to those children, but it was to every single human being involved in that child's life. This keeps up here. Are you wanting that?

Alright, let's see what happens. Break the disc before I do anything. There we go. It says film sequence, make data visit 11068. Most of this film sequence is powered being tested.

This is Mrs. David. The most prominent feature of projective material was a pervasive sense of sadness, fears of deprivation and loss in his immediate environment, his sense of the instability of his environment. Unmodulated angry outbursts which began toward the end of the first year with headbanging and pounding on the floor.

and continue in various forms throughout the study years. An expressed sense of loneliness. My strongest friend is me.

It kind of bothers me that they did this and nothing ever came of it, or they never used the data, or did all this effort and did all this stuff to people. And, you know, what did it do to help anyone's lives? Nothing.

Oh no, Trucker's the puppy, that's Sandy. Right? Yes.

Okay. So here's where we told the world that you have arrived. There must be a reason that I'm finding this out now. Like, why didn't I find out 20 years ago?

You know, does she need my help or do I need her help? You know, is there a reason for this? Because it kind of seems odd that within six months, you know, of having diagnosed with cancer that here, you have a twin. Like it just something seems like I don't even know how to put it.

Something seems like we need each other. Anya, come here baby girl. What are you doing? You bring the spatula?

So we went to Louise Wise because it was where you got a Jewish baby. If you want to do it the right way, go through Louise Wise. And we did.

And they lied. We went in and they said, all right, now she's in a study. If you don't want to be in this study, let us know.

Well, at that point, if they had said, if you can learn to fly, you can have a baby. Yeah, when we brought you home, you were very small, very tiny, and very clingy. And for the longest time, you were extremely clingy. You would let go of mom at all. I don't like being alone.

Thanks for warning me about that one, guys. I never liked being alone. Never will like being alone. So I think it'll be very interesting to find out if your sister had the same personality type. The same clinging.

I'm really very anxious for her sister to know exactly what's going on because she may have the same breast cancer and not know it. If you're going to do a study, at least show people what the study proved. You know, nature versus nurture.

Okay, so what happened? That's what I wrote. Of course, is this true? Do I have a twin? An identical twin?

Oh my god. I don't even remember writing this. Too much to process.

Felt shocked. I had a stomach ache. My head was spinning.

It was surreal. So it's so strange. It's real. This was the day I knew it was real that I have an identical twin. Seeing that book, I held that book and I couldn't let go of that book.

Again, I needed to find her. That is my mission in life is to find her. Rollerball. Me too! That's a great movie.

I must have just seen it. I love that movie. 82763. So we were still together at the end of August. This was probably two weeks before I was adopted.

Placement dates. 9. 924. There it is. They were a little bit after me.

You got answered one question, right? That's pretty disturbing. Said after adoption, both boys show decline in something and then they start rocking. Whatever that means. I was graduating college in 85. This is stuff they reviewed and revised in 86. So they're still messing around with this stuff.

People sitting around dissecting your life. We felt that interaction between the twins was taking place by at least four to four and a half months. There was some interplay when they were together. Increased personal interaction between the twins during the past month.

We see the twins pending adoption into separate homes as additional potential complications for separation individuation. Go back to how twins are bonded and whatever, I would assume that somehow if you tear them apart it has to have some effect. It's just wrong. What they did was really, really wrong. And the more stuff I read, the more wrong it kind of seems.

And the more upsetting it gets. For Douglas and Howard, who were shifted from hospital to one foster home, then to another, then back to the first foster home, in the first half year. Prior to their separate adoption, the co-twin may have been the most stable human object in their environment.

Usually Howard initiated contact with his twin, with Douglas then responding. This would involve them both in the twinning interaction. It's upsetting to know that these people were able to... affect our lives in a way that I didn't even understand. And I don't know why I'm getting emotional about it, but it's just, I mean, it's not really my nature, but it's just hard to, I'm not really introspective.

And when you start looking, you start going, wow, maybe if that didn't happen, you know, maybe some of the hard spots wouldn't have been hard. I don't know. Early enough, in their very early birth, right after birth, then it was advantageous for them to have their own family. Uh-huh.

It's, however, what was known as the twinning reaction, an attachment between the two twins, the two children. Uh-huh. It had time to develop in the earlier months. Then we were opposed to it.

Because then we would be traumatically separating those who had an opportunity to be attached to each other. Oh my god, oh my god, like... The reaction to that is, it's a bunch of bullshit.

Sick soaps. Now, I understand we're talking about an eminent psychologist. But we also may be talking about a liar.

I thought it was a Nazi experiment that they had done. I thought it was dreadful, the most awful thing I had ever heard. They didn't give a damn for anybody, only what they were doing, their work. These are unconscionable people.

They separated us after three months. So if they really truly believe this, then why place us together in one crib in foster care? I think it was not only a crime, but a sin. Who do you think you are that you could play God like that?

If they're twins, they're meant to be together. They knew the effect had happened. They knew we'd been together for long enough for it to happen.

And they didn't know shit about shit anyway. It's, to me, I'm ill by that. I'm made ill by that.

She's, it's, to me, it's fraud. He's stalled. A childhood on some levels.

Not that I wouldn't trade my life for anything, but you can't give back. You can't give that back.

Transcript for:Exploring Twinhood, Adoption, and Ethics

Transcript for:
Exploring Twinhood, Adoption, and Ethics