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The Tragic Story Of The Triplets From Three Identical Strangers

Given the 7 billion living people on Earth, it stands to reason that people might resemble each other. The sentence, "You look like my cousin," might have been directed at a number of us. But coming across someone who looks so similar to you that people can't tell you apart? And then, what if this person had the same birthday? And was also adopted. And through the same agency. In fact, this person is not just a lookalike, but a biological twin . And then, imagine it's not only a twin, but there's a third person. Triplets. All of you prefer Marlboros, wrestle, and love Chinese food. This is exactly what happened to David Kellman, Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland, as recounted by  Three Identical Strangers,  a 2018 CNN Films documentary by English filmmaker Tim Wardle.

In 1980, Bobby started attending Sullivan County Community College in New York, and was shocked to find everyone greeting him like a friend. Fast forward, and not only did he and Eddy, his unknown, twin brother attend the same college, and see their story blow up on the news, but they were joined by a third sibling. Three siblings, one in an upper class home, one in a middle class home, and one in a working class home. Each with an older sister of the same age. This might be just a bizarre, even charming, story were it not for the sinister and strange details surrounding the adoption and childhood of these three individuals.

An unethical, secret psychological experiment

The Louise Wise Adoption Agency, as it turned out, deliberately placed not only Bobby, Eddy, and David in households of varying incomes, they also planted their sisters in those houses, too, as described by the LA Times . As part of an undisclosed study to tackle the "nature vs. nurture" debate, psychologist Peter Neubauer received money from some seemingly high-level, governmental source in order to conduct a secret study whose ultimate focus was on parenting style. When the men were children, researchers visited their house, conducted experiments , and recorded metrics for the study. None of their parents knew the true purpose of the visits.

The result was, in the case of the triplets, a childhood where each of them beat their heads against their cribs and went into psychiatric facilities because of the trauma of being separated at birth. Despite their joy at being reunited from age 19, living together before getting married, and starting a successful SoHo-based restaurant, Triplet's, they suffered from bipolar disorder, and their upbringings proved more valuable to their survival than any heritable traits. Eddy committed suicide in 1995.

The experiment, described by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright for the New Yorker, was dubbed the Neubauer Twin Experiment. Because of  Three Identical Strangers, in which Wright appeared, almost 10,000 pages of data from the unpublished experiment were released from Yale University, but have so far revealed no further information about the origins of the study, or any of the other people involved. 

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'Three Identical Strangers' Tells The Astounding Story Of Triplets Separated At Birth

David Edelstein

Tim Wardle's new knockout documentary starts out as a Parent Trap -like lark about three young men who, by chance, realize that they are triplets, but ultimately takes a more devastating turn.

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The surreal, sad story behind the acclaimed new doc ‘Three Identical Strangers’

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When they were first reunited at age 19, the triplets quickly discovered how much they shared in common. Though they’d been separated at birth, David Kellman, Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland had all individually grown up loving many of the same things: Marlboro cigarettes, wrestling, the same type of woman.

Decades later, at 56, the brothers are still learning about their commonalities. As boys, Kellman and Shafran shared the same vision problem: Amblyopia, a condition in which the brain and eye are out of sync, resulting in a lazy eye. But only Kellman was treated for the ailment — a fact that infuriates the siblings.

The brothers have spent the past few years, in fact, working through rage — anger toward the fate that befell them. What began as a miraculous fairy tale — three long-lost brothers stumble upon one another through sheer happenstance! — has since devolved into a dark tale of deception and inhumanity. It’s the story at the heart of “Three Identical Strangers,” a just-released documentary that premiered to jaw-on-the-floor reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January. (It debuted to impressive ticket sales in its very limited release over the weekend.)

The movie, directed by British filmmaker Tim Wardle, tracks how the triplets randomly found one another in 1980 and instantly became media darlings. They were interviewed by Tom Brokaw and Phil Donahue, wearing matching outfits and answering questions eerily in sync. The trio formed a bond so fast that it was almost as if they hadn’t been raised by three different adoptive families. They moved into an apartment together in New York City, later opening a SoHo restaurant called — what else? — Triplet’s, which attracted scores of tourists.

Slowly, however, the bloom came off the rose. In 1995, after a struggle with mental illness, Galland committed suicide. That same year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright published an article in the New Yorker shedding light on a disturbing psychological study. The scientific inquiry, masterminded by prominent psychologist Dr. Peter Neubauer and his Child Development Center, set out to answer the fundamental question of nature vs. nurture. Through the now-defunct Louise Wise adoption agency, an unknown number of twins and triplets were placed in different homes and secretly observed for years by researchers who diligently made home visits. (Parents were told these visits were standard, to track the adoptive children’s progress.)

Kellman, Shafran and Galland were part of the study, each strategically placed in a blue-collar, middle-class and wealthy home. The disclosure is at the crux of “Three Identical Strangers,” which unfolds like a thrilling, macabre mystery.

“It’s beyond anger,” Shafran said, describing his emotional state after the revelation came to light. “We’ve been called ‘subjects.’ We’re victims. There’s a big difference. I don’t want to play off like we’re horribly injured people now as adults — we have families, we have children — we’re relatively normal people. But they treated us like lab rats. Nothing more. And we’re human beings.”

He was sitting with his brother, Kellman, and the film’s director in Park City, Utah, earlier this year, a few hours after the documentary had first played for the public. The experience, the siblings said, had been moving. Kellman heard many audience members crying, and said a number of people approached him post-screening to offer him hugs.

“A couple came over to us and said, ‘On behalf of all the research psychologists in the world, we’re sorry,’” he recalled.

Though the festival experience proved cathartic, both brothers were extremely hesitant about partaking in the documentary; it took four years for Wardle to convince them to participate.

“If you see what’s happened to these guys in their lives, it’s not surprising that they’re initially wary when people approach them,” said the filmmaker. “We’re British people coming in and saying ‘We want to tell your life story.’ And they’ve been messed around a lot by the media. I would be suspicious of people.”

Kellman agrees: “After all this time, they were so excited about our story and we wondered what they really had in mind.”

A teaser Wardle created to help raise additional funding for the project early on didn’t help. When the brothers saw it, they had second thoughts about moving forward. Even Wardle acknowledges that the sizzle reel was “quite tabloid” and “a bit sensationalist” for selling purposes.

“For every talk show we were on, every snapshot we were promised — no one ever sent us anything. It felt like everyone was making money on us but us,” Shafran said. “This wasn’t about money — it was just that if we were going to tell our story, we wanted to tell it truthfully.”

Despite the teaser misstep, Kellman said he and his brother decided to take a “leap of faith” and move forward with Wardle. And as a result of their participation in the film, a slew of new information has come to light. Because of the filmmaking team’s persistence, thousands of pages from the Neubauer study have been released to the brothers.

When Neubauer died in 2008, he went to his grave having never spoken publicly about his findings. He left his research at Yale University, where it is to be sealed until 2065 — presumably so that any subject of his study would be dead before they could access it.

Access to the papers at Yale is controlled by the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. An earlier incarnation of the 150-year-old nonprofit was called the Jewish Board of Guardians, and that organization was one of two that helped establish Neubauer’s Child Development Center in 1947.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Jewish Board said the group does “not endorse the Neubauer study, and we deeply regret that it took place. We recognize the great courage of the individuals who participated in the film, and we are appreciative that this film has created an opportunity for a public discourse about the study. For many years, The Jewish Board has been, and will continue to be, committed to providing people who were involved with the Neubauer study access to their records in a timely and transparent manner.”

Indeed, after Wardle got involved, The Jewish Board did give Kellman and Shafran access to about 10,000 pages from the study. There were some interesting findings — such as the Amblyopia revelation — but most of the pages were heavily redacted and none reported formal conclusions.

“The data was collected but the results were never published, and we’re getting to a point where we’re pretty sure that nothing was ever done with it,” said Shafran, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. “And then what was the whole point of this, right? All this observation, collecting all this data, and no conclusions?”

When the brothers initially learned about the study, they consulted an attorney but were told that the statute of limitations might prove to be an issue in the case. Shafran found the explanation ludicrous: “It’s not like someone left a scalpel in someone’s belly button. How many cases like this do you have to compare it to? What they did to us wasn’t a question of law. These people were entrusted with God-like power and decisions.”

Since “Three Identical Strangers” — which will air on CNN in early 2019 — Kellman and Shafran have begun to reconsider their legal options.

Though their participation in the documentary has led to the stirring of painful memories, it has also led to tangible movement in the case. And it’s given the two brothers “a reason to spend more time together and work harder on our relationship,” said Kellman, who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children and works as an insurance agent.

Wardle said he was extremely cognizant of the effect his movie could have on the brothers.

“Because of their background, it threw up a lot of ethical considerations for us,” he admitted. “Normally on a documentary like this when people are talking about painful memories from their past, we would probably expect them to speak to a psychologist beforehand and have a talk and make sure they were comfortable and happy with it. And we offered them that. But it’s their decision whether they take it up or not. We’re certainly not going to press it on them, because they’ve been through quite a hard time psychologically.”

Shafran shook his head and offered a nervous laugh.

“I mean,” he said, “how little could they do for someone like me?”

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Three identical strangers: where are the triplets now.

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10 Best Documentaries You Need To Watch Right Now

The best true crime documentaries on hulu, speed 3 with sandra bullock & keanu reeves addressed by 20th century boss.

Content Warning: this article contains discussions of suicide.

The remarkable documentary Three Identical Strangers follows the story of triplets separated at birth only to be reunited by coincidence many years later. However, the tragedy that unfolds in the years after their meeting left a lot of questions about what happened to the brothers. Directed by Tim Wardle, the 2018 documentary spotlights identical triplets Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran using archival footage, interviews, and reenactments. As the movie goes on, it’s revealed that a sociological experiment was involved in their separation.

Three Identical Strangers presents increasingly unbelievable events. The trio became a media sensation, in part due to the great documentary , and their story was made even more incredible by the revelation that it was no accident that they were separated. They were part of a scientific study of nature versus nurture. The brothers were among a handful of sibling sets separated at adoption to see the effects of socioeconomic upbringing on one’s personality and future prospects. Though the experiment is over, officially, the lasting effects still reverberate, and where the brothers are now can be seen as a direct result of how their lives were puppeteered early on.

The world of documentaries is massive and rich in educational entertainment across many topics. Here are the 10 best documentaries to watch right now.

Where Robert Shafran Is Now

Robert was raised in an upper-middle-class family.

Three Identical Strangers reveals that Robert Shafran was sent to live with an upper-middle-class family when he was just an infant. This was one of the major parameters of the study performed by psychiatrists Peter B. Neubauer and Viola W. Bernard, who themselves were overseen by the Jewish Board of Guardians. Neubauuer and Bernard specifically assigned the triplets to families of different economic levels.

...this person with Edward's face was not in fact Edward.

Robert received what can be considered the “best” situation out of all his siblings, at least in terms of home life stability. He was also the one to kick-start the three brothers finding each other. Unbeknownst to either of them, one fall, Robert began attending the same college that his brother Edward Gallant had gone to the year prior.

After being greeted like an old friend on his first day on campus, Robert ran into one of Edward's classmates, who eventually realized that this person with Edward's face was not in fact Edward. Robert eventually met Edward, and they realized just how much they had in common. Their story then attracted the attention of the third brother, David Kellman, and all were reunited. Three Identical Strangers follows the trio learning that they share similar tastes in cigarettes, women, sports, and more.

Since the events documented in Three Identical Strangers , Robert has slipped back into anonymity. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is married with two children . He is a lawyer but has stepped away from work after a motorcycle accident in 2011 (via The Tab ). However, in 2018, the documentary increased interest in their story, and Robert and David have considered working as public speakers and participating in commercial opportunities together. The pair have appeared on a number of daytime talk shows since the documentary, and it seems they may be willing to further explore their confusing past.

The best true crime documentaries on Hulu present unique looks at some of the most mysterious, unbelievable, and disturbing crimes.

Where David Kellman Is Now

David grew up in a working-class family.

While Robert and Edward were the first of the triplets to meet each other, it was David who figured out that he was the missing sibling to make the group a trio. Once all three brothers were introduced, it became clear just how similar they all were. Even though David came from a blue-collar family, the lowest socioeconomic class of all three triplets, he shared many of the same mannerisms, tastes, and interests as the others. In fact, the trio eventually decided to open a restaurant together and ran that for many years, as depicted in Three Identical Strangers .

The friendship between the trio was not always perfect. David and Robert’s relationship became strained at some point between the closing of the restaurant and the making of the documentary. However, the pair managed to mend their relationship and now spend time together and play golf. David has two children and works in insurance in New Jersey , where he resides. According to Variety , Ben Stiller plans to star in an adapted miniseries of the Three Identical Strangers and David and Robert could very well lend their expertise and experience to the production.

What Happened To Edward Galland

Edward's story reveals the trauma behind the unexpected story.

The first half of Three Identical Strangers makes it seem that everything that happened between the three brothers was the work of fortune and is simply an incredible story of coincidence and serendipity. However, that part of the movie is only a blanket to cover the dark and cruel reason for their separation , which is explored in the second half.

The biggest victim of this sinister social experiment wound up being Edward. After finding each other, the triplets discovered they had all actually been participants in a scientific study performed by doctors Peter B. Neubauer and Viola W. Bernard. The triplets and their adoptive parents were completely unaware of this.

At first, the families went to the adoption agency, Louise Wise, which claimed that placing triplets was near impossible and the children had to be separated, at which point the psychologists took interest in a scientific study. However, this wasn’t the truth at all.

As Three Identical Strangers slowly reveals, Neubauer and Bernard intentionally separated the triplets, as well as many sets of twins, into different socio-economic families with the express purpose of conducting a longitudinal study (following a singular individual across a significant amount of time). This is a common type of research in academia, but it should only be performed on willing participants.

Edward’s life was seismically upended from birth...

The subjects of Three Identical Strangers lived with mental health issues their entire lives. Tragically, Edward took his own life at the age of 33 in 1995 . There is no doubt the traumatic event of his forced separation and the later revelation was deeply mentally destabilizing for the man. The results of the experiment have never been revealed, and the individuals involved in its operation have never spoken out about it.

Edward’s life was seismically upended from birth, but the fact that he found his brothers before he died and learned the true story of his upbringing at least gives a sense that he experienced some closure before his passing.

Three Identical Strangers is available to stream on Hulu and Kanopy.

What's Known About The Study

Little is known about the study details.

In addition to the documentary featuring the triplets, a 2007 book, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, also recounted some findings from the study. Specific details, and any conclusions, however, have not been shared with anyone.

The study was officially led by Peter Bela Neubauer. Neubauer was a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He worked for Bellevue Hospital after immigrating to America from Austria to escape the Nazi regime in 1941. While Neubauer participated in many studies and published many findings in his career, when this particular study ended in 1980, he chose not to publish . In an NPR interview with Schein and Bernstein, they believed that he feared the court of public opinion when it came to publishing.

Schein told the interviewer that it was just one year after the study concluded that New York began requiring adoption agencies to keep siblings together when finding homes for them. Bernstein added:

And at that point, they realized public opinion would be so against them, that they wouldn't dare publish the study.

In fact, the records for the study are to remain sealed at the Yale University Library until October of 2065 - likely long after the children who were actually monitored and studied have passed on.

What is known is that representatives of the Jewish Board of Guardians, a nonprofit mental health and social services agency, visited the different adoptive parents periodically for the entire length of the study to check in on the children. They never explained to the parents why they were taking information about the children. That has been confirmed by multiple unknowing participants in the study after the fact.

One item that was asked in the 2018 documentary was whether the biological parents of the siblings in the study had reported signs of mental health issues. Those who broached the subject were told by a researcher involved that the research was not about any possible predisposition to mental health issues, but was solely about parenting. It will be decades before anything else is revealed about the study that prompted Three Identical Strangers to be made.

A new documentary chronicles the lives of triplets separated at birth in a controversial study — here's how scientists continue to use twins in research

• The documentary "Three Identical Strangers" follows the story of a secret study conducted in three genetically identical siblings who were separated at birth. 
• The study was the only twin study that followed siblings from infancy. But due to controversies over ethics, the authors never published it and the data is sealed.
• Twin experiments can give scientists insights into how different habits , treatments, or lifestyles affect two people with the same genetic makeup.
• In other twin studies, researchers have found that on average, environment and genetics have a 50/50 influence on a person's traits and disease. 
• Currently, NASA is using twins to study the effects of space on humans and mice . 

Twins have always fascinated scientists, especially as the subjects of studies about the influence of environment and genetics. 

The new documentary "Three Identical Strangers," which is now in theaters, tells the story of the ultimate test of nature versus nurture: it follows three identical brothers who were separated at birth and raised by different families. 

In 1980, two of the brothers met while attending Sullivan County Community College, and after making headlines, found the third triplet. Aside from looking alike, the three shared similar behavioral quirks and preferences.

But they were not the only twins in the study —  according to NPR , of the 13 children involved, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. A book titled "Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited" was published in 2007 by a pair of twins who were also involved, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein. 

The other four subjects still do not know they have identical twins. 

A controversial twin study

The study was conducted by child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer and Violet Bernard, a child psychologist. They worked with the Louise Wise Agency, which matched Jewish orphans with adoptive families, to  craft a secret experiment that would test how much of a person's behavior is genetically influenced and how much is environmentally influenced.

The researchers carefully controlled which families the identical siblings ended up in, withheld information about their biological parents, and didn't tell the adoptive families that the children were twins or had siblings. Instead, they told the families that their children were being followed for a study about the development of adopted children.

The study ultimately ended in 1980, and because of the fear of backlash and controversy over ethics and consent, Neubauer never published the results. The data is sealed in a Yale archive until 2066.

This is the only twin study that followed its subjects from infancy, but it's far from the only time scientists have used genetically identical siblings in research. 

Why scientists are obsessed with twins

The annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio attracts the largest hoard of twins from all over the world. And you bet scientists are in attendance as well. 

Conducted properly, twin experiments can give scientists insights into how different habits, treatments, or lifestyles affect two people with the same genetic makeup. Studying identical twins can also help scientists pinpoint the effect of epigenetics, or environmental influences, on gene expression and function. This can help determine if certain traits or diseases lean more heavily on genetics or the environment.  

In history, twins have been used in research about I.Q., everyday diseases , eating disorders, obesity, developmental and psychological traits , and sexual orientation , according to Smithsonian Magazine . 

In a comprehensive review of twin studies worldwide, which was published in Nature Genetics in 2015, researchers  found that on average, environment and genetics have a 50/50 influence on a person's traits and disease . But certain conditions like bipolar disorder rely more heavily on genetics. 

Today, twin studies are still commonly used. There are studies on mood and anxiety disorders  as well as asthma and allergies. The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research  collects community-contributed data from twins that helps them map out  mental health outcomes and examine the development of substance use and related behavior disorders. For one study , they examined personality development of twins to see whether environment or genes played a role in risk-taking behaviors that lead to substance abuse. 

Most famous, however, are NASA's twin studies. After astronaut Scott Kelly got back from a year in space, scientists observed that  7% of his genes were expressed differently than those of his identical twin .  The genes that were altered were related to the immune system, bone formation, DNA repair, and responses to an oxygen-depleted or carbon-dioxide rich environment. 

On top of this, Scott Kelly's telomeres — the caps at the ends of our chromosomes that affects cell aging — appeared to get longer in space, but they shrunk back when he returned to Earth. His gut also hosted different bacteria, and he returned two inches taller.

NASA recently sent 20 mice into space while their twins stay on Earth. In partnership with astronauts on the International Space Station, agency scientists plan to study changes in the rodents' microbiomes and circadian cycles. 

Watch: This hair colorist uses hairspray bottle caps to color hair

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What Three Identical Strangers Reveals About Nature and Nurture

• The new documentary, Three Identical Strangers clearly conveys how it never serves anyone well to unnecessarily mess with nature. Post This
• Three Identical Strangers quickly shifts to a real-life Truman Show-type train wreck about three lives that were blindly orchestrated for the purposes of social experiments. Post This

Spoiler Alert: The following article includes plot elements from the documentary, Three Identical Strangers .

The recently released documentary, Three Identical Strangers , tells a story that’s at times humorous, at times incredible, and at other times foreboding. The film, directed by Tim Wardle and released across the United States in the past few weeks, tells a story some might remember from headlines in the 1980s: Three college-aged identical triplets—Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran—each put up for adoption, learn they were separated at birth and are reunited.

It is almost too good to be true. At the time, it was the kind of good news  everyone wants to hear. Seeing the three hardy boys together, whether in New York Pos t photos , on prime-time TV shows, or in person at the Manhattan restaurant they ended up opening, was deeply heart-warming. Everyone wants to belong to a tribe; one can only imagine how powerful it must feel to find two other people who are immediate family; who have ties to you from before you knew; who literally reflect your likeness on their faces; and, who can give you a bear-hug as warm as your own, which you can all but imagine if you’ve ever seen photos of Eddy, David, and Bob together.

It’s a story of the power of nature and nurture. But it’s a story that quickly turns dark when one looks past the lighthearted headlines and comedic banter of TV show hosts, who note how the trio happens to like the same brand of cigarettes. Deeper questions beg to be asked, even if at first by the adopted parents: Why were these boys separated at birth ; why weren’t they informed they had biological siblings ; and why weren’t any of the adoptive parents informed and given the option to adopt all three?

The answers are worse than we might imagine. As the film details, the Louise Wise Adoption Agency , a prominent child-placement agency for Jewish families, intentionally separated a number of twins and multiple-birth siblings and placed them in homes of different socio-economic levels for the purposes of using the children’s lives for research. Quickly, the movie turns from a humorous run of interviews about how they first met, to a real-life Truman Show-type train wreck about three lives that were blindly orchestrated for the purposes of others’ social experiments.

As the film explains, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named Dr. Peter B. Neubauer wanted to solve the mystery of nature vs. nurture and decided to use children put up for adoption as guinea pigs for his research. Telling adoptive parents only that they were doing research on adopted children, not on biological siblings separated at birth, the Louise Wise agency facilitated years of research on Eddy, David, and Bob, by sending researchers on house visits. For more than 15 years, they performed psychological testing and took extensive notes and video recordings of the children.

What were the findings of the research? Much is unknown, since the conclusions were never published, and the notes were under seal until 2066. It wasn’t until the documentary filmmakers’ put the pressure on that the Yale officials now holding the research authorized limited access of the psychological files to the studied children who requested access. A number of children have still not been informed they were separated at birth from siblings and studied as a part of the multiple-birth-child research.

It is terrifying to imagine that pivotal aspects of one’s life would be kept secret from them and that their lives would be treated like those of “lab rats,” as one of the brothers described it in the movie. “This is like Nazi sh*t,” another said, who, as a man of Jewish descent, did not choose those words lightly. One family member of one of the boy’s adopted families later said, “coming from the Holocaust, our family has a knowledge that when you play with humans... [things turn out] very wrong.”

Natasha Josephowitz, a former research assistant for Dr. Neubauer, told filmmakers that at the time when the research was being done in the ‘80s, it “did not seem to be bad… it was a very exciting time.” Later in the documentary, however, Josephowitz’s words betrayed an underlying sense that it was unethical. Considering the children out there who still don’t know their origins, the former assistant exclaimed, “these people don’t know they were used this way; they will be so upset!” It was for this reason, however, that Josephowitz seemed comfortable with the idea of keeping the truth hidden instead of bringing it into the open.

Three Identical Strangers offers an empathic view of multiple perspectives throughout the film, but the most salient are those that caution viewers away from intentionally and unnecessarily dividing biological family members.

The Persistent Tension Between Nature and Nurture

In terms of healthy child development, Three Identical Strangers  offers a number of insights. First, treating children like specimens is a dangerous business and will set them on a challenging life course. This says less about adoption as a general practice—since research like Neubauer’s is fringe and rare—and more about the practices of intentional family fragmentation at large.

Watching the brothers describe their trauma growing up reminded me of Alana Newman’s project, Anonymous Us —an online forum and subsequent books where children conceived with reproductive technologies could anonymously open up about their traumatic experiences growing up with their origins unclear. There, individuals could discuss the hardships of being intentionally separated from biological family members, such as a father they’d never meet if they were donor-conceived, or a surrogate mother they’d never meet if they were hired by a gay couple, for instance. One need only  scroll through some of the testimonies  to be struck by the common chords.

Messing with nature affected the boys in similar ways as well. The children had identical looks, similar ways of talking, and common ideas about how to have fun together. Sadly, they also had similar struggles with mental illness growing up: all three displayed separation anxiety, banging their heads against the bars of their cribs; all three experienced depression at times, and all three made visits to psychiatric hospitals as teenagers.

The children’s mental-health challenges from being separated point toward the stubborn truth of how biological families are best kept together when possible. Even if their birth mother wasn’t able to take care of them, the boys could have been put up for adoption together as a trio, which would have reduced some of their nature-disrupted challenges.

But the children’s experiences in different families also revealed something most parents know to be true—that parenting styles make a difference. This message came through the triplets’ entwined stories as a tragic turn of events unfolded.

As a part of the experimentation, Louise Wise Services placed the three children in homes within a 100-mile radius of each other in families with a mom, dad, and older sister who had also previously been placed by the same adoption agency. More than factors like income level, the film suggests that the dynamics of a father’s warmth in the home in particular is a key player in the nurture that affected the three boys the most.

David was placed in an upper-class family with a doctor as his adoptive father; he experienced a rather reserved home life where his father was often unavailable. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Bob was placed in a working-class home with a grocery-store owner as a father who had a very warm and jovial disposition and later became affectionately called the Yiddish nickname “Bubula” by all three boys. Meanwhile, Eddy was placed in a middle-class family with a dad he often clashed with. A person close to the triplets said in the film, Eddy’s relationship with his dad “couldn’t have been good...otherwise, we would have seen him, or Eddy would have talked about him.”

As the brothers grew up, got married, and pursued their business endeavors, some coped better than others with the inevitable stressors in life that come up. After one of the brothers left their joint restaurant business, Eddy’s behavior became erratic and unpredictable, and he displayed manic-depressive symptoms. After receiving brief psychiatric care, he returned home. One morning, when he didn’t show up at work, a family member went to check the house and discovered that Eddy had shot himself. He was 33 years old.

After the tragedy, the surviving brothers couldn’t help but see differences in how they were raised and how it may have affected their life choices. The elderly father of Eddy even said, still in grief, “I often wondered if I didn’t teach him something…how to live life or something…that bothers me.”

Three Identical Strangers offers an empathic view of multiple perspectives throughout the film, but the most salient are those that caution viewers away from intentionally and unnecessarily dividing biological family members. The story clearly conveys how it never serves anyone well to unnecessarily mess with nature.

The plot somewhat twists at the end to emphasize the greater impact of nurture than nature, especially in shaping the boys’ abilities to cope with hardships. One interviewee notes toward the end of the film, “both [nature and nurture] matter; but I think nurture can overcome anything.” Still, at the end of the documentary, the clear villain is not Eddy’s reserved father but the people responsible for separating the triplets at birth, which would seem to suggest that messing with nature has a greater effect. Alas, in this case, the adoption agency is guilty of crimes against both nature and nurture, since they failed to live up to their most fundamental and trusted responsibility—to help provide vulnerable children with as nurturing an environment as possible. Needless separation from blood relatives, years of psychological testing the reasons for which were not disclosed—these also played into the nurture  the boys experienced.

Perhaps that’s why the researchers never penned conclusions from the unethical study. Had they undertaken this task, which would have involved attempting to measure the effects of nature and nurture, they might have had to face how, for the numerous lives involved in their experiment, they actively damaged both.

Mary Rose Somarriba, who completed a 2012 Robert Novak Fellowship on the connections between pornography and sex trafficking, is a writer living in Cleveland and the editor of Natural Womanhood .

* Photo credit: Courtesy of NEON

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Understanding Twins

The controversial study of twins and triplets adopted and reared apart, what i learned about the 1960s study of separated twins..

Posted October 26, 2021 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Infants twins were separated and studied in New York City in the 1960s.
• Adoptive parents did not know they were raising a child who had been separated from a twin.
• The twins' records remain sealed at Yale University until 2065.

The course of human life is fragile. The way our paths unfold can be drastically derailed by seemingly innocent or accidental events with unintended results. Policies carried out by people with good objectives, but who lack the foresight to consider the implications or consequences of their deeds, can inflict irrevocable damage on individuals, families, science, and society.

New York’s Child Development Center Twin Study of the 1960s and 70s took small, incremental steps toward helping unwed mothers, but its foundation quickly turned into secrets and cover-ups. Lives were fractured forever because a reputable adoption agency took the advice of a well-intentioned but misguided psychiatrist to place newborn twins apart, and welcomed an unprincipled self-interested researcher who secretly studied them. Events like these remind us that in our current climate of social media , digital record keeping and online transactions, our privacy and trust in others may be illusory. We all take reasonable risks with the institutions holding our personal information, the physicians taking our medical histories and the banks managing our finances. Any one of us could be the victim of good intentions gone awry.

In the fall of 1982, I arrived at the University of Minnesota as a post-doctoral fellow to work on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA). By then, the MISTRA had gained considerable stature, drawing attention from national and international scholars, students and journalists. But for a brief time during my early years in Minnesota, an older twin study was gaining attention once again. CBS’s 60 Minutes, was preparing an exposé of the Louise Wise Services (LWS) — Child Development Center (CDC) twin project. The program was intended to show how and why a group of New York City psychiatrists (mainly Drs. Viola W. Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer) and psychologists decided to "play God" by separating infant twins and tracking their development without informing the adoptive families that their children were twins. The investigative journalists also wanted to know what the scientists hoped to learn from this unique study, the only one in the world to follow separated twins prospectively from birth. Ultimately, the planned television special was canceled.

Scientists and journalists occasionally revisit this controversial study, most recently in the production of two documentary films, The Twinning Reaction (2017) and Three Identical Strangers (2018), as well as a 20/20 ABC news program (2018). This episode in twin research has gripped the public that is now clamoring for more, perhaps because the project was so unthinkable, violating not just established norms, but beliefs in the sacredness of family and faith in the integrity of scientists. People everywhere began talking about the study; at anniversary parties and birthday celebrations, I often become the center of attention because of my twin research background. Festivities were ignored as lush gardens and backyard patios become scenes of dialogue and debate. “How could this happen?” guests demanded to know. “What more can you tell us?” It has been no different among my professional colleagues. “There's so much more that needs to be written about it...” “I wondered if you have been consulted... I'd appreciate your thoughts and/or a link to something you may have written about this.”

Some elements of the secret study were shown in the two documentaries, but it is a mistake to think that the whole story has been told. There is much more to say about the twin pairs that were raised apart, as well as the inner workings of the study that 55-minute and 90-minute films cannot capture. Furthermore, aside from the omissions there was information that requires clarification. It is uncertain as to whether twins were separated for purposes of the study—some believe they were separated on the assumption that each individual twin child would enjoy undivided parental attention and develop a stronger sense of identity . These people would agree that the study came later. However, this may not be exactly what happened, an issue I explore in my new book, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart. Another critical point is that twin research is a vital, informative and respected part of the behavioral and medical sciences. The wealth of well-conducted studies has significantly enhanced our understanding of human nature, underlined the unique challenges faced by twins and the families who raise them and suggested ways to assist twins.

The twins who have learned about their past have experienced uncontrollable anger , considerable sadness, and deep regret. Their parents have been outraged that a respected and trusted adoption agency endorsed such dishonest and deceptive practices. Everyone would have willingly raised a complete set of adopted twins or triplets had they been given the chance. LWS disregarded the requests by some parents for multiple birth children.

Upon closing in 2004, the Louise Wise Agency handed its records over to the Spence-Chapin adoption agency. At present, information may be released only to the twins by the Jewish Board of Family and Child Services (JBFCS). The data collected by the research team has been deposited in the Yale University archives in New Haven with the stipulation that it not be released until 2065. Dr. Viola Bernard’s twin-related papers have been hidden from view at Columbia University, but some have become available as of January 2021; at first, however, given the pandemic, this material could only be viewed by Columbia University faculty, students, and staff. Neubauer and his son authored a 1990 book, Nature’s Thumbprint, but many important details of their work are omitted. He only states that an “opportunity arose to follow the development of identical twins from infancy.” The Louise Wise Adoption Agency does not appear in the index or text, nor does Dr. Viola Bernard.

A few of the twins have been granted access to portions of their personal information, but it is an arduous process, requiring prior approval from several sources. Frustrated, some twins have sought legal counsel. Several attorneys are independently working on their behalf and some material, but not all, has been retrieved.

Segal, N.L. (2005). More thoughts on the Child Development Center Twin Study. ­­­ 276-281.

Segal, N.L. (2018). Twins Reared Apart From Birth; Beyond the Secret Study. Sloan Science and Film, http://scienceandfilm.org/articles/3141/twins-reared-apart-from-birth-b…

Segal, N.L. (2019). Twin Studies: Through the Lens of Three Identical Strangers. Quillette., March 26, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/03/26/what-light-does-three-identical-strang…

Segal, N.L. (September 26, 2021). Shame and Silence: The LWS Twin Studies Revisited. Quillette,

https://quillette.com/2021/09/26/shame-and-silence-the-lws-twin-studies…

Included in the Weekly Roundup: https://outlook.office.com/mail/deeplink?popoutv2=1&version=20210927003…

Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology and the Director of the Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton.

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Three Identical Strangers: Was the twin separation study ethical?

The documentary (spoiler warning) raises questions about adoption policies and research practices in the 1960s. Much has changed, but there are parallels with how companies use our data today

By Sam Wong

2 July 2019

Triplets Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafron found each other in 1980 after being raised by separate families

Photo by Jerry Engel/New York Post Archives /(c)NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty

In Three Identical Strangers , the documentary directed by Tim Wardle, 19-year-old Bobby Shafran finds out that he has an identical twin, Eddy, who was raised separately after they were adopted by different families. Shortly afterwards, the pair learn they were triplets, and come together with a third brother, David.

The joyful story of a family reunited later turns sour when they discover that they were unwitting guinea pigs in a study on child development, and the age-old question of nature versus nurture . The film portrays the brothers’ anger at Peter Neubauer, a now deceased child psychiatrist who orchestrated the study under a shroud of secrecy and kept the subjects in the dark about their genetic kin.

Was Neubauer’s study as unethical as the film suggested? According to psychiatrist Leon Hoffman and linguist Lois Oppenheim, it isn’t so clear cut.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association , Hoffman and Oppenheim say the triplets were not separated for the purposes of the study. Rather, it was the policy of the adoption agency, Louise Wise Services. They were advised by a prominent child psychiatrist, Viola Bernard, who was not connected to Neubauer or the study.

Bernard believed adopted twins and triplets would have a better chance of thriving if raised independently, without having to compete for their parents’ emotional resources. This was typical of the thinking among child development specialists of the time.

Paradoxically, this highlights the need for more research into what is really best for children in these situations, says philosopher Julian Savulescu at the University of Oxford, UK. “People can invent plausible-sounding policies or interventions for human beings, but until you rigorously test them, you don’t know if they’re doing more harm than good.”

Now, US law stipulates that reasonable efforts should be made to place siblings for adoption in the same home, unless a joint placement “would be contrary to the safety or well-being of any of the siblings”. If they are separated, frequent visits or interaction should be made possible.

Read more: Three Identical Strangers review: a good film about bad science

Hoffman and Oppenheim also say Neubauer should not be blamed for the secretive nature of the study. It was illegal at the time to provide information about biological families to adoptive parents. Although open adoptions are now legal, it is still normal for records of adoptions to be sealed, affording some privacy to parents who give children up.

Neubauer was committed to the children’s confidentiality, the article says, and this is why the study forms were sealed for nearly 100 years. The two surviving triplets and another set of twins in the study have successfully appealed the sealed terms, and gained access to some of the study materials.

“The study was ethically defensible by the standards of its time,” Hoffman and Oppenheim write, though they acknowledge that such a defence will not be satisfactory to the families who live with the study’s legacy.

By today’s standards, it’s clearly wrong not to tell people if they are part of a research study, says Savulescu. And yet it still happens on a huge scale when companies like Google and Facebook use our data to maximise profit. “There is sham consent but that kind of research is going on today without adequate transparency about what’s going on or an appropriate level of control,” says Savulescu.

In medical research, ethical oversight now is much more rigorous – so much so that it hampers research and obstructs the development of treatments that will make people’s lives better, Savulescu says. “My own view is that we should look at new procedures like blockchain that enable greater use of data while maintaining transparency, accountability and control.”

JAMA DOI: 10.1001/jama.2019.8152

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Three Identical Strangers Revisits a Shadowy Scientific Conspiracy

“Perhaps what is so compelling about the story of reunited twins is the implicit suggestion that it could happen to anyone,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lawrence Wright observed in his 1997 book, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are . “It feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is me, almost me. It is not just the sense of identity that excites us but the difference; the fantasy of an identical twin is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other spouses. An identical twin could experience the world and come back to report about choices we might have made.”

Reunited twins, especially identical ones, are compelling to scientists for essentially the same reasons: They offer a unique opportunity to glean insight into the age-old question of nature versus nurture, genes versus environment, and with our growing understanding of the importance of epigenetics, the question of how these two factors act upon each other. If identical people are raised in different environments by different parents, what can that tell us about the degree to which our behaviors, personalities, health, and intelligence are innate or acquired? Among the conclusions of one of the best-known studies of separated twins, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart : Identical siblings reared independently are roughly as similar as those reared together. Nature, in other words, makes a pretty strong case for itself.

In the canon of famously reunited twins, there are a few iconic, touchstone examples: the Jim twins, brothers parted as babies who went on independently to build alarmingly similar lives; Oskar and Jack, separated at six months, the former became a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, the latter a Trinidadian Jew. More recently we learned of the Colombian brothers accidentally swapped in the hospital nursery so that two pairs of identical twins were raised as two seemingly fraternal, actually unrelated duos.

Then there are the Shafran/Galland/Kellman triplets, once notorious in their own right, and now the subject of an excellent new documentary , Tim Wardle’s Sundance award-winning Three Identical Strangers . In 1980, Bobby Shafran, an incoming student at Sullivan County Community College in Sheldrake, New York, arrived on campus to an unusually friendly reception. It was as if the strangers milling around his dorm already knew him. In fact, they’d mistaken him for a former classmate: Eddy Galland, who shared with Shafran more than just a passing resemblance. They had the same face, the same body, the same mannerisms, the same birthday; were both adopted; and had both been placed with their families by the same adoption agency: New York’s Louise Wise Services, now shuttered, then a pre-eminent institution for Jewish families seeking Jewish babies. They were twins, the boys quickly surmised, reunited after 19 years apart. Their story was splashed across the newspapers.

So much so that in Queens, David Kellman, another curly-haired, barrel-chested, 19-year-old adoptee—also born July 12—soon found himself staring at his mirror image(s) in the New York Post . What initially seemed like a story of reunited twins suddenly became an even bigger one: triplets separated at birth, raised within a hundred-mile radius of each other, completely oblivious to one another’s existence.

“The three of them ended up like puppies wrestling on the floor,” Kellman’s aunt recalls of the boy’s first meeting. “It was the most incredible thing. They belonged to each other.” The first part of Three Identical Strangers zooms forward with the same carousing, puppyish energy. The triplets were the toast of the human-interest news media. They appeared on talk shows, touting their uncanny similarities: All three smoked Marlboros; all three were high school wrestlers; all three liked older women. They scored cameos on Cheers and in Desperately Seeking Susan (that’s them, ogling a very young Madonna on the streets of Soho). They partied in the glittery 1980s New York City club scene, became roommates in a squalid Manhattan bachelor pad, and eventually business partners, opening a scene-y, kitschy restaurant called Triplets Roumanian Steak House a few blocks up from the onramp to the Holland Tunnel. (“Its dining room is the kind of brick-walled, blond wood contemporary space where you expect free-range chicken morsels in raspberry vinegar,” praised The Washington Post in 1988, “but the menu is the kind of old-fashioned Eastern European array that declares war on your arteries and massages your soul.”)

About halfway through Wardle’s documentary, the manic energy of the triplet’s first act takes a nosedive. “From the time we met till . . . till later . . . there was nothing that could keep us apart,” a present-day, middle-aged Shafran ominously remembers. By the mid-’90s, the easy intimacy the triplets had assumed began to curdle. In 1995, Lawrence Wright, working on a New Yorker story that he would later adapt into the aforementioned Twins book, contacted the brothers. He had come across an article that referenced a secret study conducted by a psychologist named Dr. Peter Neubauer in collaboration with Louise Wise Services. The agency had a policy of separating twins and other multiples for adoption ( based on a recommendation from a different psychologist ). Neubauer, Wright discovered, had seized the opportunity to launch the ultimate investigation into nature versus nurture: studying separated twins not, as other scientists had, only after they’d rediscovered each other, usually in adulthood, but over the course of their development as ostensibly singleton children. The adoption agency would feed him subjects, but the whole operation depended on a cone of silence: parents could not know that their new offspring had identical siblings, nor the nature of the social experiment in which their kids were unwitting participants (nor could they know, as the documentary later suggests, that they, themselves, may have been study subjects, too). They were pressured to keep their new babies enrolled in what they were told was a standard childhood development study of adoptees, allowing them to be observed regularly by a team of visiting researchers operating under false pretenses.

“Despite the controversy surrounding it, the study apparently violated no rules requiring informed consent for human experimentation,” Newsday reported in 1997, shortly after the project was exposed. “No such rules governing behavioral studies were in place at the time, and there were no laws prohibiting the separation of twins.” Watching Three Identical Strangers , I was reminded of Errol Morris’s recent Netflix docudrama series, Wormwood , another slow-burn thriller about a conspiracy and a cover-up. That film’s refrain, cribbed from Hamlet —“something is rotten in the state of Denmark”—works just as well here, though much of the power of Wardle’s documentary lies in our inability to identify the precise source of our apprehension.

More than half a century after the birth of the triplets, Neubauer’s methods raise serious ethical questions, including about the integrity of the junior researchers who made monthly house calls to each family, with full knowledge of the existence and close proximity of their subjects’ siblings. (Wardle interviews one such research assistant, whose lack of contrition is disconcerting.) The dark history of twin studies—favored by Nazi eugenicists and in the U.S. by those with racist policy agendas—doesn’t help, particularly given that all the children involved were Jewish (as was Neubauer, who fled his native Austria during the Second World War). Nor does the fact that Neubauer refused to outline his specific objectives, and to this day has never published his findings. He died in 2008—his New York Times obituary omits mention of the controversial project—leaving instructions to keep his study notes under lock and key in an archive at Yale until 2065. Precisely what he was researching, why, and what he discovered remains a mystery, even after publicity generated by the documentary resulted in the release of portions of his records. They contain no formal conclusions, and leave large swaths of text redacted, presumably to protect the privacy of other study subjects, some of whom are likely still in the dark that they were born twins.

I was struck looking back at articles published after the triplets reunion in 1980, by an anecdote reported by People magazine: Shortly after their story was made public, the brothers—per the documentary then utterly oblivious to Neubauer or his project—were contacted by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., the head scientist behind the aforementioned Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Bouchard was hoping to recruit them as participants in his own study (it’s unclear whether he was aware of Neubauer’s activities). Their response, communicated by their newly hired agent: “What’s in it for them?”

The same year that the brothers found out about Neubauer’s machinations, Galland, following a series of what appeared to be manic-depressive episodes, tragically killed himself. Several years later, Triplets, the restaurant, closed its doors. The film implies that the relationship between the two surviving brothers cooled as well. Toward the end of the documentary, we finally see Shafran and Kellman together on camera; they appear less like siblings, more like slightly uneasy acquaintances, old war buddies with a trauma between them too big to ignore.

Wardle metes out details slowly, with an eye toward suspense, pacing the story almost like a psychological thriller. Most of the triplets’ tale of woe has been previously reported, but the director digs up a few salient clues to Neubauer’s intent. I’ll tread lightly so as not to spoil those revelations. Suffice it to say, little in the triplets’ lives, in the choice to study them, or in the families with which they were placed proves insignificant.

Was Galland’s battle with mental illness coded into his genes? Was it a function of his difficult childhood with, we're told, a disciplinarian father who didn’t quite know what to make of his emotional, high-spirited son? Or a function of the trauma of discovering that said childhood had essentially been engineered for the sake of science? Or a function of some deeper trauma sustained when he was separated at such a young age from his brothers?

And what made Shafran and Kellman more resilient than their genetically identical sibling? Would Neubauer’s findings have cast any light on these questions? We may never know, or at least not for nearly 50 years. But in the great debate between nature and nurture (something of a false dichotomy by current scientific standards), Wardle’s film, or at least the people in it, seem to favor nurture. The triplets’ differences may have ultimately been more important than their similarities. “We found the ways we were alike and we emphasized them,” Shafran insists. All three boys were wrestlers, but then again, they all had the same stocky, muscle-bound, thick-necked physique well suited to the sport. They all smoked Marlboros, but at that time, Marlboro was the most purchased cigarette brand in the U.S. They all preferred older women, but studies have actually shown that partners is one of the few areas where identical twins tend to differ .

“No matter how tantalizingly alike we may be, no one crosses the boundary between being alike and being the same,” Wright wrote back in 1997. What can the experience of any other person—even a genetic clone—really tell us about ourselves? There are no definitive answers. We leave David Kellman and Bobby Shafran in the Bardo: somewhere between ignorance and comprehension, between strangers and brothers.

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Separated-at-birth triplets met tragic end after shocking psych experiment.

This article contains spoilers for the documentary “ Three Identical Strangers ,” opening Friday.

When 19-year-old Robert Shafran drove from his home in Scarsdale, NY, to the Catskills for his first day at Sullivan Community College in 1980, he was shocked to find that everyone already knew and adored him.

“Welcome back!” guys said. Girls ran up and kissed him. Finally, a fellow student, Michael Domnitz, connected the dots after asking if Shafran was adopted: “You have a twin!” he said.

Domnitz was a friend of Edward Galland, who’d dropped out of Sullivan the previous year. He knew Galland was also adopted, and he called him right away. Shafran was stunned to hear a voice identical to his own on the other end of the line — and decided he couldn’t wait to meet his “new” brother. That day, Shafran and Domnitz drove to the New Hyde Park, LI, home where Galland lived with his adoptive parents.

When the door opened, Shafran says in the film, he saw his own face staring back at him: “It was like everything faded away, and it was just me and Eddy.”

But as he would soon discover, it wasn’t.

Months later, David Kellman, a student at Queens College, saw a news story about the reunited twins and recognized his own face in the photos. He called Galland’s house and got his mother, who said: “Oh my God, they’re coming out of the woodwork!”

“Three Identical Strangers” chronicles a story so wild that, as Shafran says in the film, “I wouldn’t believe [it] if someone else was telling it.” And once the long-lost siblings found each other, their story became even more shocking as they discovered they had been part of a decades-long psychological experiment that had controlled their destiny.

The triplets were born to a teenage girl on July 12, 1961, at Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, NY. Split up at 6 months by the now-defunct Manhattan adoption agency Louise Wise Services, the boys were raised within 100 miles of each other. None of the adoptive parents knew of the other brothers.

‘Those who were studying us saw there was a problem happening. And they could have helped … and didn’t.’

Before the babies were placed in their adoptive homes, the agency had told the prospective parents that the children were part of a “routine childhood-development study.” The parents say it was strongly implied that participation in the study would increase their chances of being able to adopt the boys.

For the first 10 years of their lives, the siblings were each visited by research assistants led by Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent child psychologist who had worked closely with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna.

“It appears there were at least four a year for the first two years and a minimum of one visit per year after that,” said the film’s director, Tim Wardle. Officially, the study went on for a decade; however, said Wardle, “it’s clear from some of the study records that the scientists continued to follow from a distance and collect data on the triplets’ progress for many years after this.”

Neubauer’s study, initially brought to light by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, involved separating a still-unknown number of twins and triplets at birth and placing them with families of varying economic and emotional reserves. The intention? To answer the question of nature versus nurture.

The brothers were placed with families who were working class (Kellman), middle class (Galland) and upper middle class (Shafran). Kellman’s father, a grocery store owner, was a warm and loving man who eventually became affectionately known as “Bubula” to all three of the young men. Shafran reports his upbringing to have been slightly more reserved, with his doctor father often away. Galland clashed with his father, who, according to Wardle, “had a different idea of what men should be.” Collectively, they represented a spectrum of “nurture.”

“That era, the ’50s and ’60s, was the Wild West of psychology,” Wardle said. “The Milgram experiments [on human obedience], the Stanford Prison Experiment. Psychology was trying to establish itself as a new science, and people were pushing the envelope.”

Still, Neubauer and his associates were not roundly accepted, said the director. “They approached other agencies to be part of the study, and [were told], ‘You can’t split up twins and triplets — what are you thinking?’ Even at the time, it was pretty extreme.”

Conducted in the families’ homes, the meetings involved cognitive tests, such as puzzles and drawings, and were always filmed. Behavioral problems were evident almost immediately in the triplets. According to their adoptive parents, as babies, all three would regularly bang their heads against the bars of their cribs in distress.

Kellman thinks he knows why: “It was absolutely separation anxiety.”

Mental health issues continued as the boys got older. By the time they were college age, Kellman and Galland had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals; Shafran was on probation after having pleaded guilty to charges connected to the murder of a woman in a 1978 robbery.

“Those who were studying us saw there was a problem happening. And they could have helped,” Kellman told The Post. “That’s the thing we’re most angry about. They could have helped . . . and didn’t.”

In the early days, life for the reunited triplets was a party. The strapping young men made the talk-show rounds and moved into an apartment together in Flushing, Queens.

“We were sort of falling in love,” said Kellman of the time. “It was, ‘You like this thing? I love that!’ There was definitely a desire to like the same things and to be the same.”

But as they spent more time together, he recalled, “there would also be times when one of us was closer to another. And it was not fun to be the odd man out.”

They met their mother, briefly, in the early ’80s. Hers was an underwhelming story, says Kellman in the film: “A prom-night knock-up.” She had drinks with them but didn’t pursue any further relationship.

In 1988, the trio opened a restaurant in Soho, called Triplets Roumanian Steakhouse. (Shafran left the business several years later, and it closed in 2000.)

“We did do a lot of crazy things,” Shafran told The Post. “Like march down 42nd Street with one of us perched on the other two’s shoulders, stopping traffic.

“One night, we ran into [celebrity photographer] Annie Leibovitz,” Shafran added. “She said, ‘I work for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Let me hang out and take your picture.’ She took us to Peppermint Lounge and the Mudd Club. We were wearing these Izod Lacoste shirts and, like, matching white jeans, going to places where people had multiple piercings and all kinds of color in their hair. We felt like virgins in a brothel!”

They were also spotted on the street by director Susan Seidelman. “She was like, ‘You’re the guys! Will you be in my film?’ ” Shafran recalled. That film was 1985’s “Desperately Seeking Susan.” In one scene, Madonna jumps out of a convertible and heads into an apartment, catching a smile from the three brothers lounging by the stoop.

“We were kind of cautious about doing it,” said Shafran, “because the whole crew had this sort of leathery, punk look.”

As the triplets basked in their newfound bond and endless similarities, their adoptive parents were beginning an investigation into why the trio had been separated in the first place. They convened a meeting with several officials at Louise Wise, who gave them little information.

“They said the reason was because it was hard to place three children in one home,” Kellman says in the film. “At that moment my father blew his stack. He said, ‘We would have taken all three. There’s no question.’ ”

The parents left frustrated and angry, but Shafran’s father had forgotten his umbrella. “He went back to get it,” says Shafran’s stepmother in the movie, “and he walked into the room to see them breaking open a bottle of Champagne and toasting each other, as if they had dodged a bullet.”

The furious parents vowed to take legal action. But, said Wardle, “they couldn’t find any law firms that would take the case — some firms told the parents they had partners who were trying to adopt from the agency and they didn’t want to damage their chances.”

Eventually, the brothers married off and had kids of their own: David and Janet Kellman had two daughters, Ali and Reyna; Robert and Ilene had a daughter, Elyssa, and a son, Brandon; and Eddy and Brenda had one daughter, Jamie.

Of all the triplets, Galland seems to have been the one who was the most affected by their discovery of one another. Growing up, Galland and his adoptive father “didn’t quite see eye to eye,” Wardle said. “They had a very dysfunctional relationship. So when he met his brothers for the first time, he felt, this is my family. He put everything into being with the boys.”

But in 1995, Galland, who had exhibited increasing signs of bipolar disorder, killed himself with a gun at his home in Maplewood, NJ.

“A heartbreaking detail that isn’t in the film is that Eddy moved several times so that he could be close to the brothers,” said Wardle. “He did that, I think, three times. He had moved close to David and his family when he ultimately died — he was living across the street from them, which is kind of tragic.”

After Galland’s suicide, Shafran and Kellman drifted apart, their relationship indelibly marked by the whiplash of initial euphoria and the harrowing events that came later.

“It would be fair to say their relationship was very strained from the point [Robert] left the restaurant,” said Wardle, who says the two remaining brothers did begin to get somewhat closer over the course of making the film.

Today, Shafran is a lawyer living in Gravesend, Brooklyn; Kellman, who is still in New Jersey and in the process of a divorce, is an independent general agent working in life insurance, Medicare and annuities. He has remained in touch with Galland’s wife and daughter. “My daughter and Jamie are extremely close,” Kellman said.

After everything they went through, the study that so altered the triplets’ lives was never published. Neubauer shelved his findings, and upon his death in 2008 and according to his orders, all documents related to the study were placed with Yale University and restricted until 2065.

Through an attorney, the remaining siblings eventually gained access to thousands of pages of documents from the archive. “We were given some discs with notes and stuff like that, and it was pretty heavily redacted. Everything I got was just about me — it wasn’t about visits to me versus visits to Eddy,” said Shafran.

Wardle was able to access short clips of film from the study, and the end credits play over archival footage of the triplets as toddlers, separately working puzzles, taking tests and looking quizzically at the person behind the camera who’s so interested in their behavior.

Their search for answers as to why it was ever allowed to happen is still not over. “There are people living in New York City now, practicing psychiatrists, who were heavily involved in setting [the study] up,” Wardle said. “They refused to talk to [the filmmakers] even when we had the proof they were involved in it.” But, he hopes, once the film is out, “there will be a lot of attention on those involved.”

In the film, viewers hear a recording of the psychologist speaking with New Yorker writer Wright about his work. “Neubauer showed no remorse,” Shafran said of that clip. “If anything, he reinforced his position. We were subjects, and it was a study. [But] you don’t do a study with human experimentation.”

Robbed of the chance to confront Neubauer in life, Kellman is seen directing his anger into the camera. “Why?” he says. “What did you do? Why? And how could you?”

Yale Daily News

Records from controversial twin study sealed at Yale until 2065

Staff Reporter

William McCormack

In the depths of Yale’s library collections, records from a controversial study that separated twins and triplets at birth remain sealed, despite demands from the study’s participants to see their own files.

The study, conducted by child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer throughout the 1960s and 70s, involved at least eight twins and a set of triplets who had been separated at birth at the now-defunct New York City adoption agency Louise Wise Services.

In 1990, a decade after abruptly ending the confidential study, Neubauer and the Child Development Center of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services arranged to house the locked records at Yale. The Jewish Board set forth terms that gave the organization the power to approve or deny any requests to access the records for the next 75 years.

The records will remain sealed until Oct. 25, 2065. The study came into the spotlight after this summer’s documentary “Three Identical Strangers” and 2017 documentary “The Twinning Reaction” highlighted the stories of the participants and explored the study.

“Yale does not know why the Jewish Board made [the decision to seal the records],” said University Director of External Communications Karen Peart. “Yale accepted the records because Manuscripts and Archives determined that the records held long-term substantive value for the research community.”

Neubauer conceived the experiment to compare the development of separated sets of twins and triplets with fellow psychiatrist Viola Bernard, to explore one of psychology’s most pressing questions — that of nature versus nurture, or whether human behavior is more affected by environment or genetics. Researchers did not obtain the consent of participants or their adoptive families. They also failed to inform families that their child had been separated from a twin during the adoption process or in their later observation of the children, according to Sharon Morello, one of the subjects of the study.

At an internal meeting at the Medical School about the records in July 2013, Yale’s counsel explained the University was in no position to breach the terms of Neubauer’s 1990 gift by unilaterally deciding to unseal the records, according to Michael Alpert ’07 MED ’14, who emailed faculty at Yale Medical School to organize the meeting after learning of the study in 2013. If Yale had ignored the stipulations of the Jewish Board, they would potentially suffer a lawsuit. The precedent would also discourage future donors from donating their papers to the University, according to Stephen Latham, who chairs Yale’s Human Subjects Committee and attended the meeting.

Alpert said that everyone at the meeting sympathized with the study’s subjects and agreed that the study was unethical by today’s standards.

“I don’t think [the study] would be allowed to go forward under current standards,” Latham told the News last week. “But you have to bear in mind that the study was set up well before any of our current regulations were in place … we didn’t have our rules governing research on human subjects until decades after. We don’t commonly retroactively apply ethical standards.”

Morello told the News that researchers came to her home periodically over a span of at least 12 years during her childhood. She added that they administered interviews with her, took pictures and recorded videos of her riding a bicycle and doing ballet.

They concealed the purpose of their visits, she said, telling her parents that the routine visits were to ensure that Morello was doing well in her adoptive home. She was 49 years old when she heard she had a twin.

“I remember them doing a lot of testing,” Morello said. “Picture identification, doing math problems, I think I even read to [a researcher] at one point.”

According to the two documentaries, many of the separated children dealt with mental health issues in adolescence and as adults. Director of “The Twinning Reaction” Lori Shinseki told ABC’s 20/20 that of the at least 15 children separated after birth by Louise Wise and Neubauer, three have committed suicide. Eddy Galland, whose fellow triplet brothers David Kellman and Robert Shafran are the protagonists of “Three Identical Strangers,” committed suicide in 1995.

Many of Neubauer’s subjects have encountered issues accessing the records now housed at Yale. For instance, in 2011, the Jewish Board denied two separated twins — Howard Burack and Doug Rausch — the request for access to the sealed records in a letter that claimed they were never participants of the study. Ultimately, Shinseki helped them prove their participation.

A spokesperson for the Jewish Board told the News that all individuals were notified of their participation in the study and “provided with copies of their records that relate directly to Dr. Neubauer’s study of them.” The Jewish Board did not clarify when individuals had been notified, but did note that redactions to the materials were made to ensure the privacy of other subjects.

Morello received a limited selection of 700 pages about two years ago, but frequent redactions made them nearly undecipherable “black pages of nothing,” she said. She has not received any of the photos or videos researchers recorded — though Yale University Library’s guide to the records lists that the films and tapes are stored in Boxes 50-58 in Yale’s Library Shelving Facility in Hamden, Connecticut. Morello feels strongly that 12 years of research must have yielded more than 700 pages of material.

“I think [Yale] should be doing something,” Morello said. “Again it was all — all the records, all the data that was taken, it was all under false premises — they really have no right to it. It’s not theirs or Neubauer’s, it’s whoever’s they took it from.”

According to Stephen Novak, the head of Archives and Special Collections at Columbia University’s Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, a deed of gifts — the contract that transfers ownership of concrete or intellectual property — is a legal document. Sealing documents is not an uncommon practice in private collections, Novak explained, and usually relates to privacy concerns or the donor being uncomfortable revealing something to the public. Columbia houses Bernard’s papers, a small portion of which is related to the study — but contain no individual observations and records — and is sealed until 2021. Nearly all of her other papers are currently accessible.

Novak explained that when Columbia received Bernard’s papers, the university’s literary executor — the individual who was entrusted with the transfer of the papers — was under the impression that Neubauer’s adoption study records at Yale would also be sealed only until 2021. The inconsistency in release dates at each institution may result in Columbia extending the seal on Bernard’s papers until 2065.

“We have to decide in the next three years whether we keep these closed until 2065 or open them up in 2021,” Novak said. “I would be the one to make that decision if we feel that we need to be consistent with Yale … we’d probably consult with Columbia’s general counsel.”

Neubauer died on Feb. 15, 2008.

William McCormack  | [email protected] .

These triplets were separated at birth for a sick scientific experiment

IN 1980, three young men discovered they were long-lost triplets, separated at birth for a sick science experiment.

IT SOUNDS like an uplifting story — and initially it was.

In 1980, three young men from New York discovered they were long-lost triplets, separated at birth and raised by adoptive parents who had no idea their kids had been part of a set.

But that’s just the jumping-off point for Three Identical Strangers , a new documentary just screened at the annual Sundance Film Festival, about the reunion of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman that quickly veers from delightful to harrowing. (If you want to see the movie without knowing the entire story, don’t read any further.)

The triplets discovered each other’s existence when Bobby was 19 and enrolled as a freshman

at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York.

“Guys were slapping me on the back, and girls were hugging and kissing me,” he told People at the time.

They also kept calling him Eddy. It was truly baffling to him.

Thankfully a fellow student at the college cleared up the mystery.

The student’s best friend, Eddy Gallard, was physically identical to Bobby.

After learning that the two men were born on the same day — July 12, 1961 — and that he, like Eddy, was adopted, the college student got the two men together for a meeting.

As People reports, “they found they laughed alike and talked alike. Their birthmarks and their IQs (148) were identical. They even claimed to have lost their virginity at the same age — 12. Hospital records confirmed what the boys already knew, and the New York press trumpeted the story of reunited twins.”

Then, to make an incredible story even more remarkable, David Kellman saw their picture in the paper, felt like he was looking into a mirror, and called the Galland household.

“You’re not going to believe this ...” he began.

Documents at Manhattan’s Louise Wise adoption agency confirmed it — Robert, David and Eddy were triplets, born in that order, within 27 minutes of each other. They were separated soon after birth.

Upon discovering their siblings, the three boys moved in together, started going to the same college and all got degrees in international marketing.

The film has plenty of archival footage of the three grinning, handsome 19-year-olds making the publicity rounds — they appeared on all the big-name US talk shows, got a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan (at Madonna’s personal invitation) and appeared in the TV series Cheers . Together they started a restaurant in New York called Triplets.

Their camaraderie wasn’t a gimmick; they say they really had an instant connection, but gradually it became clear there were also differences that went deeper than their superficial similar tastes in sports, women and cigarette brands.

The triplets were raised in very different families and, it was eventually revealed, this was by sinister design.

An initial visit by the stunned parents to the now-defunct adoption agency lead to a trail of increasingly creepy discoveries about a scientific study of separated twins and triplets. The investigation was aided by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, who was working on a story about the study.

The young men and their families learned that their childhoods were monitored, filmed and documented — under the guise of normal adoptive follow-up — to serve the interests of a psychologist who wanted to test the influences of nature versus nurture. This was little comfort to the three men, all of whom had longstanding behavioural difficulties, starting with banging their heads on their cots.

At the time of the boys’ birth, none of the adoptive parents were asked if they would take more than one child.

The study’s lead researcher Dr Peter Neubauer is deceased, but his now-elderly assistant gives an interview in the documentary that amounts to, “Eh, what are you gonna do? Times were different then.”

Before his death, Dr Neubauer defended the study to Newsday . He claims the triplets would have been separated anyway, because it was the policy of Louise Wise Services at the time.

“When we learned about the policy, we decided it gives one an extraordinary opportunity for research,” he said.

But Kellman deeply resents the way he and his siblings were treated. In a recent article in The Times Of Israel , he said “they refer to us as participants ... We weren’t participants. We were victims.”

While the triplets were initially inseparable after discovering one another, their bond was eventually broken.

Going into business together in the Triplets restaurant wasn’t the best idea — they started arguing in the workplace and Shafran quit the business.

Then, in 1995, 15 years after they reconnected, Galland took his own life at his home in New Jersey. He left behind a wife and a young child.

New York Post writer Sara Stewart saw the film at its premiere at Sundance and described it as “riveting, deeply unsettling stuff”.

“There’s so much dark psychological territory to mine in the documentary,” she notes.

More, apparently, than the filmmaker chose to use. The involvement of one of the men in a violent crime, before the discovery of his triplets’ existence, is omitted from the film, perhaps because it can’t be tied neatly to nature or nurture.

(As a teenager, Shafran took part in a robbery where an 83-year-old woman was beaten to death with a crowbar. He pleaded guilty and testified against his accomplice. He was convicted of manslaughter and escaped with a light sentence — five years of working weekends at a home for disabled children.)

The psychological impact on the three men is undeniable and it seems the pain remains. In a 1997 feature in Newsday , Kellman laments “we were robbed of 20 years together”.

“How can you do this with little children?” Shafran asked. “How can you do this to a little baby — innocent children being torn apart at birth?”

With Sara Stewart at the New York Post .

If you or someone you know needs help, contact: Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467 for 24-hour Australian counselling services.

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Nature versus nurture: The heartbreaking experiment of triplets separated at birth

The triplets were adopted by different families as part of a disturbing experiment, article bookmarked.

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Imagine growing up in your perfect little bubble… only to discover that you have not one, but two siblings that you never knew existed.

Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman spent nineteen years none the wiser that they were identical triplets.

Separated at birth, they had each been adopted by different families and obliviously grew up with no knowledge of one another.

However, the truth behind why this all came to pass is extremely sinister.

Shafran, Galland and Kellman were all adopted in 1961 through the now-defunct Louise Wise Agency.

They were each monitored as part of a legal study led by psychoanalyst Dr Peter Neubauer of the Manhattan’s Child Development Centre, which has since merged with The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services.

The aim of the study was to explore the age-old question of “nature versus nurture”; to see whether placing the triplets in different domestic environments would affect their upbringings.

It was only thanks to a chance encounter that they ever crossed paths.

In 1980 when Shafran attended his first day of college at Sullivan County Community College in New York, he was taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive reception he received from his peers.

He was welcomed with hugs and kisses from several college students, despite having never met any of them before.

One student, a young man called Michael Domnitz, had attended college the previous year with his friend Eddy Gallan.

Domnitz knew that Gallan hadn’t planned on returning to school. However, everyone at college was greeting a new student as Gallan, as if he had come back.

Domnitz went to the lookalike’s dorm room to investigate and was dumbfounded by what he discovered.

“As soon as this guy turned around, I was actually shaking,” he said in the documentary Three Identical Strangers which won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival. “The colour from my face dropped because I knew it was his [Gallan’s] double.”

Domnitz immediately asked Shafran whether he was adopted and whether he was born on July 12 1961.

When Shafran replied affirmatively, Domnitz told him of his suspicions that Shafran had a twin brother.

Shafran and Gallan’s story received a lot of attention in the press when they met, which is how they eventually found their third brother.

After spotting a photo of Shafran and Gallan together in the news, Kellman contacted the pair to inform them that he believed he was their third brother, making them not twins, but triplets.

Shafran, Gallan and Kellman were in for a wild ride as they explored their newfound fame, even appearing in cameo roles in Madonna’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan .

However, their story took a darker turn when they attempted to figure out why they were separated in the first place.

The triplets were placed in homes with varying states of wealth and were assessed by researchers throughout their childhoods, with none of the families aware that their adoptive sons had identical siblings.

Shafran, Gallan and Kellman weren’t the only adoptive babies included in the study, with many others likely completely ignorant of the fact that they have identical siblings.

Sadly, Gallan took his own life at the age of 33. Shafran and Kellman are now currently in the process of seeking an apology and compensation from The Jewish Board and for official documents from the study to be released.

The Jewish Board refused to take part in the documentary, directed by Tim Wardle.

However, they did provide The Washington Post with a statement in regard to the controversial study.

“The Jewish Board does not endorse the study undertaken by Dr Peter Neubauer, and is appreciative that the film has created an opportunity for a public discourse about it,” a spokeswoman said.

“We hope that the film encourages others to come forward and request access to their records.”

“The Jewish Board had no role in the separation of twins adopted through Louise Wise."

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Three Identical Strangers and the History of Twin Studies in Science

Channel 4's documentary three identical strangers tells the story of triplets separated at birth, triplets eddy, bobby and david found each other by chance , they discovered they had in fact been the subject of a long-term scientific study into nature vs. nurture.

As a mum of identical triplets, the idea of twins or triplets being separated at birth makes me cringe. I can't conceive of a world in which my daughters, now 32, would have missed out on each other's company as children. Yep, I had my hands full, as everyone was keen to remind me, but the bond between my girls has always been a source of strength and comfort to them. They are each other's best friends and they keep each other grounded.

Tim Wardle's award-winning 2018 documentary film Three Identical Strangers , recently shown on Channel 4, tells the story of triplets Edward Galland, David Kellman and Robert Shafran, born in New York in July 1961, who were separated at six months old and placed into three different adoptive families. They found each other by chance 18 years later when, on his first day at community college, Bobby was puzzled when everyone greeted him affectionately as "Eddy", mistaking him for his identical brother who had been there the previous year. The ecstatic "twins reunited" newspaper headlines reached the third triplet, David, and as "triplets reunited" they became a national sensation.

They revelled in each other's company, "rolling around like puppies" on first meeting and played to the ensuing media circus, which focused on their similarities: apart from looking the same and having the same mannerisms, every TV appearance mentioned that they'd all been wrestlers while at school and that they smoked the same brand of cigarettes. 

The boys exploited the novelty of their identical triplet status, occasionally pretending to be each other: Eddy even got his appendix removed under Bobby's name because he didn't have any medical insurance. They cameoed in Madonna's 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan. They ran a New York restaurant together called, inevitably, Triplets. So far, so dream-come-true.

But their adoptive parents were angry that they hadn't known about the siblings. Why had the boys been separated? Why did the adoption agency which placed all three boys in their respective families tell them that their sons were part of a "study of adopted children", without also revealing that they had triplet brothers? 

As more details emerged, the triplets themselves began to realise and resent the fact that they had in fact been "lab rats" for a long-running nurture versus nature twin experiment led by Child Development Centre director, psychiatrist Peter B. Neubauer. 

My reaction at this point, and I'm sure the reaction of most people watching this fascinating documentary is:  That is messed up! How could it happen? 

One of the strengths of the film is that as Bobby, Eddy and David's story unfolds, it raises as many questions as it provides answers and left me itching to know more after the credits rolled. 

Some clues come from people who had worked on the study. Psychiatrist Lawrence Perlman describes in the film the months he spent as a young researcher on the project in 1968–9 when he would visit each of the triplets in turn, recording his observations, and could not let on that he also knew their brothers. "In retrospect it was undoubtedly ethically wrong," he says.

Perlman explored the origins of the study himself in the June 2005 issue of the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics , where he wrote, "Apparently no-one had considered what now seem to have been critical oversights in the study: the twins’ rights to know each other and the possibility that they might meet in the future." He also pointed out that at the time, "informed consent for research subjects was not a required practice".

Perlman interviewed Dr Neubauer in 2004 when Neubauer was aged 91 (he died in 2008), and found he had no qualms: "Neubauer continues to maintain that everything done in the study was proper, and that it conformed to the adoption practices and research standards of the time." …  "The twin study staff believed that a weakness of prior studies on twins reared apart was the twins’ and parents’ knowledge that there was an identical sibling out there somewhere. It was assumed that such knowledge could affect the handling of the child by the parents, as well as the child’s own sense of self. This study intended to eliminate such confounding variables."

Writing in the same journal, psychologist Nancy L. Segal explains how separating twins and triplets for adoption had originally been on the advice of another child psychiatrist, Dr Viola Bernard, who in the 1950s had been advisor to Louise White Adoption Services. Bernard believed that identical siblings growing up together didn't secure a "special niche" in the family: "Consequently, when unwed mothers relinquished their infant twins and triplets for adoption, Bernard advised the agency staff to place the babies in separate homes. Once this policy was in place, Bernard mentioned the separated twins to her friend and colleague, Dr. Peter Neubauer. He replied, ‘They must be studied’."

And so he embarked on a project which ran from the early 1950s to mid-1970s, involving multiple sets of twins and one set of triplets, each child placed individually for adoption, studied regularly and never told about its multiple birth status. Yet the findings were never published and the research was gifted to Yale University in 1990 to remain sealed until 2066, by which time the participants in the study will likely be dead. Which begs the question: what was the point? And if Neubauer thought it was all above board, why bury it? 

Lawrence Perlman said it was his understanding that the point of the study was to see what difference parenting styles made to the children's behaviour. But it seems to me unfair to home in on adoptive parents' parenting styles when so much in these particular children's lives had been manipulated, including their separation from each other.

As Bobby recalls: "We all had really tough adolescent years. Just growing up adopted can add another log to the fire, another dimension to the whole identity crisis of adolescence. We were all really emotionally disturbed kids. Sometimes you don’t realise what the answer is until you find it. It’s pretty hard to imagine the answer that we found." 

As a result of the media exposure and reunions of separated multiples who were part of the study, some of the participants are now requesting access to their own files from the project.

There's a history of twins and higher multiples being the subject of unethical scientific studies. Josef Mengele conducted horrific experiments on twins at Auschwitz; the identical Dionne quintuplets in Canada were removed from their parents and observed and studied like zoo animals throughout their childhoods in the 1930s. 

Three Identical Strangers shows that what might seem acceptable in one era can prove controversial in the next and can have hurtful consequences. As David's aunt says in the film: "When you play with humans you do something very wrong … They didn't have the gift of being brothers for 18 years. They met as adults and hadn't learned to live with each other."

For all the euphoria that surrounded the triplets' teenage reunion, it does not have a happy-ever-after ending.

Fortunately, these days twins and triplets are placed together wherever possible, if they are put up for adoption. We don't assume, as Viola Bernard once did, that twinship is a "handicap". And twin research, done ethically and with appropriate consent, provides valuable answers to nurture versus nature questions, which can lead to scientific and medical progress. 

Neubauer's quest to "eliminate confounding variables" by ensuring that Eddy, Bobby and David knew nothing of each other's existence is, from today's perspective, unnecessarily brutal.

Further reading

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Lessons From a Controversial Study That ‘Deliberately Divided’ Twins

A notorious 1960s study that purposely separated adopted twins and triplets into different families is the subject of Nancy L. Segal’s latest book, “ Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart ,” released Nov. 8.

Segal, professor of psychology at Cal State Fullerton, closely examines the research team that ran the study and tracked the twins’ and triplets’ development from birth to age 12. Meanwhile, the study and its intent were never revealed to their adoptive parents.

Key players included former New York City adoption agency Louise Wise Services and psychoanalytic psychiatrists Viola Bernard and Peter Neubauer. At the time, Neubauer was director of the prominent Child Development Center of the Jewish Board of Guardians, now the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in Manhattan.

The book features extensive interviews and life histories of the twins and triplets, their families, the researchers, the researchers’ colleagues, and adoption, child development, bioethics and law experts. Their stories — along with records, letters and documents — reveal the origins and consequences of the study.

Segal, one of the world’s leading experts on twin studies, specializes in such topics as twin-family relations, twin loss, personality similarity, general intelligence and twins raised apart. She is also the founder and director of the Twin Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton, which mentors the next generation of twin researchers and serves as a public resource on twins.

What were some of the arguments made for separating these twins and triplets?

One justification Bernard had for separating twins was that it relieved parental overburdening. She never mentioned financial concerns, because these families who adopted the kids were all fairly well off. Some of the families even specifically requested twins, but they were not given twins.

Bernard also argued that separation would allow twins to have a stronger sense of identity in adulthood, which would improve their relationship as twins if they were to meet. It didn’t, because there were sometimes jealousies. When you don’t grow up with somebody and you don’t have a shared social history, those kinds of negotiations are not necessarily going to happen automatically. However, most of the reunited twins have formed strong bonds with one another.

The ironic twist to all this is that the separated identical twins were placed with families that had adopted a child several years earlier, all because the researchers didn’t want those twin children to be only children. Where does this rationalization come from? They weren’t only children to begin with.

What surprising or noteworthy information did you discover during your research?

There’s a thing that I call “the culture of the times” argument. For example, think about how we’re going after prominent people who have abused women. It was the culture of the times. A lot of men did it. People knew about it. Now, we’re going after them.

Think about how countries continue to go after Holocaust officers for things they did in the past. It seems there were no legal violations at that time. But morally? Reprehensible. Think about people who put Blackface on their faces. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau did that years ago when he was in high school or college. We’re going after him and others now for such actions.

The research requirements of that time don’t excuse the fact that the researchers purposely destroyed what could have been the most wonderful relationship in the life of a person for their selfish research interests.

The data from this study have been sealed at the Yale University Archives until 2065. Only the twins can gain access to the data. But even then, it’s an arduous process. The twins right now are adults. They are entitled to those records. In 2065, most of them won’t be around and anybody can gain access. It just doesn’t make any sense.

What do you hope readers will take away from this investigation?

I want people to come away with the idea that you have to talk about difficult research topics or progress is never made. If you don’t talk about them, then mistakes and missteps can be repeated. There is also the question of using data that were collected in unacceptable ways. I do not think that any information gathered on the twins and triplets would shed new insights on human developmental events, compared with legitimately conducted twin studies. I do think these twins’ stories make us more sensitive to the whole research process, what’s behind it, and whether we take part in research or not. You have to put the welfare of participants ahead of your own personal research interests. What is legally within bounds is not always morally acceptable.

Contact: Kendra Morales [email protected]