Reunited identical twins expose social experiment
Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein lived very similar lives. They were both born in New York, edited their high school newspapers and studied film at university. And both were adopted in 1968.
It was only at the age of 35 that they discovered each other and just how similar they were: identical twins who had been separated as infants in a bizarre social experiment.
After not knowing each other for three decades, the two women met for the first time three years ago.
On that first day, Elyse did not reveal the secret she had discovered during her search to find her birth mother. But soon afterwards she told Paula that they had been deliberately separated at birth and were the subjects of a study on nurture versus nature, a debate which has enthralled scientists for generations.
"Imagine a slightly different version of you walks across the room, looks you in the eye and says 'hello' in your voice...", they write in their book 'Identical Strangers', published this week in the US. "Looking at this person, you are able to gaze into your own eyes and see yourself from the outside. We don't have to imagine."
They also tackled the scientist behind the experiment, Peter Neubauer, an internationally renowned child psychiatrist.
He eventually agreed to meet them as long as their conversation wasn't recorded. They allege he showed no remorse and offered no apology.
Separating twins at birth was ended in the state of New York in 1980, a year after the study ended. Aware that his research would be criticised, Mr Neubauer reportedly locked the study in an archive at Yale University. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Alex Spillius in Washington
