Identical Strangers

We're all intrigued by a cheating scandal. The college admissions scandal, Maradona's hand of God. But what did these scandals tell us about the world? That's exactly what a new show from Radiotopia and Defector Media is all about. The show is called Only If You Get Caught. Host Patrick Redford takes us through stories of rule breakers and why they did it.

It'll explore topics like what Lance Armstrong's doping scandal tells us about trans panic or why the WNBA issued its largest fine to an owner for letting its players fly private. Listen to Only If You Get Caught starting October 21st. wherever you get your podcasts. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman.

It's an old debate. What is it that makes us, us? Our DNA or our life experiences? Genes or environment? Nature versus nurture? I spent most of my life in the nurture camp. It just felt to me like such a large part of our personalities, our path in life, is shaped by circumstances. But then something happened that made me change my mind. I had kids. Two girls, born just 15 months apart.

And they couldn't be more different. It's been that way from day one. They came out printed a certain way. One has the personality of a roller coaster. The other one is steady. One listens to Bruno Mars. The other one likes Woody Guthrie. And as a parent, I have to say it's a relief to feel like you don't deserve too much blame or credit for your kid. My personal insight, however, hasn't seemed to put a halt to the nature-nurture debate.

But what if you could take two identical twins, who share 100% of their DNA, and soon after they're born, you place each of them in different families, where they would be raised in completely different circumstances? And then, what if you could study them as they grew up? measure their intelligence and personality, compare them as they learn to walk, go to school, fall in love for the first time. Aside from the obvious ethical questions, it would be the perfect experiment.

as long as the twins never found out about each other. Today on the podcast, Identical Strangers. My name is Paula Bernstein. I grew up in the picture-perfect childhood in a suburban Westchester with really happily married parents. I got married, we had our first child, and really we were kind of in the nesting stage of our life.

It was a spring afternoon. I was just rushing in the apartment with my daughter. I walk in the door and the phone is ringing and I look at caller ID and it said Louise Wise Services and I had always known the name of the agency where I was adopted. And, you know, my heart kind of started to beat quickly and I thought, why would they be calling me after all these years?

The woman on the other end of the line confirmed that I was in fact Paula Bernstein and I was adopted from Louise Wise. And she said, well, I've got some news for you. I thought I should tell you. in case you were walking down Fifth Avenue and ran into someone who looks exactly like you do. And then she said, you've got a twin who's looking for you. And she at that point said,

I hope I did the right thing in telling you. Are you prepared to hear your twin's name? And I said yes. And she told me her name, and I thought, I have a twin, and her name is Elise Shine. My name is Elise Schein. I was living in Paris and Paula was in New York. So, you know, I head off to New York and we arranged to meet at a cafe in the East Village. I was very nervous about what I was wearing. How do you dress to meet your identical twin for the first time?

It was a gorgeous spring day and I was, you know, wearing sunglasses and, you know, nervously chain smoking. And then, you know, suddenly she saw me. I came over and said, Elise? And she got up and we kind of gingerly patted each other, which was funny. There was no tearful hug. And then we began to inspect each other.

It was like, you know, monkeys in a zoo that we were kind of inspecting each other's bodies. And I remember I said, do you have chubby knees? And I kind of glanced down below the hem of her skirt and saw that her knees were quite cute. And I always thought of mine as kind of... of chubby. So I thought, well, why did she get the cute knees? It was just a natural instinct for us to start comparing. And when we sat there through lunch and dinner, we ended up eating two meals there.

You know, we had 35 years to catch up on. How do you start asking somebody, you know, what have you been up to since we shared a womb together? You know, where do you start? Very soon after Elise and I reunited, I said, Do you know why we were separated? And she said, well, the woman at the agency said we were separated for a study on nature versus nurture. The only study of its kind on separated twins from infancy.

When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study, but of course they neglected to tell them the key element of the study. which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes. My name is Lawrence Perlman and in 1968-69 I was a research assistant on

Dr. Peter Neubauer's study of twins reared apart. Apparently, Viola Bernard, who was a very prominent child psychiatrist and a consultant to Louise Wise Services, the adoption agency, had a really strong belief that twins should be raised separately. This idea that twins were often dressed the same and kind of treated exactly the same, she felt interfered with their independent psychological development.

So she had mentioned this to Peter Neubauer, who was a very prominent child psychiatrist, and he said, oh, there's a great opportunity to do a research study. And that's how the study was born. And Paula and Elise were newborns, so I had seen them in their foster care. So at that time, they were called Marion and Jean, which I guess were the names that their mother had given them.

These are some notes of the visit that I did when Paula and Elise were 28 days old. Jean tends to be more active than Marion, wakes sooner, cries more lustily and persistently. and is less easily diverted. They seem advanced for their age. They eat heartily and already take solid foods, sleep soundly and can even be moved about and taken outside without disturbing their sleep.

It's hard to look at this and realize that I was this foster child who for the first five months of my life really lived with my twin sister. Since the beginning of science, twins have offered a unique opportunity to study to what extent nature versus nurture influences the way we develop, the people that we turn out to be. My name is Lawrence Wright, and a few years ago I wrote a book about twin studies. It was called Twins.

Every other twin study that I'm aware of, especially of identical twins who have been separated at birth, is retrospective. Usually the twins are discovered... you know, oftentimes in the middle of their lives. The Neubauer study differs from all other twin studies in that it looked at the twins at the beginning of their lives.

They were filmed as they were struggling to their feet the first time. They were filmed as they went out on a bicycle for the first time. Their intelligence was assessed. Their personality. All of these things were measured. And no one. Neither the twins nor their adoptive parents realized that they were adopting identical twins separated from each other. From a scientific point of view, it's beautiful. It's practically the perfect study.

But this study would never happen today. So the study ended in 1980, and then a year later, New York State began requiring adoption agencies to keep siblings together. At that point, they realized public opinion would be so against them that they wouldn't dare publish the study. It's kind of disturbing to think that all this material about us is in some file cabinet somewhere.

And really for ourselves, we had to figure out what the true story was. So then we immediately attempted to reach Dr. Neubauer and called him, and he refused to speak with us initially. As time passed... He realized that we were persistent enough that we were not going away, and he did grant us kind of an unofficial interview at his house. I think what we wanted was for him to say,

At the time, we genuinely thought this was the best thing to do. I'm sorry if we seem to have not anticipated what might happen in separating the twins. And while he showed no ounce of remorse and certainly offered no apology, I think we really had created in our mind this idea that we were meeting Dr. Frankenstein. And in fact, he was rather charming. You know, I almost felt like he was this...

doting uncle. And by the end he said, well you'll have to come back next time for some Viennese pastries. Dr. Peter Neubauer is not only a very distinguished psychiatrist, he's also on the board of the Freud Archives. He's internationally renowned in his field, and yet I think very few people who know Dr. Neubauer are aware of his study. He's rarely spoken to anyone about those studies. I interviewed Dr. Neubauer and I recorded those conversations.

twins are aware that they're twins and how many are not. He was unapologetic about the study. He insisted that at the time it was a matter of scientific consensus that twins were better off being separated at birth and raised separately. I never found anything in the literature to support them. Okay, thanks again for your time. Bye-bye. You know, no such study will ever be done again. Nor should it be.

But it would be very interesting to learn what this study has to teach us. It's kind of jarring and thrilling to see a carbon copy of the same person. partially because twins really do force us to question what is it that makes each of us who we are. Since meeting Elise, it's undeniable that genetics play a huge role, probably more than 50%. You know, it's not just our taste in music or books. You know, it goes beyond that. In her, I see...

the same basic personality. And yet eventually we had to realize that we're different people with different life histories. Certainly, we've made very different life choices. I mean, she's married and has children and I've been traveling a lot and, you know, I'm still single.

You know, it's not as if one of us led the true life, you know, the true outcome of this particular DNA combination. You know, if I were raised by Paula's parents and she were raised by my parents, would I be her? Would she be me? I think the answer we've decided is no. Elise, when we first met, would talk often about if we had grown up together and she was frustrated by my inability to imagine a shared life.

Part of me, I think, felt protective of my old life. You know, as much as I think they did the wrong thing, they should not have separated us. We should have grown up together. And yet I can't go back. And imagine my life growing up with Elise. That life never happened. And it is sad that as close as we are now, there's no way we can ever compensate for those 35 years.

Me and Paula, it's hard to see where we're going to go. It's really uncharted territory, but I really love her and I can't imagine my life without her. Thanks to Paula Bernstein and Elise Shine. If you want to know more about their story, you can check out their book called Identical Strangers. Also thanks to journalist Lawrence Wright. He's the author of many great books, including Twins, What They Tell Us About Who We Are.

And it's because of Lawrence Wright that this story includes the first tape ever heard publicly of Dr. Peter Neubauer describing his secret experiment. Dr. Neubauer died in 2008. The records of his twin study are sealed until 2066. Which brings me to one final note. Of the 13 children involved in the Neubauer experiment, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. So if you do the math, that means there are four individuals who are part of the study.

and still don't know that somewhere out there, they have an identical twin. It could be you.