Astonishing story at Beebs.
They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein spent their first 35 years in total ignorance of the other's existence. They were given up for adoption to separate families as part of an experiment in the US to discover how identical twins would react to being raised in different family backgrounds.Neither set of adoptive parents knew the babies were part of a study or that they had been born twins.
..."We both felt like asking: 'So what have you done with this body, with this DNA?'" says Elyse, "Or, 'So what have you been up to since we shared a womb?'"
The women have handled it well. It makes me very uneasy to think that this experiment could have all gone quite sour easily (and what we don't know is the source of our unease, much more so for the twins). Dr Peter Neubauer has been extremely lucky with these women.
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