this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour straight after this programme. february of 2018, there was a 2020 episode about louise wise agency separating identical twins back in the mid �*60s, and my older sister who's adopted, called me and said, "can you imagine if either of us was a twin?" and i said, "well, that's ridiculous." and i remember getting a shiver all over my body thinking, "wow, what if this was real?" in the 1960s, an adoption agency in new york, the louise wise services, began a policy to deliberately split up identical and fraternal twins, and place the infants in different families.

the adoptive parents were never told that their children had siblings. any louise wise adoptee from the 605 has every right to think perhaps they have a twin. the separated twins were placed in a controversial study to explore what makes us who we are, and how much is defined by nature versus nurture. but at what cost? it's so emotional for me. what they did was so| unethical, so amoral. stories of twins have long captured human imagination. there is something beguiling about having an identical copy of yourself, and the resulting bond that would create. hi. hello. which one's which? i'm pam. i'm pauline.

identical twins share all their genes having split from a single fertilised egg in the first two weeks after conception. fraternal twins share half their genes on average. they result when a women releases two eggs at the same time and they are fertilised by two separate sperm, so they have 50% of their genes in common on average, like ordinary siblings. comparing resemblance in identical twins to fraternal twins, gives us a handle on whether or not genetics has an effect. it would, if identical twins were more alike than fraternals, and they invariably are. for decades, they have been the focus of scientific research. the study in new york came to light when identical triplets who were separated at birth accidentally discovered each other. studying twins gives us enormous insight into how we come to be the way that we are. twin studies are a natural model. looking at genetic and environmental influence on behaviour and what we're finding is that many more behaviours than we would have thought do have a genetic

component to them. tea is served. thank you very much. to try to understand the unique relationship twins have, i went to visit pauline and pamela, identicaltwins who grew up together in east london. i can look at her and i know what she's thinking. yeah. and i know what she is feeling. yeah. and if it is something funny then, that's it. you can't do a thing with us, can you? and tell me a bit more about what your unique bond is like. it's so hard to describe, but our lives, because of the virtue that we are twins, i think it's more entwined. it is like you are the other half. we have always said that. i think that is right. we knew we started off as one and then we split. and it feels like that. we look so alike i cannot tell us apart, could you? no. me and my shadow, it is unique and we're lucky to have it. what was it like growing up with an identical twin?

we always knew when there was something wrong with the other one. so you're always there. she's going to cry now. i spent many years looking at identical and fraternal . twins who have been separated at birth. . it is very important - to include the fraternals because they are the natural. control group, and what got me into twin research initiallyl is because i am a fraternal twin and i was fascinated with the similarities - and differences, mostly. differences, that my sister and i have. i used to wonder as a child how this could be if we had - the same parents - and same environment. though it is rare, twins are raised apart for a variety of reasons, from parents splitting up and taking one child each to mix ups in infant wards, but never before had twins been separated as part of policy. when i first got to the university of minnesota in 1982 i heard about this

controversial study in new york city that took place in the 1960s and '70s in which an adoption agency, the louise wise services, felt that it was beneficial to twins to be separated, to grow up to develop their own identity. at the time, there was a researcher, dr peter neubauer, at the child development centre at the jewish board of guardians, who had wanted to study twins raised apart, and here was his sample. neubauer had a colleague and friend, viola bernard, who was the adviser to the adoption agency, called louise wise services. so she placed a set of twins in different families back in the 1950s. when she told neubauer about it he said, they must be studied. the scientists, you know, they were the masterminds of this study, neubauer and bernard. kathy and her sister, lori, were deliberately divided as infants as part of the research programme. they only met as

teenagers by chance. we were really deprived of. being sisters, let alone twins. i think it was just - horrible what they did. we met with dr viola bernard to find out why they split us up and she just kept saying, they were satisfying, you know, two families who could not have children. we thought it would be better when it comes to competition, for twins to have their own identity. and not grow up together. parents would dress them alike and treat them exactly the same and in her terminology, shared an ego. so she did not think that was very healthy. they said it was backed by the child development literature at the time, but i can tell you, honestly, there is no such child development literature in existence. they never named studies. the louise wise services and thejewish board of guardians, both once well—respected entities, have long since shutdown, passing on the adoption

and research records to spencer—chapin and thejewish board respectively. in a comment to us, thejewish board strongly distanced themselves from the research. there are fraternal twins separated but not studied. allison and her fraternal twin sister michelle were also split up by the agency. they met by chance as adults, age 5a. i've been talking to a new york times reporter, and she said you really should take this, because this is maybe bigger than you. this is my first conversation with her. it feels like yesterday. i really think we owe a lot of people some help with this too, it was such a wrong that they did. as the adoption agency began to split up twins, social workers within the agency voiced objections. so, even though viola bernard was able to push this through, it was not unanimous by any stretch of the imagination, and that was not something neubauer had let on. he said this was the practice of the time.

they split us up to study us. we were part of this child study. nature versus nurture. lawrence perlman was briefly involved in the original study as a young postgraduate. he is one of the few researchers who have spoken publicly about their experiences. ijoined the study in 1968. i was 24. myjob was to organise the data, and there was a wealth of data. so the idea was to try to tease out what differences there might be as a result of the different families that they were raised in. thus, be able to understand the relative contribution of hereditary versus environment. part of what we did during the time i was on the study, which was maybe ten months, was to go and visit the twins and i would test the child and do some film samples of them. they would give me these exams, these tests, and they would be i

filming them and i think i felt| very anxious when they would come to the house. and there were many, many different tests given to them. intelligence, personality, emotionality. they were filmed, they were photographed, they were observed. the reason it was done was because the researchers felt the previous twins raised apart studies looked retrospectively at development and really could not capture development in real—time. here was an opportunity to track development in real time as it unfolded. the twins were placed with adopted families who were not told that their child was part of a twin pair. they were not told the real purpose of the study. they were told only that thier child was in a child development study, was already enrolled, and it was obvious if they did not accept the study, they did not accept researchers coming to the home

periodically, they probably would not get this child. they all had an older sibling who had been adopted from louise wise and that was the hook they had in terms of getting parents to agree, because they had an older sibling adopted there was a sense of how confident the parents were. remember, these were parents desperate to have children. as one mother put it, "i would learn to fly "if i could have a child", and so they could learn more about their child and psychology and adoption. my mother, she agreed, she was a psych major, i and she knew the importance| of child development studies. the fact that it was a twin study, they were not - told the truth. the study soon run into issues. as the children began to age, some of them were upset by the study and didn't want to do it any longer. apparently, the researchers ran out of funding.

it had always been a shoestring operation. it was really self—funded, pretty much, by neubauer and bernard. and so the study pretty much came to a close, but there were other problems, too. in the late 1970s, there was a real interest in informed consent procedures in this country. arthur caplan is a professor at nyu and medical ethics expert. so the landscape of ethics in research during the �*60s was a mixed bag. we'd had terrible experiments conducted by german scientists under the nazi regime in the concentration camps, and as a result it issued codes of ethics to bind researchers internationally. the number one principle in those codes, the helsinki code of ethics, was the informed consent of all subjects is absolutely essential. however, there were violations of that code which, by the way, was written by western judges, including americans. it was as if we said, "well, the nazis had done bad things

but american researchers, we don't have to worry about that, we would not do such bad things." but we were doing terrible things and this twin experiment took place during the 60s as part of a series of these violations. there were some informed consent forms drafted early but never properly signed. they tried to make it ethical in the '70s by getting parents to sign it, but some did not, and some did not think the form adequately covered what their child had been through. children who were related to one another and adopted to different families, and the children and the families did not know they had siblings and that is an incredible violation of their right to know. when they are dragooned or bamboozled into the study they absolutely have a right to know. it was wrong, unethical and damaging to individuals. after an offer to pursue a clinical career,

lawrence perlman resigned from the programme after just 10 months. i wondered what had been the outcome of the study. the years went by and i never heard of any reports. that was surprising, because this was such a unique study. i became an investigative reporter, essentially. and began to track down people who knew anything about the study. eventually, perlman would meet psychologist and twin specialist, segal, and together they would confront a 91—year—old neubauer at his office on madison avenue. nancy had asked, how they could justify separating these twins without informing the parents? and he defended the practice, saying that, again, it was viola bernard's idea.

he was not going to acknowledge any responsibility for having done anything wrong, so that was just his stance, he dug his heels in. so we asked, what was the plan if they had met one another by chance, because they were all in the metropolitan area? kathy and lori did almost meet by accident. when i was around six, i usedj to play with my neighbour two doors down, bruce and amy, and they said to me, - "kathy, we met a girl who looked just "likej you and acted like you and talked like you", i and i never forget barry, who is my fiance now, i and his brother when i was in fifth grade said, - "we met your twin sister." and i said, "i don't| have a twin sister." and he said, "oh yes, you do." the girls were pulled from the study after the researchers became aware, because they felt

it would affect the data. but the horrible thing about this was that viola bernard told both parents these twins cannot meet and do not tell them that they are twins, so the parents had to live with this difficult important knowledge and never tell their child. both girls were dancers and when they met, they were 17 and they met secretly without their parents' knowledge. muscle i saw lori crossing the street, and ijust saw the way- and ijust saw the way she walked and the big smile on her face. - yeah, then we hugged. it was quite an experience. it was surreal. i felt that i was staring at myself in the mirror. it was beautiful, i was in such awe of the whole thing. there were so many similarities and we shared so many similarl feelings and perceptions and artistic inclinations. |

when i met with these kids i was struck by how similar they were. notjust the similar physical appearance but their whole personalities. it was quite clear to me that the genetic influences were very strong. these were psychoanalytically orientated researchers who placed heavy weight on environmental influences and on parenting, and suddenly they are confronted with twins raised apart to end up being very, very similar. the beauty of identical twins raised apart is that they share only their genes and not their environment so any resemblance between them is tied to their common genes. genetics is not everything, but it does explain a great deal of why we differ, one person to another. we find that height and weight have substantial genetic components. we find that general intelligence has a substantial

genetic component, a little less than some of the physical traits like height and weight and brainwaves. nevertheless, a substantial genetic component as does special mental abilities, and then we drop down a bit when we get to job satisfaction. probably the most surprising findings in the last 20 years or so have been things like religiosity. how much you invest in religious activities and interests and political attitudes and social attitudes have a genetic component to them. these findings come from years of data collected from retrospective studies of twins raised apart, and not the neubauer—bernard project, which itself was fundamentally flawed as it did not include a control group of fraternal twins, even though they were also separated. this was the reality for allison and michelle, even though they were not studied. my son gets an e—mail on ancestry from a women in newjersey who basically

blurts out and says, "i am your mother's twin sister." michelle and i got connected and were reunited and it was unbelievable. you know, physically there were a lot of things that were similar. you could tell we were sisters. there's a lot of pictures of us wearing clothing that is so similar and we grew up on opposite coasts so it is pretty incredible. the more we got to know each other, the more that we realised we were similar, emotionally and how we looked at life and how we lived our life. we find some amazing similarities in identical twins raised apart, many more that we would have anticipated, notjust in the more traditional areas but in some more unusual habits, such as a pair of twins who both used to scatter love letters around the house to their wives, and both bit their nails down to the nub and had the same mixed headache

syndrome described in the same way, as if someone was beating on the head with a hammer. these are very challenging and you can ask yourself are these due to random chance? my answer to that is no, they're not. and the rarer they are, the more i believe it is somehow tied to their genes and how that interacts with their environment to produce these kinds of unusual similarities. this is certainly the case for pauline and pamela, who mirror each other in extraordinary ways. i always knew she was pregnant more or less at the same time i she did, because i always used to get the pregnancy arthritis l in my fingers. she used to come to me and say, "you're pregnant aren't you?" - we do sort of mirror each other, and it is bizarre. . when people hear about twin studies, and how much nature seems to be genetically determined, does that take away from our own sense of agency or our own control? it is very important to appreciate that genes do not work in determinative ways, they are predisposed, but they do not provide the final word. just because you have a gene,

doesn't mean it will always be expressed. it takes a certain environment to bring that out. we all have genes that will be expressed given a particular environment. sometimes gene expression can occur in one twin, and not the other, and this can create differences between them. these environmental differences that trigger different gene expressions might even start in the womb. it doesn't mean we're set in stone, that we can't change. describe to me how you complement each other? although you are identical, i and that bond is always there, you have your own opinionsj and your own personalities. pauline had one half-

of the bedroom and i have the other, hers was all pristine and dusted, i and mine was like a tip. i was more academic, pam was dyslexic, we didn't know that then. she's a lot more creative, i'm not at all creative. when i was a child, one thing i always wanted to do is join the police, from about the age of four. we ended up both police . officers, but if you had told be in my 20 and 30s, i i would have told you, never in a million years. it's weird, because a lot. of time twins grow apart, but we've grown into each - other, we look more like now. we'll look after each other for as long as we can, - will do that forever now, really. - i couldn't imagine, i think it would be the cruellest thing, if you're a twin, and you didn't know you're a twin, until you reach a certain age, you would have got on with your life. once you're actually told, when i look back at everything we've done together from dot, i would feel so cross and so angry that we've missed out on all these chances in the unique relationship that we've got. you would never have that, you would never have that forever person next to you, so i think it's tragic, actually.

you can really cause severe harm, marital disruption, l battles down the road - between children and parents, the potential for harm is real, the potential for violation- of basic rights, - absolutely present. 0nce reunited, allison and michelle had less than three years together. michelle passed away from pancreatic cancer in early 2022. allison feels her loss keenly. i was just in awe of how bright and funny and smart she was. she was just positive, literally to the very end. i try to learn from that, and live from that, and try to have that be the way that i'm living my life, because i met her. for lori and kathy, the impact of finding out that they were separated was profound. we could never go back, because we were twins, | but we weren't sisters. we didn't grow up together.

even to this day, that has been a very difficult part _ of our relationship. maybe you meet somebody, i would say "i'm a twin", - and "oh, that must've been so much fun growing up- together, dressing the same, looking the same." _ instead of saying no, that didn't happen, l we were separated, i didn't. want to have to go into that, i would lie, because ijust didn't feel like going - into the whole story. to continue the legacy of this secret sister, . it's been difficult, - so i'm sort of glad that hopefully people will see this. maybe it doesn't have to be such a big secret any more. she's like my best friend now. 0h, now it's a loving relationship. - so whatever happened to all the data that was collected? the data was a mess.

it was just not well organised. they didn't really seem to have an understanding of the proper way to handle it, from a scientific viewpoint. they were threatened with lawsuits, and nothing was published. with permission, i did request the video footage for kathy and lori, but i was told that due to privacy concerns they couldn't actually share the data with anyone else. so people wonder, what can we do now? the first thing we can do is make sure every twin that was involved in the study knows it. they have a right to find out what the findings are when they participated in the study, and then say, "you can publish that, you should publish that, "i want that never released", or whatever they wish. at this point all the data had been sequestered, placed under seal at the yale university archives, not to be opened until the year 2065. the researchers, who are now deceased, had claimed that this was to protect the twins. i do not believe that fora minute, i believe it was done to protect themselves. it obviously is - a subject of wonder.

why keep the records under seal? - i think the only explanation that i can come up with is, i embarrassment. forthe families, questions persist, and the experiment has cast a long shadow. makes me emotional thinking about it, because it'sjust something that ijust believe you don't do to people, and i think being fraternal twins, like we felt we were collateral damage in this whole louise wise scheme. i would say it was challenging enough, being an adopted child, and to deprive me of being a twin, and having a sister, it wasjust... ..horrible. in the name of scientific - research they had essentially exploited these families, i without ever using the data. there really are no insights, we don't know what's in there, and if we were to get access to it, and publish it perhaps, what kind of message would that send to future researchers?

i think thatjust because you can do a study doesn't mean that you should, and i still think that it stands as a great example of how not do research. this should never, ever, ever be done. hello there. the weather story's looking pretty benign for the next few days. we'll have very little wind around to move the weather along. but one thing you will notice over the next few days is that it'll be warming up, particularly across england and wales. most places will be dry, but there will be some showers around — increasingly so across the north and the west

of the country as we move into the weekend. so, we've got this weak area of high pressure just to the east of the uk, rather cloudy high, drawing up some warmer airfrom the near continent. but there is a lot of cloud trapped underneath it, so a rather grey day, i think on thursday. showery bursts of rain continuing to affect parts of northern ireland, northern england, southern scotland, certainly through the morning, it'll tend to ease down into the afternoon. could see a few showers developing across western areas, most places will be dry. despite the cloud amounts, it'll feel warmer — 22—24 celsius in the south. we could see 20 celsius or so in the central belt of scotland. so, it looks like it should be a dry affair for the commonwealth games�* opening ceremony in birmingham, temperatures at around 19—20 celsius, so feeling quite mild. now, as we head through thursday night, it looks like most places will hold onto the cloud — again, the cloud will be thickest across parts of northern england, southern scotland, where we could see some splashes of rain. but for most places, it will be dry, and a milder night to come, lows of 12—14 celsius. so for friday, we start to see this

area of low pressure pushing into the far northwest of the country. the breeze will be picking up here later in the day, but much of the uk will be under the influence of high pressure once again. so, we'll start off with quite a bit of cloud around friday morning across northern england, southern scotland. that should tend to fizzle away, and we could see the cloud melt away, as well. so, i think there's a greater chance of seeing the sunshine on friday. the odd shower will develop again into the afternoon, but most places will be dry, 25—28 celsius across england and wales, the low 20s across the north — so feeling a lot warmer. saturday's another warm, muggy day, but we will have more cloud around outbreaks of rain affecting the north and the west of the country, as that weather front continues to push its way eastwards. very little getting into the southeast, the areas where we really do need the rainfall. again, it'll be another warm day — low 20s in the north, up to around 25—26 celsius across the southeast. it stays warm into sunday and monday. there's always the chance of rain in the north and the west, but tending to stay dry in the south and the east.

welcome to bbc news. i'm david willis. our top stories — china warns the us it will "bear the consequences" if the house speaker nancy pelosi visits taiwan. presidents xi and biden are due to speak on thursday. the united states says it's offered russia a deal, aimed at freeing the american basketballer, brittney griner. trying to avert a global food crisis — the first ships carrying crucial grain supplies prepare to leave ports in ukraine. he's credited with inspiring the global green movement — tributes are paid to the environmentalist james lovelock, who has died, at the age of 103.