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.
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
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
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.
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