Wednesday Weirdness: Three Identical Strangers

Welcome to Wednesday Weirdness, a recurring theme where we post something truly weird and wacky in adoption or child welfare.

I posted about this one in 2018, but I thought I would revisit it because I found out new information about it. This was published on Facebook recently as a “Historical Fact.” It is disgraceful!!!! Dr. Peter Neubauer died in 2008. Yale is disgraceful!

From the “Historical Fact”:

“In 1980, 19-year-old Robert Shafran arrived for his first day at Sullivan County Community College in New York. But something strange happened. Students began greeting him as if they already knew him, calling him by the name “Eddy.” Confused but curious, Robert soon met Eddy Galland, and the resemblance was undeniable. They weren’t just lookalikes, they were identical twins, separated at birth and completely unaware of each other’s existence. Their reunion made headlines, but the story was far from over.

Shortly after the news broke, David Kellman came forward. He had seen their faces in a newspaper and instantly recognised himself in them. What followed was a jaw-dropping revelation: the three young men were actually triplets, all born on July 12, 1961, and adopted out to different families through the Louise Wise Services adoption agency in New York. None of their adoptive parents were told the boys had siblings.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a bizarre coincidence. Their separation had been orchestrated as part of a secret psychological study led by Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent psychiatrist. The study aimed to explore the age-old “nature versus nurture” question by placing each boy in a home of different socioeconomic status working-class, middle-class, and upper-middle-class and observing their development. Even more disturbing, their adoptive families were visited regularly by researchers, without being told the true nature of the study or that the boys were being monitored in parallel.

The findings of the study were never published, and the original records are sealed until 2065. The ethical violations involved shocked the world when their story was revisited in the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, sparking renewed debate about consent and scientific responsibility.”

Yale

“In the depths of Yale’s library collections, records from a controversial study that separated twins and triplets at birth remain sealed, despite demands from the study’s participants to see their own files.

The study, conducted by child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer throughout the 1960s and 70s, involved at least eight twins and a set of triplets who had been separated at birth at the now-defunct New York City adoption agency Louise Wise Services.”

“The records will remain sealed until Oct. 25, 2065. The study came into the spotlight after this summer’s documentary “Three Identical Strangers” and 2017 documentary “The Twinning Reaction” highlighted the stories of the participants and explored the study.”

“Yale’s counsel explained the University was in no position to breach the terms of Neubauer’s 1990 gift by unilaterally deciding to unseal the records, according to Michael Alpert ’07 MED ’14, who emailed faculty at Yale Medical School to organize the meeting after learning of the study in 2013.”

[Why?Why? ]

““I don’t think [the study] would be allowed to go forward under current standards,” Latham told the News last week.” [What….?]

Records from controversial twin study sealed at Yale until 2065
[Yale Daily News 10/1/18 by William McCormack]