The girls were adopted through an agency called Louise Wise Services, which told the respective adoptive parents that their daughter was part of a child development study. Until they were about 13 years old, a psychologist had visited their homes every few months to ‘test’ and ‘study’ them.
The real purpose of the study was kept secret. What the identical twins and parents didn’t know was they were essentially guinea pigs in a long-term study, designed by famous New York Psychiatrist Dr Peter Neubauer, aimed at answering the age-old ‘nature vs nurture’ debate.
The girls had been secretly separated at birth as part of the experiment, along with several other twins and triplets -–including Eddy, Shafran and David, who made worldwide headlines when they were reunited in 1980.
But whilst they were each thrilled to find their long-lost sibling, it was a dark discovery they had made.
The women had been deprived of what should have been one of their most salient relationships, and they feel the sadness of that to this day.
“We were human guinea pigs. We were treated not like humans, but like animals,” Carbone said on 60 Minutes.
“She should’ve been the closest person to me in the world. And she wasn’t,” Mertzel reiterated.
Despite the long-term study, and the horrific lengths taken to answer the question, no scientific paper on this topic was ever published by Dr. Newbauer. He passed away in 2008 and had commanded the records of his study on twins to be kept confidential.
Source: Twins separated at birth: Dr Peter Neubauer’s study.
So wicked that this tragedy was ever allowed to occur