NaijaNews
The Incredible Story Of The Identical Triplets Separated At Birth
July 24, 2018
By Olawale Adeniyi
— Excerpt
The triplets became a media phenomenon after they met at age 19, but things began to shift in the 1990s
Robert, David and Eddy were born in a suburb of New York in July 1961.
They were separated at birth and given to adoption for three different families. The three grew up unaware that they were identical twins, until, by a coincidence, they finally got to know each other.
At age 19, Robert Shafran went to university for the first day of school when he realized that several students were confusing him with someone else. They called him Eddy Galland.
Out of curiosity, Robert decided to contact Eddy. “His eyes were my eyes,” says Robert as he remembers the moment he saw his brother.
The last piece of the puzzle (or the trio of twins) came when David Kellman saw the picture of the two students in a newspaper and realized that he was also the face of the characters in that story.
The story is portrayed in detail in the documentary Three Identical Strangers , Tim Wardle’s film, currently in the United States.
A controversial scientific experiment gave rise to the acclaimed documentary “Three identical unknowns”
Separated in scientific experiment
The documentary reveals that when the three young people first saw each other personally, they were very excited.
“For the first time, we swam together in the sea or we rode together on a roller coaster,” David told the BBC, explaining how different the feeling of experiencing day-to-day leisure with the ” new “brothers.
“We felt like children because we did not have a childhood together. It was so much fun.” …
Families would not have been informed that the babies had siblings. When the triplet parents asked the adoption agency to explain that they had omitted this information, they were informed that the separation was kept confidential because of the difficulties of finding people willing to adopt three babies at one time.
But the real purpose was to make possible a project of the Austrian psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, who at that time worked for the Child Development Center.
His plan was to investigate how genetics influence the development of twins growing in different socioeconomic environments. After all, what has the most impact? Genetics or socialization? Are humans shaped by the environment in which they live or is it the DNA that determines who they are and who they will become?
To answer these questions, Neubauer and his team monitored the youth over the years without ever revealing to the families the true motives of the investigation.
When the triplets finally discovered the psychiatrist’s secret plan, from an investigation of a New Yorker journalist, they criticized him harshly, calling the study “cruel” and comparing research to social experiments promoted by the Nazis during World War II…
More at Yale News: Records from controversial twin study sealed at Yale until 2065