Cruel secret experiment separates twins and triplets at birth | 60 Minutes Australia

identical twins are beautiful quirks of nature perfect genetic copies of each other with a bond so close it's as if they're telepathic understandably twins and even rarer identical triplets are magnets for curious scientists trying to answer that profound question is it nature or nurture that determines who we are but one psychiatrist became so obsessed by his research he engineered a truly heartless experiment he separated sets of identical twins and triplets at birth and studied them as they grew up apart they never even knew their siblings existed but his cruelty was finally exposed when in a

one in a million chance they found each other i used to pretend that i had a twin because i was fascinated with twins imagine growing up thinking that even though you were surrounded by a loving family something was missing i thought everybody wanted a twin sister i thought it was normal what do you see not a best friend [Music] not a soul mate but the most fundamental thing in your life another you a mirror image your identical twin anybody i knew who was a twin i was just always fascinated by like and i was jealous

basically like that they had a twin and i didn't and i just made one up so i pretended and talked to my imaginary twin i went to camp with twins and i was so jealous of them and i didn't understand why and then as i got older i would say doesn't everybody want a twin and my friends would be like no i didn't want a twin i didn't want to share a birthday and i was like oh well i did for the first 23 years of their lives ellen carboni and melanie mertzel had no idea

they really were identical twins nor did the families who adopted them as babies [Music] but their happiness in discovering each other turned to anger when it was revealed they had been deliberately separated as tiny infants as part of a grotesque experiment designed by famous new york psychiatrist dr peter newbauer what do you two think of peter newbauer um selfish satan we were identical and he robbed us of our childhood he robbed us our closeness altered our life it took away something from from us that we will never ever ever experience or have we'll get back

in our entire lives and they were not alone and i said this is like nazi [ __ ] other twins even triplets were ripped apart in the name of science kind of like reality hitting like a tidal wave we were a science experiment these people split us up and studied less like lab rats the experiment started in the 1960s at the louise wise adoption agency in new york here babies were adopted out to good jewish families identical twins ellen and melanie were born in may 1966 but neither their biological mother nor the families who adopted

them had any idea they were guinea pigs in a secret experiment louise wise actually called my mom and said that we will give you another baby if you let us do studies on how a third child adapts in a household so my mom was like oh okay i'll do anything i want another baby and how old were you at the time my mom says three months and so she was allowed to do that to take you away on the basis that it was a what normal child development study right exactly so the whole thing was

a sham to both sets of your parents i had no idea no what was the new bower study trying to achieve dr peter neubauer was very interested in questions of nature and nurture to what extent are we products of our genes and to what extent are we products of our environment professor nancy siegel is one of the world's leading experts on twins and the role genetics and the environment play in shaping who we are in the new bowers study there was a purposeful separation an intentional separation of the twins he got all of his data

in real time which in many ways is the ideal experiment but it's also the forbidden experiment in total four pairs of identical twins and one set of triplets were all split and sent to separate homes so they could be studied for their differences and similarities as they grew up do both of you remember being studied and filmed and questioned when you were little girls at home as part of the new bowers study absolutely i hated it i loved it i'm the only twin apparently in the whole study that loved it i hated it it was

torture i had fun why did you love it probably because i was third child and kind of you know pushed aside and it was someone who came to my house they visited me they hung out with me they played with me dr newbauer's researchers would arrive to test film and play with the children never divulging the dark secret behind their work i mean these researchers were taking obviously hospitality from your adoptive parents in their home and still keeping this horrible secret it's pretty average performance isn't it lying to everyone acting like they were doing it

for our benefit but it was for their benefit not ours we would have been the same if we were raised together [Music] it wasn't just unethical it was cruel they may have lived their whole lives not knowing each other existed but for luck and mistaken identity thirty years ago mel was working at her parents restaurant the international house of pancakes in brooklyn new york as i understand it the key to you two meeting finally knowing that you were twins came down to a very persistent auntie yes tell me about it so she came she came

into my parents restaurant and i was working and how i remember uh she saw me and couldn't understand why i didn't recognize her and um when i went over to her table she asked me if i was adopted and i said no i don't know you you know i don't go around saying that information later that day melanie said mom could i be a twin and the mother said don't be ridiculous there's no way you're a twin and the whole situation was forgotten but ellen's aunt did not forget it and then a week or two

later she came in with a picture of ellen but she didn't present it to me she presented it to my boyfriend who was working with me at the time and my boyfriend he knew i was adopted so he showed me the picture and he said that's you and i said that is not me and he said yes that's you and i said don't tell me who i am i know who i am and uh then i went over to the table and she said do you want to speak with her and i said yeah when

i went home from work that day i called ellen and when i heard her voice i was like oh my god you sound just like me and then we just started talking about everything [Music] day one when we first met melanie and ellen were 23 years old at the time they discovered each other existed was there any hesitation i mean did you hit it off straight away was it that quick yeah because when we spoke on the phone we compared everything that we liked our birthdays this that and the other thing the studies uh people

came to my house and tested me oh they came to my house and tested me oh well you know i like this and i hate this and everything was very and then i'm a lefty she's a righty her dimple's on the left side mine's on the right side so we were like wow we're in mirror images you threw up i did before we met came yep i was so nervous before you came i threw up i was like i'm meeting this person who i've only talked to i know that um like like as she said

when she called our voices were identical and then we both laughed about it and our laughs were identical and i was just like this was just so weird you know it was like what i've always dreamed of and wanted is like a reality i couldn't believe that it was happening um i didn't have a sister i always wanted a sister and here i had a sister like instantly and not only just a sister but an identical twin i feel like when we found each other just due to like circumstances in our families we couldn't be

as close i wanted what they had and i didn't get that when we met ellen was living with her boyfriend in jersey and i was dating my boyfriend in brooklyn we couldn't bond like they did we had our lives already and it doesn't sound like a you know big difference in age but boys at 18 you know and girls at 23 is more of a big difference than just five years you know what i mean so for melanie and ellen the happiness of finding each other would eventually be soured by the fact that even though

they now had their other half they were in reality strangers never learning to be sisters and that created real tension she should have been the closest person to me in the world and she wasn't do you feel as though you've been robbed melanie of not being able to grow up together absolutely yes yes all the siblings in the new bower study agree with melanie and twin expert professor nancy siegel maintains the damage done by being separated at birth was in fact immeasurable here they've been deprived of what could have been the most important relationship in

their lives you know ellen told me the person i should have been closest to i never knew and i think that encapsulates it absolutely perfectly i think in that one line she speaks for all the twins and the triplets and you can't make up for all the years liam you cannot you cannot make up for those lost years it's impossible i think we look identical there wow look at me pigtails the same [Music] 54 year old identical twin sisters ellen carboni and melanie mertzel only have photos to show each other about the first 23 years

spent growing up apart this is my best friend growing up whose name was melanie and everyone used to call us melanelle and even when they discovered each other oh i love the hair learning the truth about their forced separation was impossible for the girls and the parents who adopted them they were angry because they would have loved to have more children and they would have taken us both um they were confused about you know what transpired like why you know they would even do such a thing i suspect your adoptive parents would have also been

uh very angry that they were duped by the louise wise agency oh yeah my parents still had no idea you know that we were actually used basically as human guinea pigs for their research we were human guinea pigs like we were treated like not like humans but like animals the adoption agency didn't give up that information no they still lied even after you discovered that you were twins for me they just confirmed that you were that we were twins that's it that was it no more information no records no nothing still kept the lie and

according to twins expert professor nancy siegel the lies started shortly after the babies were born and put up for adoption by the louise wise agency they were not given an option to have them stay together but i can tell you liam that i know of at least two or three of the parents of the twins i've talked to who would have loved raising twins in fact one family asked for twins twice from your point of view what psychological damage do you think was done by separating the twins at birth these individuals were deprived of what

could have been the closest of human social relationships and to know that you could have had that is devastating it's horrible horrible i was very very shy as a child and i clung to my mother like i would hold on to her leg like when we went out anywhere and i feel like that's because i was missing my other half basically making matters worse no scientific paper was ever published by dr newbauer about his study all that sadness all that damage all that deception and for what it looks pretty much like for nothing it really

does seem that the twins suffering and the suffering of their parents and their siblings and everyone who knows them was really for nothing there is no real end product here nothing that we can say that we've learned we've only learned how not to do research most cruelly by dr neubauer's own orders before his death in 2008 the records of their own early lives are kept secret even from the twins themselves although ellen and melanie are fighting for access you think you deserve to see those records of course it's my it's my life you could you

shouldn't hide my life from me like the fact that it was never publicized is like really because you did it all for nothing then we describe him as a nazi honestly so i i think that he was trying to play god and try to see if if again if it was genetics or if it was how you're raised your environment so what molds you to be the person you are if newbower was looking for that answer to that incredible question of nature versus nurture what's your answer both both it's both hello i'm liam bartlett thanks

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