Law reVIEW: Three Identical Strangers
Law reVIEW is a blog series dedicated to investigating and reviewing both popular and documentary films in the Chastek Library film collection.
Imagine showing up to your first day of college and moving into your dorm room. People are saying “Hi”, giving you high fives, hugging you and welcoming you back to school. At first you think that the student body is incredibly friendly, but then you realize that they must be confused because they keep calling you Eddy when your name is Bobby. Next, imagine sitting in your dorm room when somebody that you don’t know knocks on your door and asks you if you were adopted.
Now imagine that you’ve been reunited with your long-lost twin brother. The two of you are bonding and you feel an instant connection. Naturally, your story becomes national news and you and your brother are pictured in newspapers across the country. You might think that this is as crazy as your life will get, but then you get a phone call. A phone call from somebody who is adopted, who shares your birthday, and who looks exactly like you and your brother.
It’s all very hard to imagine. But for Edward, Robert, and David (all have different last names, because they all were adopted by different families), Three Identical Strangers is the incredible tale of the three brothers’ remarkable life story.
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The archival footage of the brothers grinning from ear to ear, appearing on talk shows and running around New York City is heartwarming. But once the excitement wears off, the brothers and their families begin to ask questions. The documentary takes a quick turn as we are introduced to Lousie-Wise Services, the adoption agency that separated the three brothers at birth. While questions arise around the decision to separate, and not inform the adoptive families about the relationship between the brothers, the story becomes even more dysfunctional when we are introduced to Dr. Peter Newbauer, a child psychologist who researches twins…
Three Identical Strangers is the story of just one of the many unethical studies conducted on human subjects in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Unfortunately for the brothers, national policy protecting human subjects in clinical research had not yet been developed. However, in 1974, in response to the Tuskegee Study, the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law, there-by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was the first public national body to shape bioethics policy in the United States.
As a consequence of the unethical research that the brothers and their families endured, the brothers do not know why they were separated at birth to be studied by Dr. Newbauer, and they have not been able to access any of the research from the experiment. However, it has been discovered that Dr. Newbauer’s controversial research involved at least eight twins, all of whom who had been separated at birth at the Louise-Wise Services adoption agency. Despite demands from the study’s participants to see their own files, records from Dr. Neubauer’s study will remain sealed until Oct. 25, 2065.
Chastek Library Location: HQ777.35 .T495 2018 - First Floor DVD Collection
