Film Club - Three Identical Strangers - Saturday 4 December 2021
Thank you to all who attended our Film Club presentation of Three Identical Strangers on Saturday 4 December 2021.
As a synopsis, the film describes how Bobby Shafran discovered that he had a twin brother when he arrived on the campus of a New York community college. The two met and, knowing that they'd been adopted, quickly concluded that they were twins. Months later, the publicity of this human-interest story reached David Kellman, whose resemblance and matching adoption circumstances indicated that the three were triplets. After investigating their background they found out that they had been part of an experiment when, as infants, they had been intentionally separated and placed with differing adoptive families with differing economic levels – one blue-collar, one middle-class, and one affluent. The experiment aimed to get to the bottom of the nature-versus-nurture debate and none of the families involved were aware of this.
The ethical issues are obvious and at the film club we discussed a number of these including:
What was perhaps ethical years ago would no longer be seen as ethical today.
The concerns around lack of disclosure and consent. No one knew they were part of an experiment, they did not consent to it, and their information was collated for many years without their knowledge.
The parallels still exist today were we see large tech companies collecting data and no one really understanding who is collecting what and why.
There were so many variables in the experiment that proving nature V nurture would have been impossible. In a sense this is bad science as the experiment was not correctly designed and as such was unethical in itself.
The research gathered and findings have never been made public, not even to the triplets. While they were given access to 1000 pages, much of it was redacted. The research has been sealed until 2065. It has been estimated that the study included another 11 sets of twins who also remain oblivious to the experiment. This level of secrecy would not be tolerated today.
Even if the research was published the question remains concerning the ethics of using such research given the violations it would bring with it.