Accidental Brothers Read online

  In March 2017 the four brothers (from left to right), Jorge, William, Carlos, and Wilber, gathered to celebrate Carlos’s graduation. He received a certificate that declared him to be an especialista en ciencias tributarias (specialist in tax sciences).

  Credit: Diana Carolina

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  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Photos

  Copyright Page

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  In Memory of Irving I. Gottesman,

  for insights and inspiration

  —NLS

  To My Family and Friends,

  for your love and unconditional support

  —YSM

  There are really two kinds of life. There is … the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

  J. Salter, Light Years

  Preface

  Love and Luck

  Call me a twin tracker—my boyfriend does. As a researcher I cannot resist hunting down nearly all the new and interesting twin and sibling cases I encounter. The latest result is Accidental Brothers, a moment-by-moment replay of a twin-tracking adventure like no other I have had. To call it a scientific thriller is neither bold nor boastful. I did not create the events described here; I only studied them.

  I have been lucky to have a career I love. As a professor of psychology I have worked on dozens of exciting research projects involving twins, triplets, unrelated look-alikes, and other curious pairings. People in the United States and around the world send me all sorts of interesting stories involving multiples, and I appreciate their kindness. I answer every query I receive: Should twins be separated in school? Do genes influence sexual preference? Are twins clones? Are clones twins?1 Then, every once in a while, a truly exceptional twin-related situation emerges from the long list of emails, so I dig deeper.

  Just days after their birth, two sets of Colombian twins became unwitting subjects in an accidental study, twenty-five years in the future, because an identical twin baby from one pair was accidentally switched with an identical twin baby from another pair. The switch, probably the result of a momentary oversight, presumably by an overtaxed or inattentive nurse, created two reared-apart identical twin pairs and two unrelated sibling pairs who grew up believing they were fraternal twins. I saw their story as a rare opportunity to learn how the drastically different environments in which the separated twins were raised—big city versus remote township; university attendance versus fifth-grade education; father absence versus father presence—affected their abilities, outlooks, interests, and love lives. Aerial views of Bogotá and Vereda El Recreo (where the country-raised twins grew up) contrast high-density urban living and closely spaced neighborhoods with vast remote stretches of rural Colombia’s green and brown earth.2 Vereda means “path or sidewalk,” an ironic name because Vereda El Recreo has none.

  Both my colleagues who acknowledge twin study findings of genetic influence on behavior, and critics who question these findings, have been clamoring for such an extreme case of reared-apart twins, and the Bogotá brothers gave us not just one but two.3 They also gave us a chance to see how alike two pairs of unrelated same-age siblings—what I call “virtual twins”—turned out to be. The effects of genetic and environmental influences on behavior have long been a matter of debate. The special legacy of the twins in Colombia is how four young men readjusted their lives—two after trading places—and what their experience means for our understanding of human behavior and personal development.

  Conception of a Career

  My career in twin research began in the preemie nursery of Boston Lying-In Hospital, when I exited my mother’s womb six weeks ahead of schedule and seven minutes ahead of my fraternal twin sister, Anne. At three pounds, eleven ounces, I spent my first month alone in an incubator, where wires and monitors were my only distractions, while Anne, who weighed in at four pounds, seven ounces, was healthy enough to go home after a few days. No one would call us reared-apart twins, but after working with the Bogotá brothers and seven other switched-at-birth twin pairs, I think about our four-week separation more seriously now. I am grateful that I went home with the right parents and was raised with the right twin sister.

  Twin research became my passion as an undergraduate student at Boston University. In my senior year I completed a psychology course project comparing the consequences of placing young twins in the same or separate classrooms when they first enter school. This was a topic to which I could relate personally—a story in itself—and I enjoyed researching it and writing it more than any other paper I had written. The following year I explored other aspects of twin studies for my master’s thesis at the University of Chicago. My thesis adviser applauded my work but believed that my interests would change in time. However, they have only deepened: my doctoral dissertation was about twins’ cooperation and competition, and I have undertaken many twin-related papers and projects since.4

  I am drawn to unusual cases, especially those involving twins reared apart. I like peering into the alternative universes that these separated twins naturally create. Each genetically identical twin is a fresh take on what might have been—a rare glimpse of an alternate self experiencing life in a whole new way. When separated twins finally meet, they can see themselves packaged differently, keenly aware of what could have been had their families, neighborhoods, schools, and other life experiences been reversed. Brent Tremblay, an identical twin, grew up in Ottawa, Canada, not far from his genetic duplicate, George Holmes. Brent’s adoptive mother maintained a beautiful “House and Garden style home,” and while she loved her son deeply, she despaired at the constant messiness of his bedroom. She also denied his wish to have the puppy he craved. But when Brent and George finally met in their early twenties, following the unraveling of a case of confused identity, Brent found he was more comfortable in the more casual and relaxed home of George’s family.5 It turned out that Brent had been switched early on with an unrelated male baby who had taken his place as George’s accidental fraternal twin brother. It made sense that Brent found comfort in George’s home atmosphere, created by the couple who had given birth to him, too. Parents pass on genes as well as environments to their children—Brent was not raised in his biological parents’ home, but his genetically based temperament was similar to theirs and to his twin’s.

  I have studied more than one hundred of the 137 separated twin sets who visited the University of Minnesota during my nine-year association with the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA). Working on this groundbreaking and controversial project, which lasted from 1979 to 1999, was a dream job for a new investigator. The focus of the study was how differences in the separated twins’ life histories were associated with current differences in their behavioral and medical characteristics.6 The director of the project was Dr. Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., a professor of psychology.

  I interviewed identical female twins who were lively, fashi
onable, and adored animals, and identical male triplets who were outgoing, overbearing, and terrified of needles. And I also met fraternal twin men, one gay and one straight; fraternal twin women whose brittle hair refused to grow; and opposite-sex twins who seemed romantically attracted to one another. However, finding that behavioral similarities were greater among the identical than fraternal twins was not surprising because identical (monozygotic) twins share 100 percent of their genes, whereas fraternal (dizygotic) twins share 50 percent of their genes, on average.7 All humans share some genes, such as those for developing a heart or growing bigger physically. But some genes differ from person to person, such as those affecting cardiac health and body size, and this is where fraternal twins can differ. For example, many different genes, each with a tiny effect, influence most complex human traits, such as height, and it would be unusual for fraternal twins to inherit the exact same gene combinations—it is estimated that fraternal twins’ genetic commonality ranges from 37 to 62 percent for height.8 And in 2017 researchers linked fifty-two different genes to general intelligence, with each making just a small contribution.9 Thus it makes sense that fraternal twins are much less alike in their abilities, interests, and talents than identical twins.

  Working closely with separated twins reunited as adults has allowed me to witness the similarities and dissimilarities tied to the identical and fraternal twins’ degrees of genetic relatedness. This work also put me in a strong position from which to challenge twin research critics who insisted that identical twins are alike because of their similar treatment by others, not their similar genes, or felt that the data collection methods used in twin research are somehow flawed.10

  I left Minnesota in 1991 for California State University, Fullerton, but I did not leave reared-apart twins far behind. In the years that followed I tracked the developmental progress of young Chinese twins separated as an indirect result of their nation’s one-child policy. The Chinese government established the policy in 1979 in response to the need for population control; the policy limited urban families to one child and rural families to two.11 This restriction on family size, coupled with China’s preference for male children to continue the family lineage and contribute to family income, led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of baby girls, twins among them. Separating twins led to their adoption by families all over the world. I also studied adult twins raised in different countries because of unusual and extraordinary circumstances, such as family poverty in South Korea, emigration restrictions in Communist China, child tax exemption in Romania, and baby theft in Soviet Armenia.12 The similarities that these separated identical twins display in intelligence, temperament, and even in how often they attend religious services are impressive. Even more compelling is the finding that the personalities of identical twins raised apart are more alike than those of fraternal twins raised together. This finding is difficult to explain without acknowledging the difference in their proportions of shared genes. However, identical twins are not perfect copies of one another, leaving plenty of room for environmental influences.13

  In many ways the real identical twins in Colombia—Jorge and William, and Carlos and Wilber—aligned according to their genes. But while their similarities were striking, the parallel lines broke down in places, crisscrossing like streets on a Google road map. Tracing the origin and progress of these diverging paths was the challenge I shared with my collaborator, Yesika Montoya, who first told me about these twins in an email she sent to me in October 2014.

  Beginnings: The Bogotá Twins

  Yesika (pronounced Jessica) Montoya is an associate director of advising at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York City. Born in Bogotá, Yesika came to the United States in 2001 to study English at Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, before earning a master’s degree in social work at New York’s Fordham University in 2005. She is in her thirties and has long dark hair, a beautiful smile, and a penchant for earrings that dangle deliriously on each side of her head. I did not know Yesika until she reached out to me—she had read my 2011 book about an extraordinary case of accidentally switched identical twins in Gran Canaria, one of Spain’s Canary Islands.14 Yesika believed I would be interested in the Colombian pairs. Her own family history and childhood friendships included both fraternal and identical sets, which explains her fascination with twins and how scientists study them to address nature-nurture questions.

  The idea of going to Bogotá to meet and study the twins began to germinate on Sunday evening, October 26, 2014. Yesika was in her Queens, New York, apartment, half listening to the program Séptimo Día (Seventh Day) on Caracol TV, Colombia’s private national television network, on the Internet. At the end of the usual traffic and political news, a clip about two switched-at-birth twin pairs caught her attention. At first Yesika didn’t believe what she was hearing—“a soap opera,” she thought—but when she realized that what she had heard was not fiction, she found the link to the two-hour television program “Crossed Lives,” and watched it from start to finish. It was riveting—as a social worker Yesika understood the research value and clinical significance of this unusual case.

  On Thursday morning, October 30, I was alone in my office on the campus of California State University, Fullerton. This was unusual because panic about midsemester grades typically drives students to ask for my assistance or plead for more time to complete assignments. My office is like a small outpost of Amazon.com, with books stacked floor to ceiling, cabinets pushed into every conceivable corner, folders perched precariously on cabinets, pictures taped to all four walls, and a tiny thirty-five-year-old yellow refrigerator that works like new. I have accomplished some of my best work in this cluttered but comforting space, and it’s where I wrote most of this book. In fact, photographers who film my Twin Studies Center invariably prefer this space to my well-appointed adjoining office and library. Yesika’s message, which included the link to “Crossed Lives,” interrupted the quiet productivity I was enjoying that day, but replaced it with thrill and energy. That first day we exchanged six emails with breathtaking speed. I finally announced that we should go to Colombia to meet the twins and she agreed. To paraphrase the famous line from the 1942 film Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful working relationship.

  Between our first-day emails, I Googled “Colombian twins” and “switched at birth 2014,” but nothing came up. I was relieved that this news had not gone viral because I wanted to reach the twins before other researchers did. Abandoning my computer search, I hunted the halls of the foreign-language department for a Spanish-speaking faculty member who could translate the TV report. Finally, I peered into the office of a young Brazilian professor, Dr. André Zampaulo, who is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese, introduced myself, and persuaded him to come to my office to watch the program. André was mesmerized by the story, but he had to leave after thirty minutes to teach a class. So I headed to the student lounge, where I convinced a Spanish-speaking undergraduate woman to translate the rest of the show.

  An hour later, reeling from what I had learned about the discovery and its aftermath, I had the complete backstory except for three things: no one knew exactly how, where, or when the switch had occurred. Those details would have to wait. First, we had to be certain that the twins would be willing to undergo the weeklong series of interviews, inventories, and tests that I was starting to list in my head. Yesika was heading to Bogotá for the December holidays so we decided that she would approach the twins then. I was anxious, excited, and impatient, but the wait would give us time to reflect on what this incredible natural experiment could add to our understanding of personal development, family relationships, and sense of self—and what happens when these fundamental parts of our lives are severely threatened.

  The Main Characters

  Landmarks and Landscapes

  Map of Colombia showing the city and town where each pair of brothers grew up.

  Illustration by Kelly Donovan. Ph
otographs by N. L. Segal.

  Prologue

  Tales of Two Mothers

  On December 22, 1988, forty-five-year-old Ana Delina Velasco Castillo hiked for three to four hours down a rugged muddy path from her home in the tiny district of Landázuri to the small municipality of La Paz in Colombia, South America. She was twenty-eight weeks pregnant with twins and in excruciating pain from a hernia. She found walking nearly impossible. As Ana passed by, men with machetes were clearing the path, which was narrow and treacherous. She hadn’t wanted her husband, Carmelo, a farmer, to go with her because he didn’t want to go—Carmelo was in the habit of getting other people to do things for him, leaving him free to do whatever he wanted. This left Ana’s eldest son, Ancelmo (“Chelmo”), to walk alongside her on this part of the journey and hold her steady while Carmelo searched for drivers to take his wife from La Paz to the Hospital Regional de Vélez once they reached traversable roads. The entire trip would take eight hours.

  A quick look at Ana suggests she could never survive the physical ordeal she was facing. She is about five feet tall and petite, with a dark straight ponytail that swings carelessly down her back, giving her a childlike appearance. Like many farmers’ wives, she had aged beyond her years; her hard work at home and in the field had added lines and creases to her thin face and hands. But Ana had a toughness and determination, reflected in the strong line of her mouth and jaw and in the authoritative way she handled people and situations. She vowed to get through this latest ordeal successfully. Perhaps the thought of two new children—twins—after the death of an adult son years before tightened her resolve, although she didn’t fully believe the alternative medicine doctor who had said she was carrying twins.