It would not be allowed today.

The four core violations

Modern research ethics rests on a small set of principles, and the Neubauer study cleared none of them.

1. There was no informed consent.

The subjects were infants. Their adoptive parents were never told what study they had joined. They were told only that there was a routine follow-up by the agency. A research subject — or, where the subject is a child, the subject’s guardian — must understand what is being studied, what will be done, what risks attend participation, and that they are free to refuse. None of that occurred here.

2. The intervention preceded the observation.

Twin studies have a long history in psychology. Most of that history involves observing twins as they happen to be — together, apart, separated by circumstance. The Neubauer program was different in a way that is easy to miss. The separation itself was the intervention. Children who would otherwise have been placed together were placed apart so that they could be studied apart. The researchers did not merely take advantage of an existing condition. They helped produce it.

3. The subjects were children.

Modern guidelines impose additional restrictions on research involving children, on the basis that children cannot consent for themselves and that the harms of research can fall on them in ways the adult world is slow to recognize. The Neubauer subjects were studied throughout their formative years. The protocol was never explained to them, and they were never given the option to withdraw — because they did not know there was anything to withdraw from.

4. The study was withheld from publication and the records sealed.

A core function of research ethics is accountability through transparency. Studies are submitted to peer review, published, and made available for replication and critique. The Neubauer program produced no such public record. Its data was deposited at Yale under a multi-decade seal. The institutions that conducted the study chose, in effect, to be the only ones who could ever evaluate it.

Why it was permitted then

None of this was, in the years the study began, governed by federal regulation. The modern American framework for human-subjects research came together later: the National Research Act of 1974, the Belmont Report in 1979, and the system of institutional review boards that those documents codified. Before that, what governed research was professional norms — and those norms, in mid-century American psychiatry and psychoanalysis, were considerably more permissive than what followed.

The institutions involved were also self-policing in a way that is hard to imagine today. The adoption agency, the research center, and the academic figures behind the study moved in overlapping circles. The same person could serve as a consulting psychiatrist to the agency placing a child and as a co-architect of the study observing that child. Conflicts of interest of that kind would not be tolerated under any contemporary IRB regime.

None of this is exculpatory. By the standards of any era, the deliberate separation of identical siblings without disclosure to their adoptive families would have been recognizable as a serious wrong by people who paused to consider it. The argument here is descriptive, not justifying: the absence of formal regulation was the condition that allowed the study to proceed, not a reason it was acceptable.

What the harm has been

The harms the subjects describe are not abstract. Twins separated at birth and reunited as adults speak of grief for a relationship they did not know to mourn. They describe a sense that the texture of their childhoods — the unexplained sadnesses, the visits, the questions — had a meaning their parents had not been allowed to know. Eddy Galland, one of the triplets, died by suicide in 1995. The film made about the triplets two decades later treats his death without simple causation, but the surviving brothers and the people who knew Eddy speak openly about what the study cost the people inside it.

The harms reach the adoptive parents as well. They were told they were raising an only child. Many describe finding the visits intrusive, suspecting something was off, and trusting an institution that betrayed their trust. Some learned what had happened only after their child was an adult; some never learned at all.

What accountability would look like

The question of what the institutions involved owe the subjects today is partly factual and partly moral, and the answer is not exhausted by a public apology. The factual part is the records. Subjects have a clear claim to the contents of an archive that describes their own childhoods. The moral part is the broader acknowledgment — by Yale, by the Jewish Board, by the institutions that absorbed Louise Wise Services and the Child Development Center — that what was done was wrong, that the secrecy compounded the wrong, and that the appropriate response is not the continuation of secrecy under a different name.

The advocacy section of this archive sets out concrete steps the institutions could take and how members of the public can support them.