Section Hub · Media
What has been written, filmed, and reported.
The study became publicly knowable largely through the work of journalists, documentary filmmakers, and the subjects themselves. This section catalogs the major works — what each one covers, how it came to be made, and where it sits in the unfolding of the story.
The Neubauer twin study has been kept publicly legible across more than four decades by a small body of work that, taken together, is almost the entire reason the story is known outside the institutions that conducted it. The study itself produced no published research. Its records sit sealed at Yale until 2065. Almost everything the public can read or watch about the program comes from outside the institutional record — from subjects who came forward, from journalists who reported them out, and from filmmakers who put the subjects’ accounts on camera before they were lost to time.
Three works carry most of the weight. Identical Strangers (2007) is the indispensable starting point: a memoir co-written by two of the subjects, the first sustained subject-voiced account, and the source of much of the original reporting on the program that no later work has displaced. The Twinning Reaction (Lori Shinseki, 2017) is the first documentary to take the study as its central subject, structured around extended conversations with twin pairs reunited as adults. Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle, 2018) is the work that brought the story to a mass audience — the Sundance-honored film whose theatrical release prompted the partial record disclosures that followed.
The reporting is uneven. Some works are based on years of access to the subjects and to limited parts of the records; others are reactive coverage produced after a documentary release. The annotations below indicate where each work sits on that spectrum, and what original material it brings. Readers approaching the story for the first time are best served by watching the two documentaries in chronological order — Shinseki, then Wardle — and then reading Identical Strangers. The journalism page collects the reporting waves that have surrounded those works.
Documentaries
Three Identical Strangers
Tim Wardle’s feature documentary on the triplets Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman. The work that brought the study to a mass audience and prompted the partial record releases that followed. Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling, 2018.
The Twinning Reaction
Lori Shinseki’s earlier and quieter documentary, which centered on twins reunited as adults — including Doug Rausch and Howard Burack — and was the first film to address the study directly.
Books
Identical Strangers
Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein’s alternating-voice memoir of meeting each other for the first time as adults and discovering, in the process, that they had been part of a research study.
The longer bibliography
Books that touch on the study in the context of broader histories of twin research, adoption ethics, or postwar American psychiatry.
