The reading list.

Identical Strangers

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein. Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. Random House, 2007.

Two identical twins, separated at birth by Louise Wise Services and reunited as women in their thirties, write the book together — alternating chapters in each voice. The first half of the book is the story of meeting each other and learning what they shared and how they differed. The second half is the slow, harder work of learning that they had been part of a research study, and the substantially incomplete picture they were able to assemble of what that study had done. The book is the indispensable starting point for anyone approaching the study from the subjects’ side. It is careful, literary, and not interested in performance. It also produced, by virtue of having two professional journalists at its center, a quantum of original reporting on the program that no later work has displaced.

See also: the authors’ entry on this site.

Twins, doubles, and twin research

Lawrence Wright. Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are. John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

Wright’s book grew out of his New Yorker reporting earlier in the decade and treats the broader history of twin research, including the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, the Louisville Twin Study, and the Neubauer program. The Neubauer chapter is one of the earliest sustained book-length treatments of the study available in print. Wright is a careful reporter; the chapter is reliable on what could be reliably established at the time of writing and explicit about the gaps the sealed records produce. The book remains useful as context — it places the Neubauer study within the longer tradition it intersected and against which it is now most often judged.

Adoption history and the Jewish welfare context

There is no single book on Louise Wise Services or the Jewish Board’s adoption history that addresses the Neubauer study at length. Several works on twentieth-century American adoption practice touch on the agency in the context of closed-records adoption, the role of religiously affiliated agencies, and the eventual collapse of domestic infant adoption. Readers researching the agency’s history in detail are referred to the sources index, which lists the academic and archival material this archive has consulted.

Research ethics and the history of human-subjects research

The general literature on the development of American research ethics in the postwar period is large. Standard works include Henry Beecher’s 1966 paper “Ethics and Clinical Research” in The New England Journal of Medicine, the report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, and David J. Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside (Basic Books, 1991). None of these works addresses the Neubauer study by name, but together they describe the regulatory environment that did not exist when the study began and that, by the time the records were sealed in 1990, had grown into the system the study would not have survived.

What this archive will keep adding

The bibliography above is a starting point rather than a complete map. As scholarship on the study grows — particularly any work that draws on the partial releases beginning in 2018 — this page will be updated to include it. Suggestions through the contact channel are welcome.