Subjects · Twins
Doug Rausch & Howard Burack
Identical twin brothers, separated at birth by Louise Wise Services and placed with two adoptive families who were not told of each other’s existence. They met as adults and were among the first surviving subjects to speak at length, on camera, about what had been done to them. The Twinning Reaction (2017) is built around their account.
At a Glance
- Placed
- Two separate adoptive families through Louise Wise Services
- Reunited
- As adults, after one brother sought information about his birth family
- Public account
- The Twinning Reaction (2017, dir. Lori Shinseki); subsequent television and print interviews
What they have placed on the public record
Doug Rausch and Howard Burack have been straightforward in interviews about the texture of what their reunion was like and about the process of learning what the home visits of their childhoods had really been. Both grew up understanding the visits as ordinary — researchers from the agency coming to ask questions, set out tasks, take notes. Neither knew, as a child or as a young adult, that the visits had been comparative. They learned that piece slowly, through the agency, through reporting on the study, and through their own subsequent inquiries.
This archive treats their televised and recorded statements as primary source material on the experience of being a subject. It does not retell their story in detail beyond what appears in The Twinning Reaction and in their on-the-record interviews; the texture and the timing of what they choose to share belongs to them.
The 2017 documentary
Lori Shinseki’s The Twinning Reaction, released in 2017, was the first documentary to take the study as its central subject. It is quieter and less commercially successful than the film that followed it the next year — Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers — and is sometimes treated, unfairly, as a companion piece to that later film. It is in fact the earlier work, and it brought to public attention several of the surviving twin pairs who had not previously had a public platform. Rausch and Burack are central to it.
See: the documentary’s entry in the Media section.
Where they stand on the records
Both brothers have spoken in support of opening the Yale archive to the surviving subjects. Their position aligns with that of the other publicly identified subjects this archive lists: that the records describe their lives, that they were entered into the archive without their consent, and that the institutions’ current arrangement — partial, redacted, slow disclosure to those who know to ask — falls short of what the subjects are owed.
Related: The documentary · Louise Wise Services · Advocacy