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1. 1951 Peter Neubauer assumes leadership of the Child Development Center, the research and clinical arm of the Jewish Board of Guardians in New York. He will hold the directorship until 1985.
2. c. 1960 The twin study begins in earnest. Louise Wise Services, the Jewish adoption agency, places identical multiples in separate adoptive homes without informing adoptive parents that the children are twins or triplets.
3. 1961–1968 The bulk of publicly identified subjects are placed during this window. Home visits and assessments by Child Development Center researchers begin in each placement.
4. 1961 The triplets later known as Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman are born on July 12 at Long Island Jewish Hospital and are placed separately within months. The triplets’ adoptive families are not told the children have siblings.
5. 1970s Federal regulation of human-subjects research begins to mature. The National Research Act of 1974 establishes the framework that will become institutional review boards. The study, in design, would not survive new oversight.
6. 1980 Bobby Shafran arrives at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York and is mistaken for Eddy Galland, who attended the previous year. The two meet. A newspaper photograph runs. David Kellman recognizes himself as a third. The triplets’ reunion becomes national news, breaking the secrecy of the program.
7. 1980 The study’s active data collection ends. The reasons given have varied; the public exposure of the design and the changed regulatory climate both played a role.
8. 1981 Local and national press coverage of the triplets brings the study into limited public view. The institutions involved decline to discuss the design in detail.
9. 1990 The study’s records are given to Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, in Sterling Memorial Library, under deed-of-gift terms that place them under seal until October 25, 2065. The collection is catalogued as Adoption study records of the Child Development Center, MS 1585.
10. 1995 Eddy Galland dies by suicide. The surviving triplets and many later commentators identify the separation and the study as factors in the loss.
11. 1995 Lawrence Wright publishes “Double Mystery” in The New Yorker (August 7, 1995), drawing attention to the program in the context of broader twin research.
12. 2002–2004 Elyse Schein contacts Louise Wise Services for nonidentifying information; in early 2004 the agency informs Paula Bernstein, by phone on April 13, that she has an identical twin sister. The two women meet for the first time within days, in mid-April 2004 in New York. They begin work on the memoir that will become Identical Strangers.
13. 2004 Louise Wise Services closes its operations. Adoption records are transferred to Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, the New York adoption agency that has been their custodian since.
14. 2007 Bernstein and Schein publish Identical Strangers. The book is the first sustained, subject-voiced public account of the study and the questions it leaves open.
15. 2008 Peter Neubauer dies. He never publishes the synthesizing analysis the study’s data was assembled to support.
16. 2017 Lori Shinseki releases The Twinning Reaction, a documentary centered on twins reunited as adults — including Doug Rausch and Howard Burack — and the first film to address the study at length.
17. 2018 Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers premieres at Sundance, where it wins the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling. The film’s wide release brings the study to its largest audience to date.
18. 2018– Following the documentary, Yale and the Jewish Board agree to release portions of the study records to identified subjects who request them, in redacted form. The full archive remains sealed.
19. 2065 October 25, 2065 — the currently scheduled release date for the unredacted archive at Yale.

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