Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (4 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Wright

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BOOK: Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are
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Page 14
But experience is often fallacious in ascribing great effects to trifling circumstances. Many a person has amused himself with throwing bits of a stick into a tiny brook and watching their progression; how they are arrested, first by one chance obstacle, then by another; and again, how their onward course is facilitated by a combination of circumstances. He might ascribe much importance to each of these events, and think how largely the destiny of the stick had been governed by a series of trifling accidents. Nevertheless all the sticks succeed in passing down the current, and in the long run, they travel at nearly the same rate. So it is with life, in respect to the several accidents which seem to have had a great effect on our careers. The one element, that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency; it corresponds to the current in the stream, and inevitably asserts itself.
Galton's twin studies were used to justify Herbert Spencer's defense of the British class system, just as more recent twin studies have been invoked to demonstrate racial differences in intelligence, income, and criminality. Galton himself believed that hereditary genius, rather than cultural advantage, accounted for the prominence of Britain's most distinguished families. He proposed that the state should parcel out quotas of children based on the abilities of their parents, thus encouraging the more talented strains and weeding out the defectives. The term he coined for this genetic gardening of the human population was "eugenics."
After the turn of the century, the eugenics movement swept over the United States on the coattails of progressivism. Just as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson set out to reform American politics, a number of prominent academics proposed to make a better world through selective breeding. David Starr Jordan, a biolo-
 
Page 15
gist who was president of Stanford University, headed a committee of the American Breeders' Association in 1906 to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race." Humans, however, are not as malleable as farm animals and laboratory mice; moreover, the usual experimental techniques were out of the question. Science did not begin to exploit the possibilities of the twin method until the development of various measurements of personality and intelligence in the 1920s, and a better appreciation of the difference between identical and fraternal twins. Galton had intuitively guessed the nature of that relationship, but it would be another half-century before the twinning process was satisfactorily explained, if not understood.
In the 1930s the political character of twin studies showed itself in the extreme. Two powerful political movements, communism and fascism, were spreading across the globe, each based on opposing notions of human nature. It is not surprising that twin research had quite different implications for these two competing systems. The Soviets put an abrupt end to the important and extensive research on twins that was being done at the Maxim Gorky Institute in Moscow, because the study of inherited abilities was at war with the Marxian ideal that people are inherently the same and that differences are imposed upon them by their environment. By 1939, Soviet science was in the grip of T.D. Lysenko, who followed the Lamarckian belief that acquired characteristics could be inherited. This theory so strongly accorded with Marxian theories that it over-whelmed the lack of evidence to support it. Some of the leading geneticists in the Soviet Union were eliminated by Stalinist purges, and those who didn't flee were forced to recant. Lysenko saw the need to place science at the service of socialism, which he did by asserting
 
Page 16
that similar environments would produce similar people. When applied to agriculture, however, Lysenko's theory resulted in massive crop failures. He was finally discredited in 1964, when the economic cost of his theory became unbearable.
In the meantime, the Nazis had seized the lead (from the Americans) in eugenic research. According to Nazi dogma, the science of eugenics would lead to the creation of a super-race, which would rule the world. Count Otmar von Verschuer, at Frankfurt's Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, undertook a massive inventory of genetic defects in the German population. He was the most famous twin researcher of his era, pioneering anthropological, psychological, and clinical studies of twins that were widely admired. In 1935 Verschuer wrote in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
: ''What is absolutely needed is research on families and twins selected at random," so that one could determine hereditary defects as well as "relations between disease, racial types, and miscegenation." History would soon present an appalling opportunity.
One of Verschuer's students was an ambitious young doctor named Josef Mengele. He was apparently an excellent student, who obtained a medical degree and a doctorate in physical anthropology from the University of Munich, graduating with the highest honors. He then became Verschuer's assistant.
Nazis were already seeking cures for typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox, and other killer diseases by infecting inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald. At Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps, they were experimenting with mass radiation to find the most efficient method of sterilizing large groups of people. Verschuer managed to secure a grant from the German Research
 
Page 17
Society for Mengele to study eye color. Verschuer later wrote that he expected his student to perform anthropological examinations and to send blood samples to his laboratory in Berlin, where he had gone on to become the director of the prestigious Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology and Human Heredity and Eugenics. By now Verschuer was concentrating his research almost entirely on twins, who he believed could unlock the secrets of heredity and help create a master race. There was a similar sense of urgency among eugenicists as there was, in other quarters, among physicists who were digging into the mysteries of atomic power.
Mengele was a man of broad learning, as well as a highly decorated soldier and an outstanding medical officer who had performed bravely on the Russian front. A wound had made him unfit for further combat, and he came directly from the front to Auschwitz. He arrived in the spring of 1943, laden with tests and questionnaires that were likely drawn up by Verschuer. He was a charismatic figure who inspired awe, not only among the German guards, few of whom had any war experience, but also among the inmates, whose lives he held so indifferently in his hands. When the trains that were emptying the ghettos of Poland and Hungary arrived at Auschwitz at dawn each morning, bringing 10,000 inmates a day, Mengele was often the first figure the inmates noticed, standing on the ramp in his Nazi uniform with an Iron Cross on his chest and a riding crop in his hand, smelling of cologne and whistling a Strauss waltz. Many remembered the cheerful way he greeted the new arrivals and separated them into lines on the right or the left, leading to immediate death or slavery. He was forever on the lookout for genetic anomalies: dwarfs, hunchbacks, and Jews with what he
 
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considered Aryan features. Twins, however, were his obsession. The guards would race through the incoming refugees calling out for twins in various languages. When he spotted a pair of twins, Mengele would push through the crowd, his face so distorted with eagerness that the new arrivals were struck by his expression. His selection criteria were sufficiently loose that several siblings posed as twins, rightly guessing that it might be their salvation, at least temporarily.
The twins were housed in separate barracks next to the crematorium. Mengele divided the twins by gender, although some of the younger opposite-sex twins were allowed to stay together in the girls' barracks. Unlike other members of the camp, the twins were permitted to wear their own clothes and some were allowed to keep their hair. Eventually 3,000 twins would pass through Auschwitz. They were called "Mengele's children," although at least one set of twins were seventy years old. The handsome doctor brought silk dresses for the girl twins and white pantaloons for the boys; he patted and played with them and gave them chocolates and candy; he organized soccer games with twin teams. The twins, for their part, called him Uncle Mengele, or more intimately, Uncle Pepi. "For twins Mengele was everything," one of the survivors told Robert Jay Lifton, author of
The Nazi Doctors
. "Just marvelous . . . a good doctor." Mengele himself told one of his colleagues, "It would be a sin, a crime . . . not to utilize the possibilities that Auschwitz had for twin research. There would never be another chance like it."
One can imagine the scientific temptation to experiment on twins. The classic twin method, as it evolved from Galton's time, requires a careful determination of zygosity, which Mengele could have done using blood types and fingerprints, which are highly similar (though
 
Page 19
not identical) among MZ twins. One can then compare both physical and psychological traits to determine which ones are more likely to be genetically influenced. In the early part of this century the classic twin method became a favored tool of the eugenics movement, especially in America. The Germans explored a variant of the classic twin method, which was to study the differences between identical pairs; Verschuer was particularly interested in studying diseases that were present in one MZ twin and absent in the other. His techniques formed the foundation for much of modern medical research using twins. He was also the first to adopt rigorous standards for measuring intelligence in twins and to look at different types of intelligence. Related to Verschuer's method is the twin family design, which notes similarities and differences between family members, particularly children of identical twins, who are not only first cousins but biological half-siblings. (Children of two sets of identical twins would be double-first cousins and biological full siblings, since they would have an average of fifty percent of their genes in common.) Obviously identical twins provide an ideal control for experiments on one sibling and not the other. In some measure, each of these methods would have been known to Mengele, and putting aside the circumstances in which he was operating, there would have been much that could have been learned if scientists were allowed to experiment freely on twins without the constraints of human decency.
The twins were invariably naked as Mengele weighed them and made endless physical measurements. He took frequent X-rays and bled the children almost daily, eventually having to take the blood from their necks when the veins in their arms were no longer productive. He seemed to be fascinated with eye and hair color, and he
 
Page 20
injected various chemicals into twins' eyes to see if he could turn them blue. He transfused blood from one twin to another. He sterilized some female twins and castrated the males, in what seems to have been an attempt to change their sex. Some twins were kept in isolation; on others he performed gruesome surgeries without anesthesia. Some were starved or deliberately exposed to epidemic diseases; he poisoned one pair and recorded how long it took them to die, with the apparent object of determining if there was any difference in their resistance. A pair of opposite-sex twins, one of whom was hunchbacked, were stitched together back to back. The twins believed, with good reason, that these excruciating experiments were keeping them from the ovens; and yet for most their ultimate destination was Mengele's elaborate pathology lab. He personally killed a number of twins with chloroform injections to the heart as they lay on the dissecting tables. He then opened their bodies, scrupulously comparing their organs to one another. His enthusiasm for this research was apparently limitless; he worked late into the night and would even spend Sundays in his office to put his records in order. He seemed to realize that his research opportunity was a limited one, and this knowledge spurred him into feverish, sleepless activity.
Of the approximately 3,000 twins in Auschwitz only 157 survived Mengele's curiosity. We know very little about what he learned or even what he was looking for. Mengele worried that his records would fall into the hands of the Soviet army, and in fact that may have happened. Verschuer, who was in contact with Mengele throughout the war, destroyed all their correspondence. As a party zealot, Mengele probably was seeking to validate the Nazi dogma of the inherited superiority of the

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