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Fri/Sat/Sun August 18~20, 2017
IF you unwittingly pass through Twins-burg, Ohio, a Midwestern town in the United States on the fi rst weekend in August, you might think you’ve
stumbled into a mirrored funhouse.Twins Days is an annual festival that
brings thousands of twins from around the globe to northeastern Ohio to cel-ebrate their twin-ness. The festival bills itself as the largest annual gathering of twins in the world.
It’s also one big petri dish for scientists, who fl ock to the festival every summer to study twins’ genetics and behavioral differences.
“It’s a club you can’t buy your way into,” said Katie Barry, 32, of New York City, who has been coming to Twins Days with her twin sister Kristy every year since they were 7. She gazes around at the carnival of costumed couples with a smile, searching for the right words.
“It’s this oasis of twin love.”
‘Where’s your twin?’It’s almost too perfect that Twins
Days is held in Twinsburg. The Cleve-land suburb is named for identical twin brothers who helped settle the town and died of the same ailment in 1827, within hours of each other.
The festival got off to a quiet start in 1976, when 36 sets of twins showed up. It grew fast. This year, the event attracted more than 1,900 sets of twins, along with a smattering of triplets and at least one set of quadruplets. They came from almost every U.S. state and from as far away as Australia.
The event had a county fair feel and includes a parade, look-alike contests, a talent show and an enormous group photo — a human blanket of twins — taken in a fi eld from atop a crane.
Twin humor was abundant. Siblings strolled the grounds in T-shirts that said, “Thing 1” and “Thing 2,” “The Good Twin” and “The Evil Twin,” or “I’m not Steven” and “I’m not David.”
More than a few had rhyming names, like Bernice and Vernice, Carolyn and Sharolyn and Jeynaeha and Jeyvaeha.
It may be the only place where you could stroll into a hotel and be asked by a staffer, “Where’s your twin?”
Twins said they enjoy profound bonds that few “singletons” — as non-twins are called here — fully understand.
An exclusive clubIdentical twins are an even more exclusive
club — roughly three in every 1,000 births.
Seeing double
for sciencegathering of twins one big lab for researchers
They are formed when a single fer-tilized egg splits in two after concep-tion, creating two embryos with the same genetic makeup and DNA.
Scientists love to study them because they help answer the age-old question about nature vs. nurture. Because identical twins share the same genes, any differences between them — say, more wrinkled versus less wrinkled skin — must be the result of their environment.
Take Laura and Linda Seber, 41, from Sheffi eld, Ohio for example.
The pair tied for eighth in their high school class of 404 students, attended the same grad school.
“If we’re genetically identical, I should be able to do everything that she does,” said Linda. “But sometimes it’s diffi cult being compared to each other. Because if I can’t achieve what she achieves, it’s like … why? Why can’t I do that?”
Indeed, it is hard to underestimate the mysterious psychic forces that bind one twin to another.
Don and Dave Wolf, 59, have identical graying beards that hang halfway down their chests. The identical twins live in Fenton, Michigan, and do long-haul trucking, sharing turns at the wheel during marathon cross-coun-try drives.
The pair recall waking up one morning as boys, aged 11 or 12, to discover they had just had the same dream. A few years later, Dave sud-denly became overwhelmed with concern for his brother only to learn from their dad that Dave had just broken his collarbone in a motorbike crash.
In the name of scienceIn a long white tent on the festival
grounds, a long row of twins sat at tables before trays of color-coded food fl avors: milk, potato chips and artifi cial sweeteners. Wearing nose clips to mask aromas, they uncapped each sample, took a taste and then spat into a plastic cup before taking a swig of water and tasting the next. They recorded their opinions on an iPad.
These twins were serving as volun-teer subjects for the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofi t research institute in Philadelphia whose spon-sors include such food giants as Coca-Cola and General Mills.
“Our question is whether some people are taste-blind and if so, to what? Our interest is whether this is a genetically determined trait,” said Danielle Reed, a Monell behavioral geneticist. “We like to compare geneti-cally identical twins to twins that are
no more similar than ordinary siblings.”
This can help food scien-tists understand which traits — say, an
affi nity for bitter
Scientists love to study identical twins because they help answer the age-old question about nature vs. nurture.
fl avors — are most strongly deter-mined by genetics. “You can imagine if we look subjectively at their DNA we could predict what will taste better or worse to people,” Reed said. “So you can tailor dietary advice to people’s actual ability to taste and smell.”
Monell was just one of a handful of research groups that attend Twins Days. A few feet away at Procter & Gamble’s Olay tent, scientists were studying twins to better understand the aging process and its effect on skin. Nearby, a forensics expert from the Los Angeles Police Department was collecting latent fi ngerprints from identical twins to improve fi n-gerprint-identifi cation tools.
At West Virginia University’s tent, biometric researchers took hi-res photos of twins and recorded them speaking to help computer scientists create better facial and voice recogni-tion systems.
“If you can build a system that can differentiate between identical twins,” said Jeremy Dawson, a WVU associate professor of computer sci-ence, “then it’s a lot easier to tell the difference between (regular) people.”
Doug and Jill and Phil and Jenna
Twins Days is also about the sci-ence of attraction.
New kings and queens are crowned here each summer. But the closest thing to perennial festival royalty are the Malms.
Gregarious identical twins Doug and Phil Malm grew up in Idaho. Identical twins Jill and Jenna Lassen, both introverts, grew up in Michigan. Their father would address them as “sisters” because he was too proud to admit he couldn’t tell the girls apart.
All four were visiting the Twins-burg festival in 1991 when they met and sparks fl ew. Luckily, there was never a question over who would be with who.
“It was instant,” said Phil, who chose Jenna. “We knew right away which one we were with.”
The foursome now live in Moscow, Idaho, as members of a tiny subset — identical twins married to identical twins. Doug and Phil, 60, are retired car-penters, while Jill and Jenna, 50, work in day care. All four share one home.
A year’s worth of dataBack at the research tents, the
twins lined up, sometimes for an hour or more, to participate. It’s a mutually benefi cial arrangement.
The twins enjoyed it because they got money or free samples. Many
said they feel good knowing they are contributing to science.
The scientists like it because it’s an effi cient way to gather data from a hard-to-fi nd group of people.
The Monell Chemical Senses Center expected to collect research
on some 450 twins over the course of the weekend.
“We collect a year’s worth of data in four
hours,” Reed said. (SD-Agencies)
