To meet them today you would imagine that they had known each other all their lives. They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein spent their first 35 years in total ignorance of the other's existence. They were given up for adoption to separate families as part of an experiment in the US to discover how identical twins would react to being raised in different family backgrounds. Neither set of adoptive parents knew the babies were part of a study or that they had been born twins. The research project took place under the guidance of a leading US child psychologist with the co-operation of prestigious New York adoption agency Louise Wise Services. It wasn't until Elyse Schein contacted the agency in 2003 to find out more details about her birth that the truth began to emerge. "I received a letter that said: 'You were born on 9th October 1968 at 12.51 pm, the younger of twin girls.' It was unbelievable. Suddenly another element of my identity was revealed to me. Suddenly I was a twin." When the agency contacted Elyse's newly discovered older sister Paula, the two women were quite quickly in touch and arranged to meet in a cafe in New York. First meeting: "Walking every step to that cafe felt momentous," says Paula. "I felt like this is it.
From now on my life will forever be different." When Paula saw Elyse for the first time, she was pleased to see that as similar as they looked, each was unique. Elyse had just returned from working in Paris. "She looked very European," says Paula. "She had dark glasses on and was smoking a cigarette. She looked ultra cool. She was an alternative version of me. "It was a relief I think for both of us that we were not carbon copies.
