Over two decades 137 sets of twins eventually visited Thomas Bouchard's lab in what became known as the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. But twin studies took a surprising twist in the 1980s, with the arrival of studies into identical twins who had been separated at birth and reunited as adults. The idea of using twins to measure the influence of heredity dates back to 1875, when the English scientist Francis Galton first suggested the approach (and coined the phrase 'nature and nurture'). These two lines of research - studying the differences between identical twins to pinpoint the influence of environment, and comparing identical twins with fraternal ones to measure the role of inheritance - have been crucial to understanding the interplay of nature and nurture in determining our personalities, behavior, and vulnerability to disease. If identical twins are more similar to each other with respect to an ailment than fraternal twins are, then vulnerability to the disease must be rooted at least in part in heredity. Any differences between them -one twin having younger looking skin, for example - must be due to environmental factors such as less time spent in the sun.Īlternatively, by comparing the experiences of identical twins with those of fraternal twins, who come from separate eggs and share on average half their DNA, researchers can quantify the extent to which our genes affect our lives. To biomedical researchers all over the world, twins offer a precious opportunity to untangle the influence of genes and the environment - of nature and nurture. Because identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits into two, they share virtually the same genetic code.
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