For Sake of Science They Abused These Girls

"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." --Albert Einstein

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Secularists today love to frame the religion vs. science debate as one of "superstitions" against fact as if theistic truth, morality and the spiritual aspect of humanity is meaningless fluff not to intersect with the hard fact and incontestability of science. But, as I quoted Einstein, the patron saint of scienceists, there is a part of science that dangerously crosses over into religion's realm of morality even as secularists try to deny that fact. And here is a story that does, indeed, show scientists crossing over into the realm of evil to satisfy scientific curiosity. It is an evil not as bad as that of a Doctor Mengele to be sure, but one that rises to a level of evil that few would expect in today's modern age. Imagine taking twin baby girls and purposefully splitting them up merely as an experiment to observe their lives as they grew up keeping them from knowing of the existence of each other? Would you find justified this dispassionate decision, this coldly scientific decision, to take away a lifetime of sisterhood just to satisfy a scientific curiosity? Apparently, Doctor Peter Neubauer, an internationally renowned child psychiatrist, found no struggle with his conscience over such a scientific experiment because that is exactly what he did to identical twins Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein, when they were infants. In 1968, Doctor Neubauer used the twin girls for a bizarre and immoral social experiment splitting them away from each other in order to observe how they would progress. They grew up neither knowing that they had an identical twin sister out there. Nature versus nurture has been a nagging question for scientists for generations. Are we the result of our genes or of our environment goes the raging debate. Apparently, Doctor Neubauer decided to use the lives of these two girls to satisfy his curiosity over the ages old question. And evidently he knew what he was doing would be considered wrong because he ordered that the results of his study be locked in a Yale archive, not to be opened until 2066, long after all concerned should be deceased. He didn't have the spine to own up to the consequences of his actions, obviously. After 35 year apart, however, the girls found each other at long last. Of this inhuman experiment one of the girls, Elyse Schein, recently said, "Nature intended for us to be raised together, so I think it was a crime we were separated." Of what had occurred to them, her sister Paula said, "It was like something out of a movie, I broke down in tears." We all know that the evil scientist who uses his intellectual gifts for evil instead of good is the trope of umpteen B grade horror and sci-fi movies, but it isn't just fiction that has worried over the evil science can do. Einstein often worried over such evil as I relayed in the quote that started this piece. It is said that J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the first Atomic bomb, quoted the Hindi Bhagavad Gita upon seeing the power of the weapon he created: "I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." Over the decades, many scientists and inventors have found anguish rewarding them for their scientific experiments that led to weapons inventions, as well. Many say that Alfred Nobel's Peace Prize was his penance for having invented the destructive power of dynamite. The widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle went mad and spent her enormous inheritance on s