Amazon.com
This rather remarkable video is noteworthy on two counts: the first, computer animation actually shows the development of twins in utero, and second, actual footage of twin placentas is shown, illustrating once and for all just what a single and double chorion looks like. Wow! The filmmakers have also gone all the way to the Netherlands to capture footage of the European Twin Registry studies there. The Minnesota and Louisville studies are shown as well, adding more fodder to the case the video makes: twins and their concurrent lives can "show us the extraordinary degree to which our destinies may be written by our genes." Wide-angle interviews and footage of twins and their researchers, plus an "X-Files" kind of soundtrack, lend a note of the fantastic (and almost wacky) to the video. But the stories and anecdotes collected about twin lives are truly fascinating. Girl twins separated at birth both fall in love at age 16, marry six years later and bear children of the same sex in the same years. Twin men each die of heart attacks within hours of one another. These stories are just to uncanny to rule out anything, and the scientific data summarized by the video is also convincing that nature may have more to do with life than nurture.
--Gilia Angell
