Two heads better for study than one
The US Secret Service wants to compare their handwriting.
A marketing firm will pay balding male twins $2,000 to try a hair-restoring drug for a year and female twins $1,500 if they'll try drugs to reduce wrinkles and sun damage.
Such were the opportunities for willing twins who wandered into the Research Pavilion at the annual Twinsburg Twins Days Festival on Saturday.
The event had registered 1,878 sets of twins from as far away as South Africa.
Government, university and commercial researchers representing 11 studies came to Twinsburg because the festival is the biggest gathering of twins in the world and twins can be invaluable in solving certain puzzles.
Scientists study twins so they can make comparisons that help them determine whether certain traits or diseases are inherited genetically or the result of environmental influences -- the classic nature versus nurture question.
The range of research projects mostly skews toward high-minded science that aimed to cure diseases and stretch the frontiers of human knowledge, but the guys from Burke Pharmaceutical Research didn't put on any such airs.
The research firm in Hot Springs, Ark., wants twins to try out drugs already available so they can shoot before and after pictures comparing the twin who got drugs in the study with the twin who got placebos.
“This makes believers out of nonbelievers,'' said Tim Dugan, director of research.
“It's what the companies like to call the `money shot.' ''
By Saturday, Burke had signed up seven sets of male twins for a study testing a drug that might be effective in reducing hair loss. Six pairs of female twins had signed up to get skin cream for sun damage and Botox injections for wrinkles.
After filling out paperwork at the booth and seeing a video, Jeannette A. Sterling and Janet L. Adkins went to a small tent to get the ``before'' pictures taken and get checked out by Dr. Dow Stough, a board-certified dermatologist.
The 59-year-old women were both photographed with special ultraviolet cameras that captured every sun-induced blemish on their faces and another camera that recorded wrinkles.
Adkins sat patiently while Stough checked her thyroid gland, listened to her internal workings with a stethoscope and examined her forehead for wrinkles.
``Moderate? Severe? Moderate?'' he queried an assistant.
``I'd say between moderate and severe,'' Stough decided, marking on a form.
Sterling raises beef cattle on a farm south of Wooster, and Adkins works for the Ohio Department of Corrections in Lisbon.
``When you get older, you start getting these wrinkles, which I'm not ashamed of, but... '' Sterling said.
They spent a good part of Saturday in the research tent and have always sought out researchers in the 10 years they're attended the Twinsburg festival.
``If it helps children or adults in some way, I think it's great,'' Adkins said.
It's that spirt that researcher Dennis T. Drayna appreciates.
He works with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Drayna is testing the hypothesis that the way the brain processes sound is largely based on genetics rather than environment.
``They're unbelievably good sports, and it probably comes from the overall atmosphere (at the festival). There's no pressure,'' Drayna said.
His 15-year-old twin sons, Garrett and Tim, also attended the festival and won first place Saturday for their age group in the contest for twins who are the least alike.
The US Secret Service asked twins to copy a form letter, not a presidential death threat, to see if it's true that no two handwriting samples are alike. They said the government won't be analyzing the samples for personality traits or psychological profiling.
NASA wants to find a better way for astronauts to exercise in zero gravity. The contraption it has developed is a treadmill that uses negative pressure to simulate gravity and draw fluid toward the legs as if the astronaut were walking on Earth.
``It works like a vacuum cleaner,'' said Brandon Macias, a research assistant at the University of California at San Diego. ``Just like you suck dirt off the floor, we suck people onto treadmills.''
So NASA needs female twins to go to San Diego for a month, receiving free room, board, air travel and $100 a day. One twin will exercise on the treadmill/vacuum cleaner, and the other will lie in bed. About 45 twins expressed interest.
The festival awards a scholarship to a researcher every year, and this year's winners are twin anthropologists.
Dona Davis of the University of South Dakota and Dorothy Davis of the University of North Carolina Greensboro are asking twins to talk about themselves.
The Davis sisters want to know how twins define their identity.
Twins have enjoyed discussing their lives with fellow twins who don't ask questions about ESP and who do ask at least as much about how they're different as how they're the same, Dona Davis said.
``Twins are very, very popular subjects of research, but so often nobody cares about them as whole people,'' said Dona Davis. ``So much research is subcellular. They're not just organs or DNA.''
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