Three Identical Strangers is Why the IRB Process Exists
Three identical Strangers. Image courtesy of CNN Films.
Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling at Sundance and it showcases some of the best elements of documentary filmmaking. It also highlights why the IRB process exists in scientific research. Going through an IRB (which stands for Institutional Review Board) is a hassle for most projects, but because of unethical research designs like the one featured in this movie the rest of us are doomed to jump through these hoops forever, apparently.
In my opinion, this kind of subject matter is what the documentary genre is best suited for. It focuses on a narrow but compelling issue or event, featuring interesting people and human drama that illuminates some wider issues (nature vs. nurture, ethics) rather than trying to explain the entire history, social and political implications of, say, a constitutional amendment. I think that documentaries are best-suited for highlighting these weird little human stories, and using them to turn the spotlight on bigger points. And the story of these three identical triplet brothers separated at birth who accidentally discover each other later in life is the perfect material for the medium.
That is an interesting enough hook, but it gets even more interesting when we learn they were intentionally separated and placed in different families by researchers as part of an experiment to assess the impact of parenting styles on genetically identical subjects. If you are looking for a way to get some variation in the independent variable - parenting style and upbringing - while controlling for genetics I could see how an Austrian scientist born on the cusp of World War I might have come up with this design. The problem is that it is terribly unethical; the researchers, as well as the adoption agency, manipulated and played with these peoples’ lives without their consent. Like The Truman Show, they didn’t even know they were in an experiment.
The film suggests that this may have in some way led one of the brothers to commit suicide. That is impossible to know, which also underlines the flaws in the research design. Even if you control for genetic makeup, there are so many potential confounders that could lead one brother to commit suicide and the others not to. Disentangling nature from nurture with any precision remains impossible, and the cost is that you deprived three brothers from growing up together. Maybe in the end, that is what caused Eddie to commit suicide - because he didn’t have the support of his brothers growing up, which would mean the design of the experiment itself caused one of the results.
To prevent things like this from happening, most research projects have to get approval from an Institutional Review Board now. When I did my PhD research, I had to submit it to the IRB at my university in Singapore because I would be conducting fieldwork in Indonesia and speaking to people. The process involved lots of procedural hurdles in which I had to specify which kinds of data I would collect and come up with safeguards to ensure that no one could potentially be harmed by speaking to me.
By IRB standards, it was relatively painless since I wasn’t conducting any sort of biological data collection or anything of that nature, just talking to people. Still it was not a fun process, and much of it was rather pointless bureaucratic diddling. The trade-off between complying with ethical standards (and determining what those standards are in the first place) and achieving the goals of scientific research in a timely or effective manner is not always an easy balance to strike and there is no objectively optimal balance.
But the story of Three Identical Strangers helps us to understand why these IRB safeguards and the IRB process exist in the first place. Because if they didn’t exist, some researchers would be tempted to conduct highly unethical experiments and justify it in the name of scientific inquiry. It’s good to be cognizant of ethical standards and how your research might impact the lives of people in ways you may not have considered. Sure, we can say that when they did the triplet experiment in the 1960s it was a different time but that’s precisely what the IRB is for - to anchor ethical standards to some kind of common form that can be applied across time and space.
I would definitely show this film to graduate students during a methods course, because it drives home the bigger purpose of the IRB process and helps to make sense of it even as you might think it’s overkill to fill out 15 pages of forms and go through multiple reviews and revisions just so you can talk to some government officials in a diner. And that, indeed, is the mark of a truly good documentary film.
