A podcast by two brothers and a film about two silent sisters give fresh impetus to the debate about biology and the environment
About one in every 65 pregnancies in the UK results in a multiple birth, a figure that has grown since the advent of fertility treatments, and nearly all of those multiples will be twins. The unusualness of twins has captured the creative imagination going all the way back to the earliest of myths.
Take the case of identical twins Romulus and Remus, the apocryphal founders of Rome, through to June and Jennifer Gibbons, the real-life sisters who are the subject of the Polish film maker Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s new film, The Silent Twins. The Gibbons girls, like all identical or monozygotic (MZ) twins, came from the same egg and sperm. When a zygote is split in two at an early stage of development, it creates two separate embryos that share the same genes.
