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Show j Six Pairs of Twins in One Family Are Puzzle for Scientists Chicago. The six pairs of fraternal twins that have been born to a Connecticut husband and wife are somewhat some-what disturbing to scientists. Prof. William Walter Greulich, of the department of anatomy and the adolescent study unit at Yale university, uni-versity, presents a study of the six pairs of twins in the Connecticut family in the Journal of the American Amer-ican Medical association. He has also looked into the family fam-ily history of the twins' parents. Only on the father's side can a record rec-ord of previous multiple births be found. The father's father, it turns out, had triplets by his second wife. The widespread belief that twinning twin-ning tends to run in families is supported sup-ported by evidence here and abroad, and twin births everywhere seem to appear just as frequently on the father's side as on the mother's. moth-er's. Now this disturbing fact cannot can-not be reconciled with the accepted accept-ed theory of the genesis of fraternal twins. Fraternal twins, as distinguished from monozygotic twins (those of the same sex and physical characteristics), charac-teristics), are produced, it is usually usual-ly assumed, by the fertilization of two ova derived from separate follicles fol-licles either from the same or from different ovaries. Calls for Observations. Such double ovulations are exceptional excep-tional and are generally regarded as the result of some upset in function func-tion of the ovulatory mechanism. The control of this would naturally natur-ally be with the mother and could not possibly be influenced by the father. Professor Greulich appeals to surgeons sur-geons and pathologists to make observations ob-servations during operations and postmortems on pregnant women that will help find a satisfactory explanation ex-planation of this phenomenon. The most reasonable explanation, in his opinion, was advanced 20 years ago by Dr. C. H. Danforth and recently by Dr. F. Curtius of Germany. According to this hypothesis, the sperm of some men causes the tubal tub-al ovum to form two cells, both of which are susceptible of being fertilized, fer-tilized, each, of course, by a different dif-ferent sperm. Such fertilization would result in the production of twins who had the same heredity from the mother's side but different paternal heredity. Such twins might be of like or of unlike sex and would presumably be intermediate between identical and ordinary double-egg twins in the degree of resemblance that they would bear to each other. The Connecticut family, which has renewed the faith of physicians that phenomenal fecundity has not become a lost art, had its sixth pair of twins last June 12. The mother was thirty-five and the father fifty-seven when they were born. Of the first pair of twins the boy died, but all others are living. |