Josef Mengele creating twins in Brazil?

Luciana

Skeptical Carioca
Luciana
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The full article is here.

For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.
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Leaving history aside... let's assume it was Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, visiting that community and not some other German guy that came to Brazil and chose a town full of fellow Germans. Let's assume the memories aren't false, and that indeed Mengele made consultations to pregnant women in the 1960s. Let's assume there had never been a case of twins before in the town, and that the numbers are accurate, the prevalence of twin in such a small community is way above national levels.

But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins?
 
Fascinating article.
If anyone could manage that they'd win a Nobel Prize (maybe two).
I've no idea how it could be done, but then Mengele had a massive research advantage in having easy access to a large supply of twins and being able to ignore medical ethics.
 
The Boys from Brazil. All the hall marks of a conspiracy theory, or the makings of one. We haven't heard the story here in Australia yet. But it is the sort of story to make the tabloids and the makings of a documary, so I will soon.
 
Luciana said:
But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins?
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For non-identical twins (actually, multiple births), any fertility drug might do it.

Identical twins with traits that don't jive with the local population are a little more difficult to explain without modern in-vitro fertilisation techniques and cloning. Cloning at the zygote level (as opposed to starting from DNA from differentiated cells and an empty egg) shouldn't be that difficult, you basically have to separate the clump of cells in multiple pieces and let each grow on its own (assuming, of course, that you did it before any differentiation signal was given, otherwise, what you have is different foetus parts growing on their own).

In most in vitro fertlity treatments, more than one embryo is implanted to maximise the success rate (as each try cost you a lot of of money, that is quite important). That is normally done by collecting and fertlising several eggs. But implanting clones of the same zygote might conceptually be an alternative.

So if the guy arrived in Brazil with a dewar full of blond-eyed little clones in liquid nitrogen and in-vitro fertilisation equipment, that might be possible. :D
 
His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.
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This term annoys me greatly in the mouths of Nazi racists. It's an Indian term, and it does not refer, in any stretch of its meaning, to any european white population.

It designates a group of immigrants that arrived in India hypothetically originating from Persia (Iran), which are described as fair-skinned and attractive. If there are any real aryans or aryan descendants today they live in Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan and India.

But then Hitler also stole a sacred Hindu symbol for his own, so how can anyone expect Nazis to come up with an original term.:rolleyes:
 
krazyKemist said:
But then Hitler also stole a sacred Hindu symbol for his own, so how can anyone expect Nazis to come up with an original term.:rolleyes:
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Well, variants of that symbol are present in nearly every world culture, so...

But the real pisser is that "aryan" wasn't originally an ethnographic term, it was a linguistic one. It referred to a language family, not a people.
 
Bristow42 said:
The Boys from Brazil. All the hall marks of a conspiracy theory, or the makings of one. We haven't heard the story here in Australia yet. But it is the sort of story to make the tabloids and the makings of a documary, so I will soon.
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It sounds indeed very much CT. Interestingly, I found a serious article in another tabloid, the Daily Mail:
At the time when the mysterious Dr Weiss was making his 'rounds', Mengele was in fact living 800 miles away on a farm 200 miles north of Sao Paulo.
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The biography the author sketches of Mengele coincides with wiki's. The author's concluding remarks about Candido Godoi and its twins:
Whoever the mysterious Dr Weiss was - and whether he played some part in the remarkable twins of Candido Godoi - is a mystery that may yet offer up a remarkable story.

But we can be sure that it does not have, at its centre, the Nazi war criminal who evaded capture to the end.

Most probable is that they are in some way related to the German immigrants who have populated this part of South America since the 19th century.

Within a relatively small and isolated gene pool, it would not be uncommon to see the genetic predisposition for twins to flourish through the generations.
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Personally, I'm not surprised at the "blond, blue-eyed" features as there were lots of German immigrants, as the author notes. Does anyone know if a genetic predisposition for twins exists?
 
Yes, twiness is genetic. Farm animals have been bred for twins for centuries/generations. So is blue eyes and blondness. No big story, assuming that the German immigrants are the ancestors of the population of the town.
 
casebro said:
Yes, twiness is genetic. Farm animals have been bred for twins for centuries/generations. So is blue eyes and blondness. No big story, assuming that the German immigrants are the ancestors of the population of the town.
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So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable.
 
Darat said:
And also then make it self-perpetuating since many of the kids in that photo were obviously born long after the 60s!
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Yep!

I just thought of a new theory. This dr. Weiss came from a family with many twins. Then he used his charm to impregnate many many ladies in town... and that's it, lots of twinness all at once!

Really, isn't that simply more probable? That is, if it's true that zero twins existed before him, and that the common thread is that he visited homes and subsequently women would get pregnant... come on.

Kaylee said:
So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable.
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This is most certainly the correct answer.

Needless to say, finding out Mengele's remains shook the whole country. I was a kid and I remember being fascinated with such a figure, who to me embodied all evil in the world, and then his cranium had just been found! And for months experts discussed its authenticity, whether it was his bones or not... finally the prevalent notion is that the cranium did belong to Mengele. DNA testing in the 90s confirmed it. And the forensic expert who led the research lives currently in my neighborhood, so I'm always being reminded of that suspenseful, bitter, mysterious story.
 
Btw, this Mail Online piece of news has one glaring error:

And, even more intriguingly for a Latin country, a staggering number of the children have blond hair and blue eyes.
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Please. A large number of people in the South of Brazil is blond and blue-eyed, the vast majority are white. In Argentina there's also a sizable portion of the population that is fair skinned. The same in Chile.

Why isn't this fact so well-known? Because fair-skinned people in South America do not fit the stereotype, they're not exotic enough, so they do not make it to the movies, to the documentaries (which usually focus on the indigenous populations) or to the catwalks, in which they'd have major competition from other blondes. Exception made to Gisele Bundchen (who, btw, was born close to the town in question).

Entire towns in that area has German as prevalent language. And great beer!!

It can't be surprising, as South America received large numbers of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians. The author of this article claims he visited this area for two years. And yet, how could he have missed it? His generalization is inaccurate, to say the least.
 
Luciana said:
It can't be surprising, as South America received large numbers of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians.
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...and Welsh. Patagonia is the only place they speak Welsh, except Wales.
 
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