Josef Mengele creating twins in Brazil?

Luciana · 24th January 2009, 05:58 PM

The full article is here.

Quote:

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.

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?

Policenaut · 24th January 2009, 08:18 PM

He was a Nazi. They had magic sperm.

plumjam · 24th January 2009, 08:48 PM

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.

grayman · 24th January 2009, 08:54 PM

Almost sounds like a film plot.

Bristow42 · 25th January 2009, 04:01 AM

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.

krazyKemist · 25th January 2009, 06:10 AM

Originally Posted by Luciana

But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins?

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.

Darat · 25th January 2009, 06:14 AM

Originally Posted by Luciana

...snip...

But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins?

And also then make it self-perpetuating since many of the kids in that photo were obviously born long after the 60s!

krazyKemist · 25th January 2009, 08:34 AM

Quote:

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.

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.

luchog · 25th January 2009, 01:18 PM

Originally Posted by krazyKemist

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.

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.

ddt · 25th January 2009, 03:06 PM

Originally Posted by Bristow42

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.

It sounds indeed very much CT. Interestingly, I found a serious article in another tabloid, the Daily Mail:

Quote:

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.

The biography the author sketches of Mengele coincides with wiki's. The author's concluding remarks about Candido Godoi and its twins:

Quote:

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.

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?

casebro · 25th January 2009, 03:18 PM

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.

Kaylee · 25th January 2009, 04:28 PM

Originally Posted by casebro

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.

So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable.

Luciana · 26th January 2009, 03:22 PM

Originally Posted by Darat

And also then make it self-perpetuating since many of the kids in that photo were obviously born long after the 60s!

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.

Originally Posted by Kaylee

So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable.

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.

Luciana · 26th January 2009, 03:36 PM

Btw, this Mail Online piece of news has one glaring error:

Quote:

And, even more intriguingly for a Latin country, a staggering number of the children have blond hair and blue eyes.

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.

TX50 · 26th January 2009, 04:13 PM

Originally Posted by Luciana

It can't be surprising, as South America received large numbers of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians.

...and Welsh. Patagonia is the only place they speak Welsh, except Wales.

Luciana · 26th January 2009, 04:17 PM

Originally Posted by TX50

...and Welsh. Patagonia is the only place they speak Welsh, except Wales.

I did not know that! Wow. And the Irish, who even staged a coup of sorts in the port of Rio.

24th January 2009, 05:58 PM	#1
Luciana Skeptical Carioca Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 10,108	Josef Mengele creating twins in Brazil? The full article is here. Quote: 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. 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?
	__________________ Regards, Luciana

24th January 2009, 08:54 PM	#4
grayman Happy-go-lucky Heretic Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Casa del Whacko Posts: 5,884	Almost sounds like a film plot.
	__________________ Stupidity is a condition. Ignorance is a choice. - Wiley All great truths begin as blasphemies. - George Bernard Shaw God is evil. As soon as you accept that, it all makes sense. - Sledge

25th January 2009, 06:10 AM	#6
krazyKemist Critical Thinker Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Funkytown Posts: 421	Originally Posted by Luciana But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins? 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.
	__________________ Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasels. -- Homer Simpson It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. -- Douglas Adams

25th January 2009, 06:14 AM	#7
Darat Lackey Administrator Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: South East, UK Posts: 51,261	Originally Posted by Luciana ...snip... But how would any doctor in the 1960s force or influence the birth of twins? And also then make it self-perpetuating since many of the kids in that photo were obviously born long after the 60s!
	__________________ If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

25th January 2009, 08:34 AM	#8
krazyKemist Critical Thinker Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Funkytown Posts: 421	Quote: 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. 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.
	__________________ Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasels. -- Homer Simpson It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. -- Douglas Adams

24th January 2009, 08:18 PM	#2
Policenaut Graduate Poster Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Shadow Moses Island Posts: 1,532	He was a Nazi. They had magic sperm.

24th January 2009, 08:48 PM	#3
plumjam Philosopher Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Valencia, Spain Posts: 6,916	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.

25th January 2009, 04:01 AM	#5
Bristow42 Student Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Australia Posts: 48	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.

25th January 2009, 01:18 PM	#9
luchog Neo-Post-Retro-Revivalist Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: The Emerald City Posts: 6,772	Originally Posted by krazyKemist 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. 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.
	__________________ "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." -- Douglas Adams "The absence of evidence might indeed not be evidence of absence, but it's a pretty good start." -- PhantomWolf

25th January 2009, 03:06 PM	#10
ddt Mafia Penguin Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Netherlands Posts: 5,672	Originally Posted by Bristow42 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. It sounds indeed very much CT. Interestingly, I found a serious article in another tabloid, the Daily Mail: Quote: 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. The biography the author sketches of Mengele coincides with wiki's. The author's concluding remarks about Candido Godoi and its twins: Quote: 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. 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?
	__________________ Proud member of the Solipsistic Autosycophant's Group Pardalis lies about the contents of my posts. Pardalis refuses to admit he lied. Pardalis lies again about the content of a post of mine.

25th January 2009, 03:18 PM	#11
casebro Illuminator Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 4,204	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 Illuminator Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 4,204	__________________ Please pardon me for having ideas, not facts. Some have called me cynical, but I don't believe them. It's not how many breaths you take. It's how many times you have been breathless that counts.

25th January 2009, 04:28 PM	#12
Kaylee Master Poster Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 2,523	Originally Posted by casebro 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. So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable.
Kaylee Master Poster Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 2,523	__________________ When everyone think alike, no one thinks very much. -- Walter Lippman''

26th January 2009, 03:22 PM	#13
Luciana Skeptical Carioca Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 10,108	Originally Posted by Darat And also then make it self-perpetuating since many of the kids in that photo were obviously born long after the 60s! 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. Originally Posted by Kaylee So the genetic drift happened first, and then the attribution to Mengele happened afterwards? Sounds reasonable. 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.
	__________________ Regards, Luciana

26th January 2009, 03:36 PM	#14
Luciana Skeptical Carioca Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 10,108	Btw, this Mail Online piece of news has one glaring error: Quote: And, even more intriguingly for a Latin country, a staggering number of the children have blond hair and blue eyes. 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.
	__________________ Regards, Luciana

26th January 2009, 04:13 PM	#15
TX50 Graduate Poster Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 1,381	Originally Posted by Luciana It can't be surprising, as South America received large numbers of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians. ...and Welsh. Patagonia is the only place they speak Welsh, except Wales.
TX50 Graduate Poster Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 1,381

26th January 2009, 04:17 PM	#16
Luciana Skeptical Carioca Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 10,108	Originally Posted by TX50 ...and Welsh. Patagonia is the only place they speak Welsh, except Wales. I did not know that! Wow. And the Irish, who even staged a coup of sorts in the port of Rio.
	__________________ Regards, Luciana