Calling All Twins

Are you an identical twin? Run a twin study on yourself!

There are millions of identical twins living in the US right now. Are you one? Do you know one? If so, run a twin study! Many prospective twin studies use fewer than 20 pairs so you’re only one order of magnitude short with you and your sibling. If you and your twin pick a property where your starting state is very similar and has been for a while, you should be able to detect a large signal pretty straightforwardly.

Take weight loss as a toy example. Say you and your twin weigh the same amount and have for some months. Now say you go on a potato diet while your twin doesn’t. If you lose 10 lbs and your twin doesn’t, that’s interesting! If your twin then goes on a potato diet and also loses 10 lbs, that’s really interesting and decent evidence that the potato diet works for your genotype.

If you’re a human biologist (twin or not), there are probably twin studies you’d love to run. Some of them are probably very simple. Could one pair of twins generate enough signal to be meaningful to you? If so, just put your theory out there and see if a pair of twins volunteers to give it a shot. You’ll need to take some care not to trip over an IRB requirement, which is why this post is about twins studying themselves rather than anyone else studying twins. However, there’s nothing preventing the rest of us from letting the twins know what the most interesting things to try might be. If you’ve got any ideas, put them in the comments!

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