Joseph Massoud, age 14, of Washington Mills, N.Y., for his question:
DO IDENTICAL TWINS HAVE THE SAME FINGERPRINTS?
When two children are born at the same time to the same mother, you have twins. Once out of every 96 births will produce a pair of twins. The tendency to have twins seems to be hereditary. When twins arrive, they will be either fraternal or identical. Fraternal twins grew from two different egg cells which happened to have been fertilized at the same time.
Identical twins are always of the same sex, since they are born from a single egg cell which separated into two parts early in its development. Each of the parts became one of the twins.
Because they were born from separate eggs, fraternal twins are usually easy to tell apart even when they are both of the same sex. It is often a much more difficult job to tell identical twins apart since they have almost exactly the same features.
You can tell some identical twins apart because their characteristics are in reverse. The hair of one twin may be parted on the left side while the other twin's hair is parted naturally on the right. The reason for this is that the twins' common egg cell did not separate until it had begun to develop right and left sided characteristics.
When it comes to fingerprints, each identical twin stands alone. No two fingerprints have as yet been found to be exactly alike. Fingerprints, therefore, would certainly act as a foolproof means of identification. The identification Division of the FBI in Washington, D.C. has over 200 million fingerprints on file including many from identical twins ¬and each print is unique.
Long before the birth of Christ, the Chinese used thumbprints to sign documents since they discovered that each person had a pattern unlike anyone else's.
It happens from time to time that identical twins are born joined together either at the hip, chest or abdomen. A famous pair joined at the hips were Eng and Chang who lived from 1811 until 1874 and were born in Siam to Chinese parents. All joined twins of this type are now called Siamese twins. Sometimes Siamese twins can be separated by surgery, but if they share a vital organ, surgery is rarely attempted.
Craniopagus Siamese twins are joined at the head. There have been surgical separations in which both twins survived and developed into normal adults.
A British official in Bengal, India, is given credit for devising the first workable method of fingerprint identification. Sir William J. Herschel in 1858 made use of a simple form of such identification to prevent impersonations which were then common among people.
Sir Francis Galton is given credit for founding the present system of fingerprint identification. In the 1880s he established a bureau for the registration of civilians.