Womb Twin Survivors

So, here we are, back from Ghent, from an international conference. The organisation details here:

The conference venue was Ghent in Belgium: lovely place, here are the details of the conference.

I gave a talk about the results of my research, (delivered with several others under the general title of "controversies in obsterics") which went down like the proverbial lead balloon because I had not subjected my data to Multivariate Analysis of Covariance : silly me. I was told to find someone who would help me write the questionnaire questions and someone to help me create some kind of useful statistical analysis. The inference was that then and only then would anyone take me seriously......

The questionnaire is coming along nicely, it is now in its 6th generation and there are 30 already. As for the statistics, I found a psychologist with the necessary software who just happens to be an expert on vanishing twins and has undertaken the task and has all my research files which I just happened to have with me on my flash drive (hooray!) So watch this space for statistics to astonish the nation!

It makes me very sad that I have to spend so much time and energy convincing people of an obvious (and already statistically proven) fact, and that is that 10% of the population are the sole survivors of a twin or multiple pregnancy and the loss of their twin or multiple(s) DOES leave some kind of impression on the survivor.

I also learned that when you see a twin pair you may (or may not) be looking at a reduced triplet set, and there is no way of proving that either! In the light of this, the whole idea of using twins as research tools for testing genetic inheritance seems rather an uncertain science to me, against which my results are beginning to seem positively robust!