Lord Winston, Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, dropped into Glasgow recently to film footage for the BBC’s flagship science programme, A Child of Our Time.Dr Rob Jenkins and Lord Winston.

Lord Winston was at the Department of Psychology to meet with psychologists Rob Jenkins, David Simmons, and Oliver Garrod and to use the Department's state-of-the-art face-modelling facilities to analyse subtle differences between the faces of identical twins.

Dr Jenkins said: "By digitally splicing together different viewpoints of each face, we were able to build high-resolution models of these living faces to compare in 3D".

The investigation was carried out in the department's Dimensional Imaging suite.

"The results were quite striking", said Dr Jenkins. "Our analysis highlights differences in face shape that are difficult to see with the naked eye. These are the differences that the parents tune into in order to tell the twins apart."

But how can genetically identical twins look different? And how might appearance relate to personality? To find out, tune in to the BBC's 10th Anniversary edition of A Child of Our Time, in April 2010.

First published: 4 November 2009

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