Last November I went to Bucharest to shadow an American neuroscientist, Charles Nelson, whose team has studied the same group of 136 Romanian orphans for the past 14 years. My (loooong) story about this project came out this week in Aeon Magazine. Here’s a snippet:

In 1999, [Nelson] and several other American scientists launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a now-famous study of Romanian children who were mostly ‘social orphans’, meaning that their biological parents had given them over to the state’s care. At the time, despite an international outcry over Romania’s orphan problem, many Romanian officials staunchly believed that the behavioural problems of institutionalised children were innate — the reason their parents had left them there, rather than