Twin drunks

Matt:

Can a Siamese twin get their connected sibling drunk? And is there such a thing as Siamese triplets?

-- Just Curious, San Diego

Got to say, I never considered that dilemma. One twin a teetotaler, one a lush. One out carousing all night, the other trying to sleep through the partying. One goes to Harvard, one to Stanford. Well, at least they'd always qualify for the car pool lane. Staff quack Dr. Doctor opines that with sufficient vascular connections between the two, one could drink, the other get looped. This wasn't the case, though, with the famous 19th-century conjoined twins, Chang and Eng. One drank like a fish, the other never touched a drop and didn't suffer from his brother's excesses. But they were joined mainly by cartilage from breastbone to navel. The mind reels at the thought of conjoined triplets. Conjoined twins are always identical (from a single egg that failed to separate properly at about 15 days gestation). Identical triplets exist, but as far as we can tell, no live conjoined triplet births have been recorded.