In December 2008, Bruno Reversade travelled to India in pursuit of some spit. The journey took him first to the northeastern city of Allahabad, and then a further 10 kilometres to Mohammad Pur Umri, a farming village enclosed by mud walls. There he asked some of the 2,000 or so residents to deposit samples of their saliva in a cup specially designed for the purpose. Fifty-five of them complied. This is not the first time that these villagers have sacrificed their body fluids for science. Mohammad Pur Umri has become somewhat famous, not for the milk or mustard that provides the villagers with their livelihood, but for its prolific production of identical - monozy-gotic - twins. Globally, only 1 in every 250 to 300 births are identical twins. In Umri, roughly one in ten is of this type, births that the villagers - including the twin village leaders - call "gifts from God".
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