Short Stuff: Beethoven’s DNA

It's very very fascinating, more fascinating than it appears on the surface. And the surface is Beethoven was fairly famous for suffering from a lot of terrible health maladies for many years late in his life until his death, very most famously his hearing loss, which is just fascinating that he was still able to compose with hearing loss. That's just insane. Yeah, But people, some people are very much

fast sinated with Beethoven, even more than other people. And one of those people is Justin Beg who is a student of biological anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and also an enormous Beethoven enthusiast. And he said Hey, I want to put my two things together and figure out what the heck was going on with Beethoven's body. Yeah, and now we back up a little bit and talk a little bit about DNA and the challenges of taking DNA from a dead person to figure anything out. It's it's

not that easy. DNA from a live human is much easier to work with in sequence, but if you're trying to get good DNA from a body, you're gonna want teeth ideally, or the petris bone in the skull, which we did not have from Beethoven. But during Beethoven's day, collecting locks from brilliant people's hair was a thing, and so by virtue of that, it turns out there were quite a few samples of Beethoven's locks around the world, and they ended up with what they thought was eight

of them. Yes, Tristan beg had eight that he was able to access. None of them had roots, which was made the whole thing much more difficult. If you have a root, you got a much better chance of extracting a whole genome from it, right. Yeah, But plucking a whole handful of hair from Beethoven said was not allowed Beethoven did not want that to happen. He said, sure, you can use some old timey scissors on me, or maybe even a sharp knife, and I'll sit here and

let you do it. But I do not pluck my hair. So that meant that the DNA in there in this hair was composed of short, broken fragments. But Tristan Beg is such a Beethoven enthusiast and such a student of biological anthropology that he said, I don't care. I'm going to piece together different fragments of DNA from these hair samples, from each hair sample to create basically as close to a net profile as I possibly can for each of the eight locks of hairs. And he did it. That's right.

I was so trying to come up with a joke about plucking hair, and what do you think? I am a harpsichord player. And then I tried to think of a like maybe Bach or somebody I couldn't remember who was most notable for their harpsichord work. And then I thought maybe Beethoven had some harpsichord stuff, and I bailed, But I was just in my head that entire time.

Oh man, you missed some great stuff. Men. All apologies all to think of a joke that I missed the opportunity of, but at least you got to explain it, all right. So the big reveal is is that he ended up with two locks of hair that had with DNA sampling where they were like, all right, it's western central Europe. We got great providence records, yeah, going back

to yeah, going back to the early nineteenth century. So these two, we feel really good about three more that are genetically identical to those, So that's also probably Beethoven. And this is pretty good providence records, So we think these are for sure Beethoven's. But the other three are problematic because one is a woman, so that's somebody got you know, probably paid way too much money for fake Beethoven locks. Yeah, and then another is a little side note.

Beethoven would probably be mad about that, because there are no side notes. Each notice as important as the last. Yes, the notes that I wrote. But the side note is that that lock, it turns out, had been previously used to conclude that Beethoven had lead poisoning, and it turns out that probably wasn't even Beethoven's hair, right, So the upshot of the whole thing is is that he had on his hands now five locks of hair genetically identical to one another, two of which were basically one percent

guaranteed Beethoven's because they had Providence records. So as he had five locks of Beethoven's hair to work with. So I say, Chuck, that that is a great point to take our ad break. Let's do it all right. So here we are with Beethoven's hair. And they did some research on his DNA and they came back with some pretty interesting results, one of which and they kind of figured this, but they were like, all right, his hearing loss wasn't genetic. It rarely is genetic anyway when you

have adult onset hearing loss. So they kind of figured that was coming and that was kind of proved out. But they said, he does have poopy pants a lot. Yeah, he suffers from GI issues, and he has liver disease or had liver disease. Yeah. So they could not find anything that they could connect to the GI problems. It sounds like he just had some bad clams that stayed with him or some sort of bad luck. But it wasn't a genetic thing. But the thing that they did

connect to his genetics. His genes were his liver issues. Yeah, apparently he suffered from pretty bad cerrosis. It looks like they know from just sort of historical record that he did have attacks of jaundice, a pretty clear issue with your liver going on. Yeah, but they actually found genetic proof. They found particular variant two copies of the p and p LA three gene linked to cirrhosis, and then single copies of two variants of a gene that causes hemochromatosis nice,

another liver condition. And then they also found a little surprise and that I don't think they even knew about this at all until then, that he had hepatitis B. Yes, at the very least in the final months of his life, possibly before. The thing is is that's not scandalous. A lot of people in Europe had he be at the time.

Another thing that a lot of people did at the time was drink lots and lots of booze by today's standards, And they'd long been question about whether Beethoven's jaundice was brought on by liver disease brought on by excessive drinking. And apparently there's even you know, record that mentions he liked to drink, but it was not clear how much he liked to drink and if he liked to drink

more than the average person. So apparently Tristan Beg went one step further, examined records as closely as they could, and said, I think he just drank like a normal amount, Like, yeah, it'd be a lot today, but that's not what causes liver problems. It was genetic, right, pretty interesting stuff. Have you ever seen Immortal Beloved the Beethoven movie Gary Oldman? No, and I have not. It was good. I think I think it was nineties. I want to say it was nineties.

It was good. I enjoyed it. But when's the last time you saw the professional with Gary Oldman? That's been a while. I saw it a month ago. It's good, but it holds up even better than it was back. Yeah, it's amazing. And Natalie Portman being twelve like out acts everybody else on the screen. It's nuts man that she's great. That whole movie is just so good. Leon Um. The Immortal Beloved is good, it's not. It's not Amadeus level Um, as evidence by the fact that it didn't like clean

up at the Academy Awards. But it was pretty good. So just remind me Amadeus was played by the guy who who was in Animal House, right, Yeah, okay, I wanted to Abraham. Yeah if Murray Abraham was was Salieri? Right? And boy boy, that was good. I want to see that again soon. That's a good one. I've not ever seen it. I never got around to it. Hmm. I'm a Dais is good. It's worth a look if you

ever get a hanker. And for nineteen I think that was eighties biopic, Yes for sure, because the theme song rock Me I'm a Dais hit the charts in the eighties like Wildfires. Well that's it for short stuff, everybody. If you wanted to know more about Beethoven, you couldn't possibly. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.