Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Beethoven’s DNA

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

It's been all over the news, Beethoven's DNA has revealed some interesting things about his health.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The story of Beethoven's DNA has been researched, and it just, I don't know, it hit the news cycle and I saw it in a bunch of places. I mean, I can understand why. 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 malities. 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. But some people are very much fascinated with Beethoven and even more than other people. And one of those people is Tristan Beg, who was 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 not that easy. You 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 going to want teeth ideally, or the petrous 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 made the whole thing much more difficult. If you have a root, you've 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 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 genetic 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 it 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 by me then. Oh, 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 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 going back to the early 19th century. So these two we feel really good about. We got 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 probably paid way too much money for fake Beethoven locks. Yeah, for real. And then another is a little side note, Beethoven would probably be mad about that because there are no side notes. Each note is as important as the last. Yes, only 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 that he had on his hands now five locks of hair genetically identical to one another, two of which were basically 100% guaranteed to be Beethoven's because they had Providence records. So he had five locks of Beethoven's hair to work with. So I say, Chuck, that that is a great point to take our ab break. Let's do it.

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So here we are with Beto Montair 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. He suffers from GI issues and he has liver disease or had liver disease.

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 cirrhosis, 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, but they actually found genetic proof.

They found a particular variant, two copies of the PNPLA3 gene linked to cirrhosis and then single copies of two variants of a gene that causes hemochromatosis. Another liver condition. And then they also found a little surprise, and 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, that's not scandalous. A lot of people in Europe had hepatitis B 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 questioned about whether Beethoven's jaundice was brought on by liver disease, brought on by excessive drinking. And apparently, there's even a record that mentions he'd like 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. Pretty interesting stuff. Have you ever seen Immortal Beloved? The Beethoven movie? No. I haven't. No, I have not. It was good.

I think it was 90s. I want to say it was 90s. It was good. I enjoyed it. When's the last time you saw The Professional with Gary Oldman? That's been a while. I saw it a month ago. It was good.

I bet it holds up. Even better than it was back then. It's amazing. And Natalie Portman being 12, like, out acts everybody else on the screen. It's nuts, man. She's great. That whole movie is just so good. Leon.

Yeah. Yeah. The Immortal Beloved is good. It's not Amadeus level, as evidenced by the fact that it didn't clean up at the Academy Awards, but it was pretty good. So just remind me, Amadeus was played by the guy who was in Animal House, right? Yeah. Okay.

I wanted to make sure. And F. Murray Abraham. Yeah. F. Murray Abraham was salieri. Right. And boy, boy, that was good. I want to see that again soon. That's a good one.

I have not ever seen it. I think we got around to it. Amadeus is good. It's worth a look. If you ever get a hankering for in 19, I think that was 80s biopic. Yes, for sure. Because the theme song Rock Me, Amadeus hit the charts in the 80s, like Wildfire. 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 I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.