What can we learn about Ludwig van Beethoven from his hair? People have studied his music, his letters, the conversation books he
used to communicate as his hearing deteriorated. We also have the words
of his friends, colleagues and even
his doctors. But now, for the first time we have been able to investigate
his genome. By the 1820s, Beethoven was so revered that several friends and admirers sought locks of his hair and when he died in 1827 more locks were quickly cut
from his head. Working with an international team
of scientists, I identified five genetically matching
authentic locks of hair and used them to sequence
Beethoven's genome. We wanted to know more about Beethoven's
much debated health problems and we made some breakthroughs. We cannot say definitely
what killed Beethoven but we discovered significant genetic risk
factors for liver disease and evidence that Beethoven contracted
Hepatitis B virus in, at the latest, the months before his final illness. This infection might have driven the
composer's severe liver disease, exacerbated by its genetic risk and
possibly his alcohol intake. But we need to be careful not
to jump to conclusions. We can't be sure about the precise
nature of this relationship, partly because the contemporary accounts
of his alcohol consumption vary. While we couldn't pinpoint the cause of
Beethoven's deafness or gastrointestinal problems, we did find modest genetic risk for
Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. We eliminated or made less likely several potential heritable causes
for Beethoven's liver disease and bowel complaints. We also found that two of
the Beethoven locks in the collections today are not authentic including the famous lock once
believed to have been cut from the dead composer's head by the 15 year old musician
Ferdinand Hiller. We now know this hair actually
came from a woman. We were surprised to uncover
a family mystery that shows that Beethoven wasn't
actually descended genetically from the main Flemish
Beethoven lineage. A combination of genetic
and archival evidence shows that an extramarital relationship resulted in the birth of a child in Beethoven's direct paternal line at some point between
1572 and 1770, but we don't know in which generation
this might have been. We hope that by making Beethoven's genome
publicly available for researchers, and in due course, perhaps adding
further authenticated locks to this initial chronological series, remaining questions about his health and family history can someday
be answered. I'm Dr Robert Attenborough and I'm a Bioanthropologist and I've been Tristan's PhD supervisor
at the University of Cambridge, along with Dr Toomas Kivisild, formerly of Cambridge and now
at KU Leuven. This project began
over eight years ago, and Tristan has been on a remarkable journey
with his numerous research partners in Europe and the United States, including Dr Will Meredith of
San Jose State University and Dr Johannes Krause of the
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig. Scholars and admirers of Beethoven will find much
to think about and discuss in these findings, and hopefully they will help us to find out even
more about this remarkable individual. At the same time, the extremely impressive
genetic research conducted by Tristan and his colleagues, will also help to inform a wide
range of other projects, including research into health
and genetic variation at the level of individual biography.
