What made Beethoven sick? DNA from his hair offers clues

Nearly 200 years after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, researchers are extracting DNA from strands of his hair, looking for clues to the health problems and hearing loss he suffered from.

He could not solve the case of the German composer’s deafness or severe stomach pain. But he discovered a genetic risk for liver disease, plus a liver-damaging hepatitis B infection in the last months of his life.

Those factors, along with chronic drinking, may have been enough to cause the liver failure believed to have killed him, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.

This week marks the 196th anniversary of Beethoven’s death in Vienna on March 26, 1827, at the age of 56. The composer himself wrote that he wanted doctors to study his health problems after his death.

“With Beethoven in particular, the disease sometimes limited his creative work,” said study author Axel Schmidt, a geneticist at Bonn University Hospital in Germany. “And for doctors, it’s always a mystery what’s behind it.”

Since his death, scientists have long tried to piece together Beethoven’s medical history and offer various explanations for his many ailments.

How this study is done

Now, with advances in ancient DNA technology, researchers have been able to extract genetic clues from locks of Beethoven’s hair that have been removed and kept as keepsakes. They focused on five keys that were “almost certainly original,” from the same European, according to the study.

They also appear in three other historical keys, but it is not possible to confirm that they are true Beethoven. Earlier tests on one of the keys revealed that Beethoven had lead poisoning, but researchers concluded that the sample was from a woman.

After cleaning Beethoven’s hair one by one, the scientists dissolved the pieces into a solution and extracted pieces of DNA, said study author Tristan James Alexander Begg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge.

Removing genes is a challenge, because the DNA in the hair is cut into small pieces, explains author Johannes Krause, a paleogeneticist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

But eventually, after using nearly three meters (10 feet) of Beethoven’s hair, they were able to piece together a genome that they could “quiz” for signs of genetic disease, Krause said.

What the researchers found – including surprises

While the researchers found no clear genetic signs of what caused Beethoven’s gastrointestinal problems, they found that celiac disease and lactose intolerance were unlikely to cause it. In the future, the genome may provide more clues as we learn more about how genes affect health, Begg said.

The research also led to a surprising discovery: When they tested the DNA of living members of the complete Beethoven family, scientists found a discrepancy in the Y chromosome that was passed down on the father’s side. The Y chromosomes of five people were a match – but they were not a match for the composer.

This suggests that there were “extra-pair paternity events” somewhere in the generation before Beethoven was born, Begg said. In other words, a child born from an extramarital relationship in the author’s family tree.

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The key question of what caused Beethoven’s hearing loss remains unanswered, said Dr. Avraham Z. Cooper of Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study. And it can be hard to understand, because genetics can only represent half of the “nature and nurture” equation that makes up our health.

But he adds that the mystery is part of what makes Beethoven so fascinating.

“I think we know nothing,” Cooper said.