This Sunday marks the 196th anniversary of Beethoven's death in Vienna on March 26, 1827, at the age of 56.
"With Beethoven in particular, it is the case that illnesses sometimes very much limited his creative work," said study author Axel Schmidt, a geneticist at University Hospital Bonn in Germany. "And for physicians, it has always been a mystery what was really behind it."Since his death, scientists have long tried to piece together Beethoven's medical history and have offered a variety of possible explanations for his many maladies.
After cleaning Beethoven's hair one strand at a time, scientists dissolved the pieces into a solution and fished out chunks of DNA, said study author Tristan James Alexander Begg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. But eventually, after using up almost 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.
This suggests there was an "extra-pair paternity event" somewhere in the generations before Beethoven was born, Begg said. In other words, a child born from an extramarital relationship in the composer's family tree.
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