On a stormy Monday in March 1827, the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven died after a long illness. He had been bedridden for months and suffered from jaundice, diarrhoea, swollen limbs and severely weakened breathing.
When the relatives sorted through the composer’s belongings, they found a document that Beethoven had written a quarter of a century earlier. A will in which he asked his brothers to divulge details of the illness he said was worse than some of the others he suffered from. The illness that had forced him to ‘live in exile’ – his deafness.
Nearly two centuries later, a research team from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology began fulfilling his wish in a way he couldn’t have imagined—by analyzing DNA from his hair.
“Our main aim was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, including a progressive hearing loss that began in his late 20s and left him functionally deaf from 1818,” says biochemist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute of the revolutionary new study.