Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820. Beethoven House Bonn
DECRYPTION – Genetic analyzes of the composer’s strands of hair lift the veil of his health problems, but above all his parentage.
Genealogical genetics is an intriguing but dangerous game: an “extramarital paternity event” may appear in your personal history… What to think when this mishap befalls a person of immense fame who has been dead for almost two centuries? In this case Ludwig van Beethoven, the German composer whose DNA from several strands of hair could be analyzed to determine the causes of his deafness and death. The work, which took almost eight years, was carried out by an international team led by Johannes Krause, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and published in the journal Current Biology. “From a technical point of view, this is remarkable work,” comments Olivier Dutour, director of studies in biological anthropology at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris (University PSL). The authors managed to use treasures of biological technologies! »
In 1802, twenty-five…
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