This boundary is not a technical limitation waiting to be overcome by more powerful sequencing. It reflects a fundamental fact about how genes and traits relate: complex behavioral and cognitive characteristics are influenced by many genes, each with small effects, interacting with each other and with environmental factors in ways that are not captured by any simple genetic summary. The idea that sequencing a historical figure’s genome would reveal the source of their greatness mistakes what genes do and do not contain.
The researchers who conducted the Beethoven study were explicit about this. The genome tells us about his liver disease risk, about his hepatitis B infection, about his ancestry, about a discrepancy in his paternal family line. It tells us nothing about why he composed the Ninth Symphony.
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## The Conclusion That Beethoven Asked For
In October 1802, sitting alone in a small spa village outside Vienna, a thirty-one-year-old man wrote a letter to his brothers asking that after his death, his illness should be investigated and described to the world. He then put the letter away and never sent it. He spent the next twenty-five years composing some of the most consequential music that has ever been written, while continuing to lose the sense that his profession most depended on. He died in 1827, and the letter was found among his papers.
Two hundred and twenty-one years later, a team of scientists from multiple countries extracted DNA from five locks of hair that had been preserved in institutional and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. They confirmed that five different locks, with different histories and held by different owners, all came from the same individual. They determined that a sixth lock, famous and widely studied, came from an unknown woman. They sequenced a nearly complete genome from the best-preserved sample. They searched that genome for clues to the health problems that had haunted Beethoven through most of his adult life.