America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son.

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It just, I don't know, it was like it hit the news cycle and I saw it in a bunch of places.

I mean, I can understand why it's very, very fascinating. More fascinating than it appears on

the surface. And the surface is Beethoven was fairly famous for suffering from a lot of terrible health

maladies. For many years, late in his life until his death, very most famously his hearing loss,

which is just fascinating that he was still able to compose with hearing loss. That's just insane.

But some people are very much fascinated with Beethoven even more than other people.

And one of those people is Tristan Begg, who was a student of biological anthropology at UC

Santa Cruz, and also an enormous Beethoven enthusiast. And he said, hey, I want to put my two things

together and figure out what the heck was going on with Beethoven's body.

Yeah. And now we back up a little bit and talk a little bit about DNA and the challenges of

taking DNA from a dead person to figure anything out. It's not that easy. You,

DNA from a live human is much easier to work with in sequence. But if you're trying to get good

DNA from a body, you're going to want teeth, ideally, or the petrous bone in the skull,

which we did not have from Beethoven. But during Beethoven's day, collecting locks from

brilliant peoples' hair was a thing. And so by virtue of that, it turns out there were

quite a few samples of Beethoven's locks around the world. And they ended up with what they thought

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