Humans looking for space aliens? Who knew? Let's write about how aliens might see human beings!

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens

Echo essay published in The New York Times

Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens. 

Now, as a professional astrophysicist armed with the knowledge of the size, age and composition of the cosmos, I know that nothing prevents any of us from imagining a universe teeming with life.

So the impending release of U.S. government files on aliens and U.F.O.s is a good thing, even if it feels like a distraction from other important files we’ve all been waiting to be disclosed. I expect the alien files will be anticlimactic. After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?

Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?

The whistle-blowers have already told us about the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies and alien technology in our possession — hidden in undisclosed places. Not only that, but secret files have been declassified before. A 2017 headline in this newspaper was unambiguous: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” And who could forget the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which studied more than 12,000 U.F.O. sightings from 1952, until the project was terminated in 1969, with the goal of assessing threats to national security.

What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room.

Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them. And imagine them we do. IMDb, an online database about entertainment, lists hundreds upon hundreds of films, TV shows, video games and documentaries about aliens — both friendly and evil. Mostly evil.

Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.

The only thing that would shock me about a living, declassified alien is if most Hollywood depictions ended up being right, violating everything we know about biodiversity on Earth and across the universe.

We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. 🚗

Indeed, the congested city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.

Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.

If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.

In the history of our species, there’s no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress — or kill — one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths.

Upon bearing witness to our irrational ways, any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, “There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!”

Let's write about Ludwig van Beethoven. Guess what? His biography must be revised.

 DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Medical and Family Secrets.

Ludwig van Beethoven (born December 1770 in Bonn Germany- died March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria)- portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler.

By analyzing seven samples of hair said to have come from Ludwig van Beethoven, researchers debunked myths about the revered composer while raising new questions about his life and death.

It was March 1827, and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance?

The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’s death at age 56, even after doctors performed a gruesome craniotomy, looking at the folds in Beethoven’s brain and removing his ear bones in a vain attempt to understand why the revered composer lost his hearing.

Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head.

Ever since, a cottage industry has aimed to understand Beethoven’s illnesses and the cause of his death.

Illustrations made for 250th anniversary of Beethoven

Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while also raising new questions about his genealogical origins and hinting at a dark family secret.

An international group of researchers published a paper in the journal Current Biology.

It offers additional surprises: A famous lock of hair — the subject of a book and a documentary — was not Beethoven’s. It was from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman.

The study also found that Beethoven did not have lead poisoning, as had been widely believed. Nor was he a Black man, as some had proposed.

And a Flemish family in Belgium — who share the last name van Beethoven and had proudly claimed to be related — had no genetic ties to him.

Researchers not associated with the study found it convincing.

It was “a very serious and well-executed study,” said Andaine Seguin-Orlando, an expert in ancient DNA at the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, in France.

The detective work to solve the mysteries of Beethoven’s illness began on Dec. 1, 1994, when a lock of hair said to be Beethoven’s was auctioned by Sotheby’s. Four members of the American Beethoven Society, a private group that collects and preserves material related to the composer, purchased it for $7,300. They proudly displayed it at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California.

But was it really Beethoven’s hair?

The story was that it was clipped by Ferdinand Hiller, a 15-year-old composer and ardent acolyte who visited Beethoven four times before he died.

On the day after Beethoven died, Hiller clipped a lock of his hair. He gave it to his son decades later as a birthday gift. It was kept in a locket.

The locket with its strands of hair was the subject of a best-selling book, “Beethoven’s Hair,” by Russell Martin, published in 2000, and made into a documentary film in 2005.

An analysis of the hair at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois found lead levels as high as 100 times normal.

In 2007, authors of a paper in The Beethoven Journal, a scholarly journal published by San Jose State, speculated that the composer might have been inadvertently poisoned by medicine, wine, or eating and drinking utensils.

That was where matters stood until 2014, when Tristan Begg, then a masters student studying archaeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, realized that science had advanced enough for DNA analysis using locks of Beethoven’s hair.

“It seemed worth a shot,” said Mr. Begg, now a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University.

William Meredith, a Beethoven scholar, began searching for other locks of Beethoven’s hair, buying them with financial support from the American Beethoven Society, at private sales and auctions. 

So, He borrowed two more from a university and a museum. He ended up with eight locks, including the hairs from Ferdinand Hiller.

First, the researchers tested the Hiller lock. Because it turned out to be from a woman, it was not — could not be — Beethoven’s. The analysis also showed that the woman had genes found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations.

Dr. Meredith speculates that the authentic hair from Beethoven was destroyed and replaced with strands from Sophie Lion, the wife of Ferdinand Hiller’s son Paul. She was Jewish.

As for the other seven locks, one was inauthentic, five had identical DNA and one could not be tested. The five locks with identical DNA were of different provenances and two had impeccable chains of custody, which gave the researchers confidence that they were hair from Beethoven.

Ed Green, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the study, agreed.

“The fact that they have so many independent locks of hair, with different histories, that all match one another is compelling evidence that this is bona fide DNA from Beethoven,” he said.


When the group had the DNA sequence from Beethoven’s hair, they tried to answer longstanding questions about his health. For instance, why might he have died from cirrhosis of the liver?

He drank, but not to excess, said Theodore Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio. Based on his study of texts left by the composer, he described what is known of Beethoven’s imbibing habits in an email.

“In none of these activities did Beethoven exceed the line of consumption that would make him an ‘alcoholic,’ as we would commonly define it today,” he wrote.

Beethoven’s hair provided a clue: He had DNA variants that made him genetically predisposed to liver disease. In addition, his hair contained traces of hepatitis B DNA, indicating an infection with this virus, which can destroy a person’s liver.

But how did Beethoven get infected? Hepatitis B is spread through sex and shared needles, and during childbirth.

Beethoven did not use intravenous drugs, Dr. Meredith said. He never married, although he was romantically interested in several women. He also wrote a letter — although he never sent it — to his “immortal Beloved,” whose identity has been the subject of much scholarly intrigue. Details of his sex life remain unknown.

Arthur Kocher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and one of the new study’s co-authors, offered another possible explanation for his infection: The composer could have been infected with hepatitis B during childbirth. The virus is commonly spread this way, he said, and infected babies can end up with a chronic infection that lasts a lifetime. In about a quarter of people, chronic infection will eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.

The study also revealed that Beethoven was not genetically related to others in his family line. His Y chromosome DNA differed from that of a group of five people with the same last name — van Beethoven — living in Belgium today and who, according to archival records, share a 16th-century ancestor with the composer. That indicates there must have been an out-of-wedlock affair in Beethoven’s direct paternal line. But where?

Maarten Larmuseau, a co-author of the new study who is a professor of genetic genealogy at the University of Leuven in Belgium, suspects that Ludwig van Beethoven’s father was born to the composer’s grandmother with a man other than his grandfather. There are no baptismal records for Beethoven’s father, and his grandmother was known to have been an alcoholic. Beethoven’s grandfather and father had a difficult relationship. These factors, Dr. Larmuseau said, are possible signs of an extramarital child.

Beethoven had his own difficulties with his father, Dr. Meredith said. And while his grandfather, a noted court musician in his day, died when Beethoven was very young, he honored him and kept his portrait with him until the day he died.

Dr. Meredith added that when rumors circulated that Beethoven was actually the illegitimate son of Friedrich Wilhelm II or even Frederick the Great, Beethoven never refuted them.

The researchers had hoped their study of Beethoven’s hair might explain some of the composer’s agonizing health problems. But it did not provide definitive answers.

The composer suffered from terrible digestive problems, with abdominal pain and prolonged bouts of diarrhea. The DNA analysis did not point to a cause, although it pretty much ruled out two proposed reasons: celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. And it made a third hypothesis — irritable bowel syndrome — unlikely.

Hepatitis B could have been the culprit, Dr. Kocher said, although it is impossible to know for sure.

The DNA analysis also offered no explanation for Beethoven’s hearing loss, which started in his mid-20s and resulted in deafness in the last decade of his life.

The researchers took pains to discuss their results in advance with those directly affected by their research.

On the evening of March 15, Dr. Larmuseau met with the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study.

He started right out with the bad news: They are not genetically related to Ludwig van Beethoven.

They were shocked.

“They didn’t know how to react,” Dr. Larmuseau said. “Every day they are remembered by their special surname. Every day they say their name and people say, ‘Are you related to Ludwig van Beethoven?’”

That relationship, Dr. Larmuseau said, “is part of their identity.”

And now it is gone.

The study’s findings that the Hiller lock was from a Jewish woman stunned Mr. Martin, author of “Beethoven’s Hair.”

“Wow, who would have imagined it,” he said. Now, he added, he wants to find descendants of Sophie Lion, the wife of Paul Hiller, to see if the hair was hers. And he’d like to find out if she had lead poisoning.

For Dr. Meredith, the project has been an amazing adventure.

“The whole complex story is astonishing to me.” he said. “And I’ve been part of it since 1994. One finding just leads to another unexpected finding.”

From Bonn to Vienna, in Search of Beethoven, the Man
It’s the composer’s 250th birthday, and a pilgrimage shines new light on his art and life.
Feb. 24, 2020

A correction was made on March 22, 2023:  An earlier version of this article misstated how many locks of hair in a study were inauthentic. One was inauthentic, not two. The article also misstated how many had identical DNA. Five had identical DNA, not four.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.

Gina Kolata writes about science and medicine. She has twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is the author of six books, including “Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and The Science That Saved Them.” @ginakolata • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Baring Beethoven’s Secrets With Snips of DNA