The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code

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The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code Page 25

by Sam Kean


  Now, if talents on par with Matisse or Mozart seem a trifle elaborate for getting laid, you’re right; but immodest overabundance is a trademark of sexual selection. Imagine how peacock tails evolved. Shimmering feathers made some peacocks more attractive long ago. But big, bright tails soon became normal, since genes for those traits spread in the next generations. So only males with even bigger and brighter feathers won attention. But again, as the generations passed, everyone caught up. So winning attention required even more ostentation—until things got out of hand. In the same way, turning out a perfect sonnet or carving a perfect likeness from marble (or DNA) might be we thinking apes’ equivalent of four-foot plumage, fourteen-point antlers, and throbbing-red baboon derrieres.*

  Of course, while Paganini’s talents raised him to the apex of European society, his DNA hardly made him worthy stud material: he was a mental and physical wreck. It just goes to show that people’s sexual desires can all too easily get misaligned from the utilitarian urge to pass on good genes. Sexual attraction has its own potency and power, and culture can override our deepest sexual instincts and aversions, making even genetic taboos like incest seem attractive. So attractive, in fact, that in certain circumstances, those very perversions have informed and influenced our greatest art.

  With Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, painter and chronicler of the Moulin Rouge, his art and his genetic lineage seem as tightly entwined as the strands of a double helix. Toulouse-Lautrec’s family traced its line back to Charlemagne, and the various counts of Toulouse ruled southern France as de facto kings for centuries. Though proud enough to challenge the power of popes—who excommunicated the Toulouse-Lautrecs ten separate times—the lineage also produced pious Raymond IV, who for God’s glory led a hundred thousand men during the first Crusade to pillage Constantinople and Jerusalem. By 1864, when Henri was born, the family had lost political power but still ruled vast estates, and their lives had settled into a baronial fugue of endless shooting, fishing, and boozing.

  Scheming to keep the family lands intact, the various Toulouse-Lautrecs usually married each other. But these consanguineous marriages gave harmful recessive mutations a chance to crawl out from their caves. Every human alive carries a few malignant mutations, and we survive only because we possess two copies of every gene, allowing the good copy to offset the bum one. (With most genes the body gets along just fine at 50 percent of full manufacturing capacity, or even less. Foxp2’s protein is an exception.) The odds of two random people both having a deleterious mutation in the same gene sink pretty low, but relatives with similar DNA can easily pass two copies of a flaw to their children. Henri’s parents were first cousins; his grandmothers, sisters.

  At six months, Henri weighed just ten pounds, and the soft spots on his head reportedly hadn’t closed at age four. His skull seemed swollen, too, and his stubby arms and legs attached at odd angles. Even as a teenager he walked with a cane sometimes, but it didn’t prevent him from falling, twice, and fracturing both femurs, neither of which healed soundly. Modern doctors can’t agree on the diagnosis, but all agree Toulouse-Lautrec suffered from a recessive genetic disorder that, among other pains, left his bones brittle and stunted his lower limbs. (Though he was usually listed as four eleven, estimates of his adult height ranged as low as four foot six—a man’s torso propped top-heavy onto child-size legs.) Nor was he the family’s only victim. Toulouse-Lautrec’s brother died in infancy, and his runtish cousins, also products of consanguineous marriages, had both bone deformities and seizure disorders.*

  And honestly, the Toulouse-Lautrecs escaped unscathed compared to other inbred aristocrats in Europe, like the hapless Hapsburg dynasty in seventeenth-century Spain. Like sovereigns throughout history, the Hapsburgs equated incest with bloodline “purity,” and they bedded only other Hapsburgs whose pedigrees they knew intimately. (As the saying goes: with nobility, familiarity breeds.) The Hapsburgs sat on many thrones throughout Europe, but the Iberian branch seemed especially intent on cousin lovin’—four of every five Spanish Hapsburgs married family members. In the most backward Spanish villages at the time, 20 percent of peasant babies usually died. That number rose to 30 percent among these Hapsburgs, whose mausoleums were positively stuffed with miscarriages and stillborns, and another 20 percent of their children died before age ten. The unlucky survivors often suffered—as seen in royal portraits—from the “Hapsburg lip,” a malformed and prognathous jaw that left them looking rather apish.* And the cursed lip grew worse every generation, culminating in the last Spanish Hapsburg king, pitiful Charles II.

  Charles’s mother was his father’s niece, and his aunt doubled as his grandmother. The incest in his past was so determined and sustained that Charles was slightly more inbred than a brother-sister love child would be. The results were ugly in every sense. His jaw was so misshapen he could barely chew, his tongue so bloated he could barely speak. The feebleminded monarch didn’t walk until age eight, and although he died just shy of forty, he had an honest-to-goodness dotage, full of hallucinations and convulsive episodes. Not learning their lesson, Hapsburg advisers had imported yet another cousin to marry Charles and bear him children. Mercifully, Charles often ejaculated prematurely and later fell impotent, so no heir was forthcoming, and the dynasty ceased. Charles and other Hapsburg kings had employed some of the world’s great artists to document their reigns, and not even Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez could mask that notorious lip, nor the general Hapsburg decline across Europe. Still, in an era of dubious medical records, their beautiful portraits of ugliness remain an invaluable tool to track genetic decadence and degeneracy.

  Despite his own genetic burden, Toulouse-Lautrec escaped the mental wreckage of the Hapsburgs. His wit even won him popularity among his peers—mindful of his bowed legs and limp, boyhood friends often carried him from spot to spot so he could keep playing. (Later his parents bought him an oversized tricycle.) But the boy’s father never forgave his son’s handicaps. More than anyone else, the strapping, handsome, bipolar Alphonse Toulouse-Lautrec romanticized his family’s past. He often dressed up in chain mail like Ray IV, and once lamented to an archbishop, “Ah, Monseigneur! The days are gone when the Counts of Toulouse could sodomize a monk and hang him afterwards if it pleased them.” Alphonse bothered having children only because he wanted hunting companions, and after it became clear that Henri would never tramp through a countryside with a gun, Alphonse wrote the boy out of his will.

  Instead of hunting, Toulouse-Lautrec took up another family tradition, art. Various uncles had painted with distinction as amateurs, but Henri’s interest coursed deeper. From infancy onward he was always doodling and sketching. At a funeral at age three, unable to sign his name yet, he offered to ink an ox into the guest registry instead. And when laid up with broken legs as a teenager, he began drawing and painting seriously. At age fifteen, he and his mother (also estranged from Count Alphonse) moved to Paris so Toulouse-Lautrec could earn a baccalaureate degree. But when the budding man-child found himself in the continent’s art capital, he blew off studying and fell in with a crowd of absinthe-drinking bohemian painters. His parents had encouraged his artistic ambitions before, but now their indulgence soured into disapproval over his new, dissolute life. Other family members were outraged. One reactionary uncle dug out Toulouse-Lautrec’s juvenilia left behind at the family estate and held a Savonarola-style bonfire of the vanities.

  Painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the offspring of first cousins, had a genetic disorder that stunted his growth and subtly shaped his art. He often sketched or painted from unusual points of view. (Henri Toulouse-Lautrec)

  But Toulouse-Lautrec had immersed himself in the Paris art scene, and it was then, in the 1880s, that his DNA began to shape his art. His genetic disorder had left him frankly unattractive, bodily and facially—rotting his teeth, swelling his nose, and causing his lips to flop open and drool. To make himself more appealing to women, he masked his face somewhat with a stylish beard and also, like Paganini, encourage
d certain rumors. (He allegedly earned the nickname “Tripod” for his stumpy legs and long, you know.) Still, the funny-looking “dwarf” despaired of ever winning a mistress, so he began cruising for women in the slummy Paris bars and bordellos, sometimes disappearing into them for days. And in all of noble Paris, that’s where this aristocrat found his inspiration. He encountered scores of tarts and lowlifes, but despite their low status Toulouse-Lautrec took the time to draw and paint them, and his work, even when shading comic or erotic, lent them dignity. He found something human, even noble, in dilapidated bedrooms and back rooms, and unlike his impressionist predecessors, Toulouse-Lautrec renounced sunsets, ponds, sylvan woods, all outdoor scenes. “Nature has betrayed me,” he explained, and he forswore nature in return, preferring to have cocktails at hand and women of ill repute posing in front of him.

  His DNA likely influenced the type of art he did as well. With his stubby arms, and with hands he mocked as grosses pattes (fat paws), manipulating brushes and painting for long stretches couldn’t have been easy. This may have contributed to his decision to devote so much time to posters and prints, less awkward mediums. He also sketched extensively. The Tripod wasn’t always extended in the brothels, and during his downtime, Henri whipped up thousands of fresh drawings of women in intimate or contemplative moments. What’s more, in both these sketches and his more formal portraits of the Moulin Rouge, he often took unusual points of view—drawing figures from below (a “nostril view”), or cutting their legs out of the frame (he loathed dwelling on others’ legs, given his own shortcomings), or raking scenes at upward angles, angles that someone of greater physical but lesser artistic stature might never have perceived. One model once remarked to him, “You are a genius of deformity.” He responded, “Of course I am.”

  Unfortunately, the temptations of the Moulin Rouge—casual sex, late nights, and especially “strangling the parakeet,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s euphemism for drinking himself stupid—depleted his delicate body in the 1890s. His mother tried to dry him out and had him institutionalized, but the cures never took. (Partly because Toulouse-Lautrec had a custom hollowed-out cane made, to fill with absinthe and drink from surreptitiously.) After relapsing again in 1901, Toulouse-Lautrec had a brain-blowing stroke and died from kidney failure just days later, at thirty-six. Given the painters in his glorious family line, he probably had some genes for artistic talent etched inside him; the counts of Toulouse had also bequeathed him his stunted skeleton, and given their equally notable history of dipsomania, they probably gave him genes that contributed to his alcoholism as well. As with Paganini, if Toulouse-Lautrec’s DNA made him an artist in one sense, it undid him at last.

  PART IV

  The Oracle of DNA

  Genetics in the Past, Present, and Future

  13

  The Past Is Prologue—Sometimes

  What Can (and Can’t) Genes Teach Us About Historical Heroes?

  All of them are past helping, so it’s not clear why we bother. But whether it’s Chopin (cystic fibrosis?), Dostoyevsky (epilepsy?), Poe (rabies?), Jane Austen (adult chicken pox?), Vlad the Impaler (porphyria?), or Vincent van Gogh (half the DSM), we’re incorrigible about trying to diagnose the famous dead. We persist in guessing despite a rather dubious record, in fact. Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical advice. Doctors have confidently diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.

  A gawking fascination with our heroes certainly explains some of this impulse, and it’s inspiring to hear how they overcame grave threats. There’s an undercurrent of smugness, too: we solved a mystery previous generations couldn’t. Above all, as one doctor remarked in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, “The most enjoyable aspect of retrospective diagnoses [is that] there is always room for debate and, in the face of no definitive evidence, room for new theories and claims.” Those claims often take the form of extrapolations—counterfactual sweeps that use mystery illnesses to explain the origins of masterpieces or wars. Did hemophilia bring down tsarist Russia? Did gout provoke the American Revolution? Did bug bites midwife Charles Darwin’s theories? But while our amplified knowledge of genetics makes trawling through ancient evidence all the more tempting, in practice genetics often adds to the medical and moral confusion.

  For various reasons—a fascination with the culture, a ready supply of mummies, a host of murky deaths—medical historians have pried especially into ancient Egypt and into pharaohs like Amenhotep IV. Amenhotep has been called Moses, Oedipus, and Jesus Christ rolled into one, and while his religious heresies eventually destroyed his dynasty, they also ensured its immortality, in a roundabout way. In the fourth year of his reign in the mid-1300s BC, Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten (“spirit of the sun god Aten”). This was his first step in rejecting the rich polytheism of his forefathers for a starker, more monotheistic worship. Akhenaten soon constructed a new “sun-city” to venerate Aten, and shifted Egypt’s normally nocturnal religious services to Aten’s prime afternoon hours. Akhenaten also announced the convenient discovery that he was Aten’s long-lost son. When hoi polloi began grumbling about these changes, he ordered his praetorian thugs to destroy any pictures of deities besides his supposed father, whether on public monuments or some poor family’s crockery. Akhenaten even became a grammar nazi, purging all traces of the plural hieroglyphic gods in public discourse.

  Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign witnessed equally heretical changes in art. In murals and reliefs from Akhenaten’s era, the birds, fish, game, and flowers start to look realistic for the first time. Akhenaten’s harem of artists also portrayed his royal family—including Nefertiti, his most favored wife, and Tutankhamen, his heir apparent—in shockingly mundane domestic scenes, eating meals or caressing and smooching. Yet despite the care to get most details right, the bodies themselves of the royal family members appear grotesque, even deformed. It’s all the more mysterious because servants and other less-exalted humans in these portraits still look, well, human. Pharaohs in the past had had themselves portrayed as North African Adonises, with square shoulders and dancers’ physiques. Not Akhenaten; amid the otherwise overwhelming naturalism, he, Tut, Nefertiti, and other blue bloods look downright alien.

  Archaeologists describing this royal art sound like carnival barkers. One promises you’ll “recoil from this epitome of physical repulsiveness.” Another calls Akhenaten a “humanoid praying mantis.” The catalog of freakish traits could run for pages: almond-shaped heads, squat torsos, spidery arms, chicken legs (complete with knees bending backward), Hottentot buttocks, Botox lips, concave chests, pendulous potbellies, and so on. In many pictures Akhenaten has breasts, and the only known nude statue of him has an androgynous, Ken-doll crotch. In short, these works are the anti-David, the anti– Venus de Milo, of art history.

  As with the Hapsburg portraits, some Egyptologists see the pictures as evidence of hereditary deformities in the pharaonic line. Other evidence dovetails with this idea, too. Akhenaten’s older brother died in childhood of a mysterious ailment, and a few scholars believe Akhenaten was excluded from court ceremonies when young because of physical handicaps. And in his son Tut’s tomb, amid the plunder, archaeologists discovered 130 walking canes, many showing signs of wear. Unable to resist, doctors have retroactively diagnosed these pharaohs with all sorts of ailments, like Marfan syndrome and elephantiasis. But however suggestive, each diagnosis suffered from a crippling lack of hard evidence.

  The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (seated left) had his court artists depict him and his family as bizarre, almost alien figures, leading many modern doctors to retrodiagnose Akhenaten with genetic ailments. (Andreas Praefcke)

  Enter genetics. The Egyptian government had long hesitated to let geneticists have at their most precious mummies. Boring into tissues or bones inevitably destroys small bits of them, and paleogenetics was pretty iffy at first, plagued by contamination and inconclusive
results. Only in 2007 did Egypt relent, allowing scientists to withdraw DNA from five generations of mummies, including Tut and Akhenaten. When combined with meticulous CT scans of the corpses, this genetic work helped resolve some enigmas about the era’s art and politics.

  First, the study turned up no major defects in Akhenaten or his family, which hints that the Egyptian royals looked like normal people. That means the portraits of Akhenaten—which sure don’t look normal—probably didn’t strive for verisimilitude. They were propaganda. Akhenaten apparently decided that his status as the sun god’s immortal son lifted him so far above the normal human rabble that he had to inhabit a new type of body in public portraiture. Some of Akhenaten’s strange features in the pictures (distended bellies, porcine haunches) call to mind fertility deities, so perhaps he wanted to portray himself as the womb of Egypt’s well-being as well.

  All that said, the mummies did show subtler deformities, like clubbed feet and cleft palates. And each succeeding generation had more to endure. Tut, of the fourth generation, inherited both clubfoot and a cleft palate. He also broke his femur when young, like Toulouse-Lautrec, and bones in his foot died because of poor congenital blood supply. Scientists realized why Tut suffered so when they examined his genes. Certain DNA “stutters” (repetitive stretches of bases) get passed intact from parent to child, so they offer a way to trace lineages. Unfortunately for Tut, both his parents had the same stutters—because his mom and dad had the same parents. Nefertiti may have been Akhenaten’s most celebrated wife, but for the crucial business of producing an heir, Akhenaten turned to a sister.

 

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