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      DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Medical and Family Secrets

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      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.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.The paper, by an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday 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 Hiller lock, which the study found did not come from Beethoven but a woman, with its inscription by its former owner, Paul Hiller.William Meredith/Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State UniversityThe 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. 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.Lab work on the Moscheles lock at the University of Tübingen in Germany.Susanna SabinAs 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.The Stumpff lock, from which Beethoven’s whole genome was sequenced, with an inscription by its former owner Patrick Stirling.Kevin BrownArthur 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.“It could ultimately lead someone to die of liver failure,” he said.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.An 1827 lithograph of Beethoven on his deathbed by Josef Danhauser, after his own drawing.Josef Danhauser, via Beethoven-Haus BonnThe 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.” More

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      The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen

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      Listen to This ArticleAs soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew the ice had been singing all summer.Several months earlier, Sharp — at that point, in 2009, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades — had burrowed a cache of microphones into the Devon Ice Cap, a frozen mass in far northern Canada the size of Connecticut. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of the melting ice atop the cap, while several seismic monitors sensed how the ice moved along the Earth, too. Almost as an afterthought, Sharp set up a little Sony hand-held recorder, hoping it might capture the essence of the frigid stillness where he often worked.The result teemed with surprises: A snow bunting perched on the rig and sang. Gulls circled above. And below, as deep ice gradually thawed, an unexpected symphony unspooled. Water trickled past the microphone, creating a vertiginous drone, while tiny bubbles — air trapped inside the ice, perhaps for centuries — exploded incessantly, creating an allegro of snaps and pops that conjured the electronic productions of Autechre and Aphex Twin. Sharp began playing a 20-minute tape during lectures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked for a copy, hoping to add sonic context to dry discussions about data and policy.“It gave people a different way into what I was talking about, other than just showing slides,” Sharp, 64, said with a chuckle by phone. “The sound conveyed what it was like to be there.”Between 1990 and 1993, Thomas Köner made a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked.Erinn SpringerIn recent years, the assorted and unexpected sounds of ice have periodically gone viral — the laserlike phenomenon of someone skating across thin ice, the shootout sensation of ice being dropped into a frozen hole, the meditative sighs of ice forming and popping inside a Swedish lake. But several scientists and musicians believe it all could have power beyond being mere online curios. Recordings of melting ice, splintering glaciers and cascading runoff could help predict the rate of climate change and sea-level rise; music made with such sounds, some hope, could lead listeners to rethink their relationship to nature. If more people can actually hear climate change through the once-unknown songs of failing ice, can they be inspired to help prevent it?“I’m privileged that I can go somewhere and study these glaciers, but what about people who have to use their imaginations?” asked Grant Deane, 61, a longtime researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego.Since 2009, he has plotted methods to use recordings of melting ice and calving glaciers — chunks splitting from the monolith’s edge above or below water — to document and predict the rate of loss and concomitant rise of sea levels. The planet is in a constant state of flux, of course, so melting ice and calving glaciers are natural processes, with changing seasons or epochs. But the glaciers Deane studies are receding at a rapid rate he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes it’s possible to hear that acceleration. He aims to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coast to chart the attrition of the island’s gargantuan ice sheet through sound.Such science, he warned, held only so much possible public sway. “When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” continued Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by the Canadian artist Mia Feuer. “How can people care about that when they’re dealing with immediate problems? Music can make those connections.”“These recordings may not be scientifically sound,” said the Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, “but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Erinn SpringerFOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been at the forefront of transforming her straightforward recordings of glaciers and the land and water surrounding them into emotional records, poignant musical postcards from melting and cracking masses of ice. During a 2006 family vacation in Iceland, Winderen dipped a hydrophone — a sealed microphone that detects pressure changes underwater — under a glacier’s edge. She shushed her daughters, sloshing in nearby mud, so she could tease out the source of some plangent rumble.“It sounded like a loud engine, so I started looking for a tractor,” Winderen, 57, said recently, speaking by video in her studio from her family’s farm outside Oslo. “But I realized for the first time that the glacier is gliding — really, really slowly — on this water underneath sediments. And the sound has presence, like a creature. I totally fell in love.”A former aspiring marine biologist whose mother was an early member of the Norwegian environmental advocacy group Future in Our Hands, Winderen soon realized the transformative capabilities of such sounds. A photo of an iceberg, she recognized, was gorgeous; the brutal noise it made while breaking free from a glacier, however, could be harrowing. Even fusillades of tiny pops from escaping air proved evocative, as the frozen world gave way to heat. “People could close their eyes and be there with the ice, be present,” she said. “It wasn’t like I had just recorded something and brought it there.”Every time Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside. But she has never hoped to be a mere stenographer, simply playing back what she heard while suspended precariously in glacial crevasses or trying not to capsize off the coast of Greenland after icebergs hit the water. She processes raw recordings, turning them into extended collages. Her albums — particularly “Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin — unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas.“I am not archiving that sound or this sound — that’s not interesting to me,” Winderen said. “It’s more interesting to be out there and listen, to figure out what’s happening and have an awareness of how much we don’t know.”For the veteran Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, it took an unprecedented Antarctic blizzard to accept the political potential of ice’s songs. Samartzis first visited the continent, through an arts fellowship in 2010, to map the acoustic environment of the Davis research station, one of Australia’s three outposts there. How, he wondered, did existence sound at this end of the earth?“I tried to render the experiences as authentically as possible,” Samartzis, 60, said by video during vacation in New Zealand. “So you have very detailed forensic recordings of the station — without wind, which I was very adept at removing.”But, as Samartzis admitted with a grin, bowdlerizing wind from the breeziest place in the world wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, he intended to focus on wind itself, to log the ways it pulverized the place. He got his chance, during the strongest summertime blizzard ever witnessed there. As ice and snow pelted eight microphone stations through the 36-hour storm, the timbre of his work began shifting.Though Samartzis often talked with wonder about the way the Antarctic ice would “sing,” how dynamic and curious it always seemed, the roar he’d chronicled was terrifying, a bewildering testament to climate change’s ferocity. His “Atmospheres and Disturbances,” out in March, fastidiously presents the sounds of melting permafrost, contracting glaciers and human activity that seems to exacerbate both at a research outpost more than two miles above sea level in the Swiss Alps. Hearing the disappearance is haunting and hair-raising, like watching a television show about hunting ghosts.“When I talk to scientists about climate change, everyone’s all talked out. Essentially everyone knows, so it’s, ‘Why should I listen to you and your report?’” Samartzis said. “These recordings may not be scientifically sound, but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Still, at least one pioneer of portraying ice through music worries that all this work arrives too late — and that simply capturing these songs of surrender and playing them back through loudspeakers can never get to ice’s might or grandeur. More than three decades ago, the young German producer Thomas Köner sat at the foot of a Norwegian glacier and marveled as fog rose and fell above it, like enormous frozen lungs breathing deliberately.Between 1990 and 1993, Köner, who uses they/them pronouns, funneled such observations into a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked. But Köner believes that “Novaya Zemlya” — their 2012 album inspired in part by the glaciers of the Arctic archipelago of the same name — may be their final ice work. The Soviet Union tested the largest-ever atomic bomb there in 1961; for Köner, it represents humanity’s true relationship to nature.“This was the end of, if not the love affair, the loved object — the idea of this pristine world of ice,” Köner, 57, said by phone from an artist residency in Serbia. “It is very sad, like you lost somebody. But you keep going on.”Such presiding melancholy has motivated Eliza Bozek, 30, and a cadre of other young musicians to get to glaciers now, not later. An acolyte of the emotionally textured work of Winderen and Chris Watson (a prolific sound artist partly responsible for David Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet”), Bozek thinks that allowing people to hear ice creates an opportunity for awareness and, just maybe, altered behavior.“They’re beautiful, but there’s a slow violence to the sounds, too,” said Bozek, who makes music under the name moltamole, from her Copenhagen apartment. “The sounds are political statements that are not available to our ears unless they’re recorded. They create space for empathy.”Every time Jana Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside.Erinn SpringerLATE LAST YEAR, Sharp’s 2009 recording atop the Devon Ice Cap, the one he played during lectures, enjoyed an unexpected reprise on an album called, simply, “Ice Records.” The London artist and filmmaker Susan Schuppli first encountered Sharp while making a documentary about the Canadian Ice Core Lab, where more than 1,300 samples pulled from glaciers shape a portrait of Earth’s climate history. He was the archive’s first director.Schuppli wove a portion of Sharp’s file into a 24-minute collage of ice recordings she and other researchers had made around the world by climbing into crevasses or sticking hydrophones beneath a glacier’s watery lips. The snippets are loud and vibrant, almost ecstatic, an atmosphere of ice offered with an exclamation mark. “I didn’t want to treat it as a mute witness,” Schuppli said by video from her home in London. “That sound gives us access to its change almost in real-time.”Toward the middle of “Ice Records,” as meltwater gurgles beneath India’s enormous Drang-Drung Glacier, several women laugh. In the village of Akshow, they’d depended on that water their entire lives; as the melting accelerates, however, they may be threatened by “outburst floods,” when the water overruns whatever reservoir previously held it. But these women had never visited Drang-Drung, let alone listened to it. Schuppli led them up the ice and handed them headphones, so they might hear it morph beneath their feet.“It was not about mourning this glacier but trying to understand what was going on,” Schuppli said. “How does science produce hospitality, so it’s not just scientists saying why their work is important? These women were enthralled. They didn’t want to stop listening.”Audio produced by More

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      Sandra Trehub, Pioneer in the Psychology of Music, Dies at 84

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      She showed that basic musical ability is present in infants across cultures, laying a foundation for a growing field of study.Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social development, died on Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.Over a half-century as a psychologist at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Dr. Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview. “Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music — what is its purpose? Why do we do this?”Dr. Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universally shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures.She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further established that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice differences in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguish discrepancies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.“Sandra was the first psychologist to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Dr. Trehub, she added, many researchers thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.”It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmental tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental development.“Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, said by email.Dr. Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.Sandra Edythe Trehub was born on May 21, 1938, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and her master’s in psychology there in 1971.After completing her doctorate, also at McGill, she began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as one month old could distinguish between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced.Using the same methodology, Dr. Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguish between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramifications in education.As Dr. Trehub earned tenure at the University of Toronto, her work shifted from speech to music. She published prolifically in journals, including two influential papers in 1977. One showed that the heart rates of five-month-old infants changed when exposed to different rhythms. The other showed that infants can sense the relationships between notes — they can tell when the same melody is transposed to a different key. Dr. Trehub’s research was inspired in part by her own love of music; two of her favorite singers were Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.Dr. Trehub’s marriage to Norman Cohen in 1957 ended in divorce in 1968. She married Ronald Matthews in 1970; he died in 2007. In addition to her son Andrew, she is survived by two more children, Dana and Ira Cohen; her sisters, Estelle Ebert and Maxine Seidman; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.She also leaves an intellectual lineage of psychologists who studied with her and went on to head some of the most active psychology of music labs in the world.Dr. Trainor, one of Dr. Trehub’s early graduate students, remembered going to talks on the psychology of music in the 1980s and ’90s with little more than 10 people in the audience. Now there are conferences with thousands of researchers.“Part of that is a testament to Sandra, and the quality of her work — she couldn’t be ignored,” said Dr. Trainor.Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who wrote more than 30 articles with Dr. Trehub, agreed. “She was like Joni Mitchell,” he said by phone. “In the end, she really got every credit that she deserved.” More

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      A Music Historian Takes a Top Job at the New York Public Library

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      Brent Reidy, the new director of Research Libraries, said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old library by reaching a younger generation.The New York Public Library on Thursday named Brent Reidy as director of its Research Libraries, putting the 40-year-old music historian at the helm of four vast public research centers whose holdings encompass 17th-century Shakespeare folios and sheet music belonging to Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie and Mozart.Reidy, who has been serving as interim director since William P. Kelly retired in April, will preside over the collection, acquisition and preservation strategies at the Research Libraries, which have a budget of $145 million and welcome four million visitors a year. The position gives him an outsized voice on the direction of national humanities research.An amateur jazz pianist who unwinds by playing John Coltrane, Reidy said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old institution by appealing to a new generation of library goers. Among his priorities, he said, is the continued digitization of the Research Libraries’ holdings, which has become even more imperative during the coronavirus pandemic as users gravitated online. Attendance at the Research Libraries was 30 percent below the average attendance before the pandemic and had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, he added, a challenge facing cultural institutions across the country.“I want people to realize that you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. to have access to our collections — you just need a library card,” he said in an interview.Reidy has been an ardent supporter of federal funding for the arts. During the Trump administration, he criticized its attempt to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, citing former President John F. Kennedy’s assertion that artistic freedom was essential to nourish American culture.Reidy will be responsible for four public research centers — the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center — which collectively have 47 million items in their collections. Among their treasures are Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; an original Gutenberg Bible from 1455; an unpublished chapter from Malcolm X’s autobiography and an extensive James Baldwin archive.Among the treasures at the library’s research centers is Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.Robert Kato/New York Public LibraryReidy studied music at Dartmouth College before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from Indiana University, where he explored national cultural policy under the Kennedy administration, the subject of an upcoming book. Every week, he makes a pilgrimage to the library’s collection of manuscripts and scores belonging to John Cage, the eminent American composer of Minimalist music. “It helps me to de-stress,” he said.A native of Scotia, a village in Schenectady County, N.Y., Reidy said his passion for libraries and books was first ignited as a boy when he would go to the Schenectady County Public Library. With the encouragement of his father, he recalled that he bought about 1,200 LPs from the library, including classical and jazz albums, which he cataloged in the basement of his childhood home. More

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      The Long, Long Wait for a Diabetes Cure

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      In the three decades since she was first diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, Lisa Hepner has clung to a vague promise she often heard from doctors convinced medical science was on the cusp of making her body whole again. “Stay strong,” they would say. “A cure is just five years away.”But the cure has yet to arrive, and Ms. Hepner, 51, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, remains hobbled by her body’s inability to make insulin, the sugar-regulating hormone produced by the pancreas. “I might look fine to you,” she said, “but I feel crappy 70 percent of the time.”Staying healthy can be exhausting for many of the 37 million Americans with some form of diabetes. There’s the round-the-clock monitoring of sugar levels; the constant, life-sustaining insulin injections; and the potential threats from diabetes’ diabolical complications: heart disease, blindness, kidney damage and the possibility of losing a gangrenous limb to amputation.“‘The cure is five years away’ has become a joke in the diabetes community,” Ms. Hepner said. “If it’s so close, then what’s taking so long? And in the meantime, millions of us have died.”That attenuated sense of hope drove Ms. Hepner to spend nearly a decade following the fortunes of ViaCyte, a small San Diego biotech company working to create what would essentially be an artificial pancreas. If successful, its stem-cell-derived therapy would eliminate the pin-pricks and insulin injections that circumscribe the lives of the 1.5 million Americans with Type 1 diabetes. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a Boston biotech company developing a similar therapy, has already made significant headway.Since its theatrical debut in June, “The Human Trial,” the documentary she produced with her husband, Guy Mossman, has electrified the diabetes community, especially those with Type 1, a disease that the uninitiated often conflate with the more common Type 2.Unlike Type 2, which tends to emerge slowly in adulthood and can sometimes be reversed early on with exercise and dietary changes, Type 1 is an autoimmune disease that often strikes without warning in childhood or adolescence.Type 1 is also far less prevalent, affecting roughly 10 percent of those with diabetes. A pancreas transplant can cure the disease, but donated organs are in short supply and the surgery carries substantial risks. In most years, only a thousand transplants are done in the United States. To ensure the body does not reject the implanted pancreas, recipients must take immunosuppressant drugs all their lives, making them more susceptible to infections.Maren Badger, one of the first patients to have experimental cell colonies implanted under her skin, in a scene from the film.AbramoramaTherapies developed from human embryonic stem cells, many experts say, offer the best hope for a lasting cure. “The Human Trial” offers a rare glimpse into the complexities and challenges of developing new therapies — both for the patients who volunteer for the grueling clinical trials required by the Food and Drug Administration, and for the ViaCyte executives constantly scrambling to raise the money needed to bring a new drug to market. These days, the average cost, including the many failed trials along the way, is a billion dollars.At a time when the soaring price of insulin and other life-sustaining drugs has tarnished public perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry, the film is also noteworthy for its admiring portrayal of a biotech company whose executives and employees appear genuinely committed to helping humanity. (Limiting the cost of insulin remains politically volatile. On Sunday, during a marathon vote on the Democrats’ climate and health bill, Republicans forced the removal of a provision with a $35 cap on insulin prices for patients with private insurance, though the cap remained in place for Medicare patients.)“The Human Trial,” which can also be viewed online, has become a rallying cry for Type 1 patients, many of whom believe only greater visibility can unleash the research dollars needed to find a cure.Those who have seen the film have also been fortified by seeing their own struggles and dashed hopes reflected in the journeys of the film’s two main subjects, Greg Romero and Maren Badger, who became among the first patients to have the experimental cell pouches implanted under their skin.The despair that drives them to become human guinea pigs can be hard to watch. Mr. Romero — whose father also had the disease, went blind before he was 30 and then died prematurely — confronts his own failing vision while grappling with the pain of diabetes-related nerve damage. “I hate insulin needles, I hate the smell of insulin. I just want this disease to go away,” Mr. Romero, 48, says numbly at one point in the film.Type 1 can leave patients feeling alienated and alone, in part because of flawed assumptions about the disease. Tim Hone, 30, a medical writer in New York who has been living with Type 1 since he was 15, said friends and acquaintances sometimes suggested that he was responsible for causing his illness. “I’ve had people scold me and say that if I went on a diet and stopped eating Snickers bars I could reverse my disease,” Mr. Hone said.The stigma often drives people with Type 1 to hide the disease. In his quest to feel “normal” at college, Todd Boudreaux said, he avoided telling friends about his illness, a decision that could have had dangerous ramifications in the event of a seizure brought on by low blood sugar levels.Greg Romero, one of the subjects in the documentary. “I hate insulin needles, I hate the smell of insulin. I just want this disease to go away,” he said.Abramorama“I didn’t want to be defined by my illness, and I didn’t want to be seen as weak, but having Type 1 does make you different and it’s important that everyone around knows so they can help if you have severe low blood sugar,” said Mr. Boudreaux, 35, who lives in Monterey, Calif., and works for the nonprofit group Beyond Type 1.Ms. Hepner, too, has spent much of her life downplaying the disease, even with her husband, Mr. Mossman. She recalled his confusion early in their relationship when he awoke to find her discombobulated and drenched in sweat, the result of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. The more Mr. Mossman, a cinematographer, learned about the disease, the more he pressed her to make the film.For years, Ms. Hepner stood her ground, worried about drawing unwanted attention to her health. “It’s a competitive world out there and I just didn’t want people to think, ‘Oh, she’s not thinking straight because her blood sugar is high,’” she said.But over time, the ubiquity of pink-ribbon breast cancer awareness campaigns and highly publicized efforts to cure Alzheimer’s made Ms. Hepner realize her filmmaking skills could change public perceptions of Type 1, a disease that is nearly invisible, in part because many people who have it do not look sick.She hopes to change other misperceptions, including the notion that diabetes is a relatively inconsequential and “manageable” illness, one that has been popularized by Big Pharma’s feel-good drug television commercials that feature self-assured patients playing tennis and basketball and piloting hot air balloons.In fact, the industry spends a fraction of its research dollars on finding a cure, with the rest directed toward developing medications and devices that make it easier to live with the disease, according to the Juvenile Diabetes Cure Alliance.The payoff from those investments is undeniable. For those who can afford them, continuous glucose-monitoring devices can obviate the need for self-administered finger-prick testing, and the machines can be paired with iPhone-size insulin pumps that eliminate much of the guesswork over dosing.Ms. Hepner with her son Jack in a scene from the film. “We need to stop trying to normalize this disease because, let’s face it, having diabetes isn’t normal,” she said.AbramoramaMs. Hepner has profound appreciation for the wonders of insulin: At one point in the film she pays homage to its inventor, Frederick Banting, during a visit to his home in Canada. But she notes that insulin-dependent diabetes is no picnic. Many people without insurance cannot afford the thousands of dollars it costs annually for the drug, forcing some to skimp and ration. And a miscalculated or ill-timed dose can lead to seizures, unconsciousness and even death. Even with all the advances in care, only about 20 percent of adults with Type 1 are able to maintain healthy blood sugar levels, according to a 2019 study. On one occasion, Ms. Hepner woke up in the I.C.U. after her insulin pump failed.“We need to stop trying to normalize this disease because, let’s face it, having diabetes isn’t normal,” she said. “It’s the other pandemic, one that killed 6.7 million people last year around the world.”Despite her frustrations, it would be inaccurate to describe Mr. Hepner and her film as pessimistic. At the risk of giving away too much, “The Human Trial” ends on a hopeful note. And despite a number of near-brushes with bankruptcy, ViaCyte succeeded in gaining the funding to keep the laboratory lights burning.Then there is more recent news that did not make it into the film. Last month, ViaCyte was acquired by Vertex, the competing biotech company that has been developing its own stem-cell treatment. That treatment has shown early success, and last year the company announced that a retired postal worker who took part in clinical trials had been cured of Type 1 diabetes.After almost a lifetime of hearing a cure was just around the corner, Dr. Aaron Kowalski, chief executive of the JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), the world’s biggest funder of Type 1 research, counts himself as an optimist. A dozen more drug companies are pursuing a cure than a decade ago, he said, and the organization this year plans to spend $100 million on cure research. “It’s not a matter of if this will happen, it’s a matter of when,” said Dr. Kowalski, who is a scientist and has had the disease since childhood, as has a younger brother. “Our job is to make sure it happens faster.”Until that day, he added, people with diabetes, both Type 1 and Type 2, could use a little empathy and understanding. More

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      in Music

      Tree Rings Shed Light on a Stradivarius Mystery

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      Analyses of 17th-century stringed instruments suggest that a young Antonio Stradivari might have apprenticed with a particular craftsman.History is revealed in tree rings. They have been used to determine the ages of historical buildings as well as when Vikings first arrived in the Americas. Now, tree rings have shed light on a longstanding mystery in the rarefied world of multimillion-dollar musical instruments.By analyzing the wood of two 17th-century stringed instruments, a team of researchers has uncovered evidence of how Antonio Stradivari might have honed his craft, developing the skills used in the creation of the rare, namesake Stradivarius violins.Mauro Bernabei, a dendrochronologist at the Italian National Research Council in San Michele all’Adige, and his colleagues published their results last month in the journal Dendrochronologia, and their findings are consistent with the young Stradivari apprenticing with Nicola Amati, a master luthier roughly 40 years his senior. Such a link between the two acclaimed craftsmen has long been hypothesized.In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Stradivari created stringed instruments renowned for their craftsmanship and superior sound. “Stradivari is generally regarded as the best violin maker who ever lived,” said Kevin Kelly, a violin maker in Boston who has handled dozens of Stradivarius instruments.Only about 600 of Stradivari’s masterpieces survive today, all prized by collectors and performers alike. A Stradivarius violin currently on the auction block — the first such sale in decades — is predicted to fetch up to $20 million.An 18th-century depiction of Antonio Stradivari, the Italian crafter of instruments.World History Archive/AlamyStradivari likely learned his craft by apprenticing with an older mentor, as was customary at the time. That could have been Amati, who, by the mid-17th century, was well established and also living in Cremona, a city in what is now Italy.“Some people assume that because Stradivari was Cremonese and he was such a great violin maker, he must have apprenticed with Amati,” said Mr. Kelly, who was not involved in the new study.But evidence of a link between Stradivari and Amati has remained stubbornly tenuous: One violin made by Stradivari bears a label reading “Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonensis Alumnus Nicolaij Amati, Faciebat Anno 1666.” That wording implies that Stradivari was a pupil of Amati, said Mr. Kelly, but it was the only label like it that has surfaced.With the goal of shedding on this musical mystery, Dr. Bernabei and his team visited the Museum of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and analyzed the wood of a small harp made by Stradivari in 1681. Using a digital camera, the researchers precisely measured the widths of 157 tree rings visible on the instrument’s spruce soundboard.A small harp by Stradivari from 1681.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesThe pattern created by plotting the width of tree rings, one after the other, is like a fingerprint. This is because the amount that a trees grows each year depends on the weather, water conditions and a slew of other factors, Dr. Bernabei said. “Plants record very accurately what happens in their surroundings.”The researchers compared their measurements from the Stradivari harp with other tree ring sequences measured from stringed instruments. Out of more than 600 records, one stood out for being astonishingly similar: a spruce soundboard from a cello made by Nicola Amati in 1679. “All the maximum and minimum values are coincident,” Dr. Bernabei said. “It’s like somebody split a trunk in two different parts.”The same wood was indeed used to make the Stradivari harp and the Amati cello, Dr. Bernabei and his colleagues suggest. This was consistent with the two craftsmen sharing a workshop, with the elder Amati possibly mentoring the younger Stradivari, the team concluded.Perhaps that is true, said Mr. Kelly, but it is not the only possibility. Instead, Mr. Amati and Stradivari might simply have purchased wood from the same person, he said. After all, luthiers in 17th-and 18th-century Cremona belonged to a small community, said Mr. Kelly. “They basically all lived on the same street.” More

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      in Music

      You Hear the Musical Saw. These Mathematicians Heard Geometry.

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      A scientist who has studied falling playing cards, coiling rope and other phenomena has now analyzed what transforms a carpenter’s tool into a sonorous instrument.Early in the 19th century, an unknown musician somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains discovered that a steel handsaw, a tool previously used only for cutting wood, could also be used to produce full and sustained musical notes. The idea had undoubtedly occurred to many a musically-inclined carpenter at other times in other places.The key is that the saw must be bent in a shallow S-shape. Leaving it flat, or bending it in a J- or U-shape, will not do. And to resonate, it must be bowed at exactly the right sweet spot along the length of the saw. Bowed at any other point, the instrument reverts to being a useful, but unmusical, hand tool.The seated musician grips the handle of the saw between her legs, and holds the tip with either her fingers or a device called an end clamp, or “saw cheat.” She bends the saw into a shallow S-shape, and then draws the bow across the sweet spot at a 90-degree angle with the blade. The saw is then bent, changing the shape of the S to lower or raise the pitch, but always maintaining the S-shape, and always bowed at the moving sweet spot of the curve. The longer the saw, the greater the range of notes it can produce.Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help explain, mathematically, its beautiful sounds. The report was published April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Studying musical saws may seem an odd choice for a Harvard professor of mathematics, but Dr. Mahadevan’s interests are broad. He has published scientific papers explaining falling playing cards, tightrope walking, coiling rope, and how wet paper curls, among other phenomena that may appear at first glance unlikely subjects for mathematical analysis. In such a list, the musical saw seems no more than a logical next step.To understand the musical saw, imagine an S lying on its side, a line drawn through its center, positive above the line and negative below it. At the center of the S, he explained, the curvature switches its sign from negative to positive.“A simple change from a J- to an S-shape dramatically transforms the acoustic properties of the saw,” Dr. Mahadevan said, “and we can prove mathematically, show computationally, and finally hear experientially that the vibrations that produce the sound are localized to a zone where the curvature is almost zero.”That single location of sign-changing, he said, gives the saw a robust ability to sustain a note. The tone slightly resembles that of a violin and other bowed instruments, and some have compared it to the voice of a soprano singing without words.Dr. Mahadevan acknowledges that while he set out to understand the musical saw in mathematical terms, “Musicians have of course known this experientially for a long time, and scientists are only now beginning to understand why the saw can sing.”But he thinks research into the musical saw may also help scientists better understand other very thin devices.“The saw is a thin sheet,” he said, “and its thickness is very small compared to its other dimensions. The same phenomena can arise in a multitude of different systems, and might help design very high quality oscillators on small scales, and even perhaps with atomically thin materials such as sheets of graphene.” That could even be useful in perfecting devices that use oscillators, such as computers, watches, radios and metal detectors.For Natalia Paruz, a professional sawist who has played with orchestras worldwide, the mathematical details may be less significant than the quality of her saws. She began by playing her landlady’s saw when it wasn’t being used for other purposes. But now she uses saws specifically designed and manufactured to be used as musical instruments.There are several American companies that make them, and there are manufacturers in Sweden, England, France and Germany. Ms. Paruz said that while any flexible saw can be used to produce music, a thicker saw produces a “meatier, deeper, prettier” sound.But that pure tone, whatever its mathematical explanation, comes at a cost. “A thick blade,” she said, “is harder to bend.” More

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      in Theater

      The Shakespearean Tall Tale That Shaped How We See Starlings

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      Researchers debunked a long-repeated yarn that the common birds owe their North American beginnings to a 19th-century lover of the Bard. Maybe this ubiquitous bird’s story is ready for a reboot.In 1890, a mustachioed eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin released a few dozen European starlings into New York City. His supposed goal? Introduce all the bird species mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays to America.More than a century later, the European starling is one of the most plentiful bird species in North America. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit this continent, from Alaska and Newfoundland all the way to Mexico. The animals are gorgeous, with polka-dot feather patterns and a purply-green sheen. They fill the skies in great numbers, flying in synchronized patterns called murmurations.But they are also considered a pest, said to spread disease to livestock and cause $800 million worth of agricultural damage each year. The species is believed to take over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Add it all up, and it makes one heck of a story about how even the tiniest of actions can trigger profound consequences. The butterfly effect, there for all to see in every roadside murmuration. A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and around 130 years later, a woodpecker loses its nest and a dairy farmer loses their livelihood.“If true, it would suggest that a long-dead dramatist totally reshaped the ecosystem of a foreign continent, which is a fascinating connection between literature and science,” said John MacNeill Miller, an assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.However, Dr. MacNeill and a Lauren Fugate, a student who worked with him, recently concluded that crucial parts of the story are not true. And that made them wonder: What else have scientists and naturalists gotten wrong about the European starling’s narrative? Is there more to this bird known mostly as an invasive pest?The Bird and the Bard-LoverThree starlings collected in Central Park, including, from left, two juveniles collected in 1892 and an adult collected in 1890, in the American Museum of Natural History’s historical collection.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeathers of one of the European starling study skins from 1890. The museum’s starling collection includes specimens from their native, as well as introduced, range.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller has long been fascinated by the tale of Eugene Schieffelin. But there was a problem with the narrative.“In all the places that I had seen this story before,” he said, “I never saw a single reliable source from the time period when this supposedly happened.”So he and Ms. Fugate, started digging through archives and databases for any link between the Bard-lover and the bird. According to their findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Humanities in November, Schieffelin did release 40 pairs of European starlings into New York City twice in the springs of 1890 and 1891. But Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller failed to find evidence that Schieffelin was the Shakespeare superfan he has been made out to be.They found in an essay collection published in 1948 that Edwin Way Teale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nature writer, was the first to link the two. He referred to Schieffelin’s “curious hobby” of introducing “all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”Determined to find the source for Teale’s claim, Dr. Miller drove to the University of Connecticut to sort through a collection of Teale’s archives. (He died in 1980.) In a draft of the essay, Teale muses that perhaps Schieffelin had been influenced by a Shakespeare garden being started in Central Park around the same time — a botanical homage to the Bard that sought to nurture plants, not birds, mentioned in his plays.However, Teale got the timing wrong. The Shakespeare Garden — which you can still visit today — wasn’t planned until a decade after Schieffelin’s death, or 22 years after he first released starlings. Therefore, the garden could not have been a factor. The final version of the essay omitted the mention of the garden but left the connection between Schieffelin and Shakespeare. This statement of fact has since been repeated again and again without challenge in magazines, newspapers of record and birding websites.Several starlings in Fort Tryon park.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“Long story short, we concluded that this commonplace story is mostly fictional,” Dr. Miller said.Dr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also question whether today’s birds are uniquely descended from Schieffelin’s flocks, as is often parroted. Numerous records exist of earlier European starling introductions, starting in 1872, to locations including New York City, Ohio and even as far away as Oregon. Such releases were part of a movement at the time known as “acclimatization” where people deliberately experimented with transplanting species into new areas, either to see how they would adapt or because those species were seen as beneficial in some way.Some tellings of the Schieffelin starling origin story note these earlier introductions but suggest that those birds failed to survive. However, wild starlings were caught in Massachusetts in 1876, far from any of the documented introductions. Likewise, there is a record of wild starlings in New Jersey in 1884. And who knows how many birds truly survived in nature beyond human notice, the researchers argue.“From the perspective of an invasion biologist, most invasions come from multiple introductions,” said Natalie Hofmeister, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University.In 2019, Ms. Hofmeister published a study in the journal Molecular Ecology of the European starling’s genetic variation across North America. If all the birds came from Schieffelin’s small flock, then you’d expect to see a tight genetic bottleneck in the data. Likewise, if the other, earlier introductions had been successful, that should have injected more diversity into the results. But her findings landed somewhere in between.“It does seem like there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether or not the New York birds were really the beginning of the starlings’ expansion,” said Ms. Hofmeister, who has a follow-up study in the works.Hell Is Empty and All the Starlings Are HereA scavenging starling near the southwest entrance to Central Park. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit North America — they are one of the most plentiful bird species on the continent.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also take issue with the depiction of starlings as biological terrors. As evidence, they point to a well-regarded study from 2003 that found out of 27 native cavity-nesting birds, only one showed hints of decline that might be attributed to the introduction of starlings: the small woodpeckers known as yellow-bellied sapsuckers.Nicole Michel, director of quantitative science for the National Audubon Society, sees it differently. It’s her job to drill down into bird population data. And she says looking for declines as a result of any one variable sets “too high of a bar.”“There are many factors out there that we know are impacting birds — cats, building collisions, pesticides,” she said. “And yet it’s very difficult to determine population level impacts.”She added: “So do starlings affect other birds? Definitely. Are they the only ones that affect other birds? No.”Nearly three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. The European starlings here are counted among them, actually, with an estimated decline of 49 percent over the same time frame. (Starlings are also “declining rapidly” in Europe.)Even on the downswing, with about 85 million animals, starlings are bound to create an impact. The more likely scenario is that scientists don’t know enough to see the effects of starlings, said Daniel Simberloff, a biologist at the University of Tennessee.“We have no idea what its real impact is on insect populations, for example,” said Dr. Simberloff, who is also the editor of the journal Biological Invasions. Nor do scientists know much about more subtle but no less important impacts, such as the way starlings may affect how nutrients cycle through an ecosystem, he said.Anti-perching spikes are used to discourage birds, including starlings, from resting near the runways and taxiways at LaGuardia Airport.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesStarlings are believed to threaten native birds by taking over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesOne factor that’s not subtle is the way European starlings descend on feedlots and dairy farms by the tens to hundreds of thousands. Starlings usually eat insects during the winter, but when livestock feed is available, they’ll pick through it for steam-flaked corn, which is higher in protein and fiber than other parts of the feed. And when that many birds are taking the M&Ms out of the trail mix, so to speak, it can affect growth and milk production in cows and cost dairy farmers millions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.The birds are also suspected of transmitting diseases to livestock, though proving how this happens exactly has been as slippery as deciphering the impacts on native birds. While feedlots with more starlings had higher incidences of antibiotic resistant E. coli, killing more than 70 percent of the starling flock did not change how much E. coli the cows had. It’s also unclear if starlings are bringing microbes into the feedlots or simply spreading microbes that are already there.A research economist for the U.S.D.A.’s National Wildlife Research Center, Stephanie Shwiff has seen how starlings congregate at dairy lots firsthand and, she said, it is “impressive.” But as she tallies up losses to the agricultural sector, she sees no redemptive arc for these birds — only financial harm.“A lot of producers know exactly the damage that the birds are doing, but they have this overwhelming sense that it’s just the cost of doing business,” Dr. Shwiff said. She said blueberry farmers and wine grape vineyards also get slammed: “They have an almost defeated attitude.”To help farmers and livestock owners, the U.S.D.A.’s Wildlife Services program helps disperse, relocate or eradicate starlings. In 2020 alone, the program shooed away nearly eight million European starlings, and killed another 790,128 of them. A vast majority of these animals were killed with a poison invented specifically for them called DRC-1339, or Starlicide.Starlings and Arrows of Outrageous FortuneJoan Berry Hale of Stockbridge, Ga., a survivor of a 1960 Eastern Airlines plane crash that was the result of a bird strike.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhile starlings’ impact on native birds is still debated, no one can question the effect they’ve had on American aviation. Just ask Joan Berry Hale.On Oct. 4, 1960, Ms. Hale was working as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines when the Lockheed L-188 Electra she was crewing scared a flock of starlings as it took off from Boston en route to Philadelphia.“I could see out the window in the back, and I saw all these black birds fly by,” said Ms. Hale, now 85. The plane’s propellers ingested hundreds of starlings, which disturbed the engines and forced the craft to pitch left and crash nose first into the bay. “They didn’t find the front-end crew until they pulled the nose up out of the mud the next day,” she recalled.Of the 72 people on board, only 10 survived. Most were severely injured, but Ms. Hale emerged unscathed and helped survivors exit the wreckage, put on life preservers and board rescue boats.The Electra crash remains the deadliest accident resulting from a bird strike in world history. It was also a turning point in aviation safety.“That was the crash that started it all,” said Carla Dove, program manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab, which was created in response to the Electra accident.Since its formation, the Feather Identification Lab has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to make air travel safer. Using the Smithsonian’s vast collection of feathers, Dr. Dove and other experts can take a piece of “snarge,” what they call bits of bird that have gone through a jet engine, and figure out which species it belonged to. Then, airport managers and wildlife biologists can work together to make the facilities less attractive to those species.For starlings, says Richard Dolbeer, a science adviser for the U.S.D.A.’s Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, something as simple as letting the grass grow can discourage the birds from landing. Spacing out trees also cuts down on large, communal overnight roosts that might keep the animals near an airport.This Great Breach in the Starling’s Abused NatureRyan Kronenbitter, the operations group supervisor for the team at LaGuardia Airport that helps manage wildlife.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut while starlings have caused plenty of wreckage to agriculture and aviation, the birds may have some admirable qualities that are typically overlooked.Dr. Simberloff, a pioneer in the field of invasion biology, said that it was a great tragedy that starlings had been introduced, but that some of the rhetoric around them is overblown.“You see a lot of these popular papers that talk about it as one of the great scourges of North America,” Dr. Simberloff said of starlings. “And they don’t seem to be that.”Dr. Dolbeer, who is also an ornithologist, said he had “great admiration for starlings because they are so adaptable.” He’s also fascinated by the way starlings can intermingle and even roost with native species, such as red-winged blackbirds. “It’s sort of like the analogy of America being a melting pot, with all the people coming in and gluing together,” he said.Dr. Simberloff said his daughter rescued a starling and raised it up from a chick. “It knows its name very clearly,” and will sometimes say it — Blue — when prompted, he said.There may even be reasons to further consider the birds’ ecological impact. The 2003 paper on starling dominance found three species of woodpeckers experienced population increases since the European birds arrived, although it does not make a case for causation. And Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller point to a 1915 study by U.S.D.A. scientists who concluded that starlings gobbled up fewer crops and ate more crop pests than native species.And while his research has made the Shakespearean starling legend seem well and truly dead, the question of how to view the European starling these days seems very much to depend on whom you ask.After more than 60 years, Ms. Hale thinks about the crash anytime she sees a large flock of birds. So many innocent people lost their lives, and she’ll never forget the cold bite of the water. Ultimately, she thinks she became a better person because of the accident.And while she “doesn’t care much for those pesky birds,” she also doesn’t blame the European starling. “It wasn’t their fault,” Ms. Hale said. “That’s just nature.”A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and a life changes course in the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.A starling undeterred by an anti-perching device on a lamppost at LaGuardia.Karsten Moran for The New York Times More