Hummin' to the DNA

Medical Laboratory Observer, May, 2004 by Carren Bersch

Today's reality and tomorrow's revolution," said the 2004 Executive War College poster. I read materials about the event on the way to New Orleans, then spent three days immersed in all technologies molecular. Wiling away the time on the plane home, I engaged in other reading, including a piece on music and treadmills in Academic Emergency Medicine.

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Did you know that musical concerts can be injurious to human health? The musical genre with the highest likelihood of audience members having heart problems is ... classical! The highest likelihood of medical emergency? Gospel. Okay, if you insist, grunge concerts have the highest single-day record for medical emergencies. Soon, my travel-weary brain began to twirl music around molecular diagnostics.

Three years ago, one market analyst suggested products emanating from genomic research would revitalize the marketplace. Already, examination of DNA or RNA via new tests and methods can identify a disease or predisposition for a disease (music to a laboratorian's ear). Also back in 2001, estimates were that this segment of the in vitro diagnostics market would--in 10 years--garner around $5 billion (speaking of music to the ears).

Back home--and purely out of curiosity--I began searching for a real connection between music and molecular diagnostics. I found many websites devoted to music and mathematics. Countless essays over the years have cited the number symbolism in the works of Mozart and Beethoven (despite historical gossip that the latter was quite poor at arithmetic).

James Brown (the "Godfather of Soul") proclaimed, "I've outdone anyone you can name--Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin? He wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500." I think James used that "new math" to calculate his achievements.

I discovered that many of the esteemed Berkeley Carillon players are students of mathematics and statistics; engineering; biology, chemistry, and bioengineering; computer science and physics--and one carillonist is a clinical laboratory scientist in the HLA Molecular Diagnostics Lab at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.

I pondered one online essayist's questions: How are human emotions so deeply evoked by pattern, and what is the secret magic of Chopin? Music speaks to a common set of emotions in humans, another website offered. Has any one of us heard the "William Tell Overture" without a "remember when?" moment. The man who unwittingly penned the Lone Ranger's TV theme song--Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868)--was a prolific composer ("The Barber of Seville," possibly a bit meatier than "Papa's Got a Brand-New Bag"). "Give me a laundry list, and I'll set it to music," Rossini once bragged.

I dug further and finally happened upon an interesting theory from a self-described physicist and mathematician with an extra degree in psychology and genetics, who is devoted to classical music: "What is the role of our music appreciation in evolution? It is hard to see a connection between a liking for certain sequences of sounds and an organism's ability to survive, although that could be associated with the fine-tuning and efficiency of our hearing system. Other animals do not seem to possess an equivalent mathematical basis for their sound-communication systems."

Composer Carl Nielsen claimed, "Music is life and, like it, inextinguishable." So, the music is in the mitochondria; it is in our DNA.

Today's reality is that, in more ways than one, we are hummin' to the DNA, on our way to a molecular diagnostics revolution.

cbersch@nelsonpub.com