Mansell / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images; Courtesy of Sotheby'sLudwig van Beethoven
As Ludwig van Beethoven was dying in 1827, countless friends and relatives gathered by his bed to collect a lock of hair as a keepsake. In 1994, two fans of the great composer paid $7,300 for hair snipped by Ferdinand Hiller and it appeared to have solved a mystery—how Beethoven died. DNA testing of the strands found that Beethoven’s hair had enormously high levels of lead, suggesting that he may have suffered from lead poisoning, which could have caused his health problems, including deafness. But in 2010, a lead poisoning expert at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, refuted those claims, after going deeper and testing Beethoven’s skull.