ASAHI SHIMBUN (Tokyo, Japan) 05 October 05 The music of the Japanese giant salamander
Susumu Ono, a gene scientist who died in the United States five years ago, was regarded as having had a streak of genius.
His research was deemed valuable enough to garner him a Nobel Prize. A man of ideas, he sometimes amazed the academic world with his unique hypotheses. One of these was "gene music."
Ono first made his hypothesis public 19 years ago. He theorized that genes determined one's sense of beauty.
He translated the structural DNA sequencing of the rainbow trout, the pig and the chicken into musical notes.
He asked his wife, Midori, now 76, to play those notes on the piano.
And then he analyzed the music-whether, for example, it sounded like Bach or was closer to Debussy.
Gene music was favorably received in the music world. But the world of biology rejected it as unscientific.
This spring, Midori received a CD from Japan at her home in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
It was a recording of gene music derived from osanshouo, the Japanese giant salamander. Students at Hiroshima Kokutaiji Senior High School had made the music as part of a three-year project.
The prefectural school's biology study team analyzed the DNA of a giant salamander and translated the base pairs into musical scores in accordance with the Ono theory.
Midori listened intently to the CD while her memories of the old piano renditions came flooding back. The CD also contained music from human genes.
Listening to it myself, I found the osanshouo gene music freewheeling and cheering-full of the swinging tone of a Mozart composition. It made for a sharp contrast with the human gene music, which sounded burdened and sorrowful. The anguished melody recalled Beethoven.
The three-year project came under fire, however, as "stepping out of the domain of science," according to Ikuo Miura, 46, an associate professor at Hiroshima University, who has given guidance to the biology study team.
Even so, members of the team worked hard, even on holidays, trying to make the sounds of genes audible.
This summer, two of the 19 students who participated in the project-all third-graders-visited Britain.
The gene music they played at colleges and high schools was roundly applauded.
And at the end of September, the National Institute of Genetics in Japan released the DNA sequencing of the giant salamander analyzed by the students to the world.
The music of the Japanese giant salamander