Early on in the development of this series, I really wanted to spend more time with Dr. Murray Barr and his little dots. Barr was a really interesting guy — and the early era of genetics he worked in is fascinating. Unfortunately, nobody who knew him was available or willing to talk to us, so you heard what you heard in the episode. But the other thing we had to give up on, was using music composed by one of Barr’s contemporaries.
When he first discovered the Barr Bodies (which, by the way, he really did not want named after himself, but here we are) Murray Barr didn’t know what they were. In fact, for many years, he believed that the dark dots were actually both X chromosomes. That you could see them, because there were two. We now know that’s not the case. And in fact it was a researcher named Susumu Ohno who figured this out. Barr actually wrote about the moment he met Ohno. It happened at a conference at Penn State:
“I was among those who had accommodation in a dormitory, and sometime after retiring on the night of arrival there was a knock on the door of my room. On opening the door, the sleepy occupant was faced by an unknown young man who, without preliminaries, exclaimed: ‘I know the origin of the sex chromatin.’ The nocturnal visitor was Susumo Ohno; he had just arrived from California and could wait no longer to tell me of recent observations he had made at the City of Hope Medical Center. Arrangements were made for Dr Ohno to participate in the symposium; it was well attended and many geneticists learned, before the findings were published in 1959, that the sex chromatin consists of an entire heterochromatic X chromosome, with the other X chromosome of females and the single X chromosome of males being euchromatic.”
Ohno seems to have been an incredibly interesting guy in his own right. And in fact, long before “science music” was trendy, he and his wife Midori Aoyama, were composing music based on genetics. In 1986, they published a paper together titled “The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequences construction but also human endeavor in musical composition.” Unfortunately, I was never able to track down any recordings of Ohno and Aoyama (who was a singer) actually performing this music. But you can see someone else perform it in this video, here.
I had hoped that we might be able to record our own version of this composition, to use in the Murray Barr section as a kind of musical easter egg. But talking to our legal team, it became clear that doing so might actually run afoul of copyright law. We could never track down who (if anybody) owned the rights to the composition. I even messaged the Ohno’s children (a cinematographer, a teacher, and a Vegas croupier, respectively) to try and figure it out, but I never got a reply. And eventually, I had to let it go. (If you know someone from this family, please tell me! I’d still love to talk to them.)
Bonus Poetry: Apparently someone wrote a doggerel poem about Murray Barr’s work in 1953. The author is anonymous, although this was sent to Barr by a name named Bill Dafoe (no relation to Willem, I checked):
How doth the telltale chromosome
Make sex distinctions clearer
And send a doubting Thomas home
A doubting Thomasina?
Rejoice, hermaphroditic folks
In Doc Barr’s deed of splendor.
A moment’s glance from him evokes
Your true and proper gender.
I found this poem via this super interesting paper about Barr’s work.