(Science Week, day 6!)

Suppose you die one day, regretful you never got around to journalling your life story. "That's it – the end of my mind," you'd use your final moments to realize. But one day, centuries later, a researcher scans your remains and sifts through your firsthand memories. Others join them, and your regret proves unfounded, though through a method you would never have imagined, much less counted on.

Today's feature from the BBC is not about that kind of science fiction, but a real procedure that would have seemed just as unimaginably futuristic to the individual on whose remains it's being performed.

Twice this Science Week has the term "genetics" come up, a term which I doubt a person on the street today would find unfamiliar. "Sequencing the genome" is another phrase I think laypeople know, but the ability to define it would vary.

Beethoven (I'm aware as a layperson and a music major) is considered one of history's greatest composers, and a famously ironic sufferer of hearing loss. This affliction was apparently never explained and certainly not reversed, and a goal of the genetic sequencing of several locks believed to be from the man's hair is to check for any genes that might have ushered it. It looks like they hadn't found any such thing here (presuming the cause was even genetic – one reason to attempt to check), but the article touches on other inferences, as well as the intention to make the composer's genome public.

• At the BBC

Today, some mysterious conditions whose origins were once as good as guesswork – ghosts and demons, for all anyone knew – are traceable to the order of molecules that make up one's DNA, this real inward cosmos of astronomical complexity, with something approaching the same satisfying capacity as iron-clad evidence like fingerprints and surveillance tapes in a criminal case. As with all frontiers of science: as it progresses, the mystery ever erodes and the wonder ever heightens.