99 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS MUSICAL AS A MOUSE...

HOW could I possibly have missed it for so long? Four years have passed since one of the most significant recent advances in science was reported in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 2012 and it evaded my attention until yesterday. The paper, by a team of Japanese researchers, was entitled “Auditory stimulation of opera music-induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells”. In other words, if you play operatic music to a mouse after it has received a heart transplant, it will live longer than if you don’t.

The experimental design was thorough. They divided the mice into groups, all of which received heart transplants from unrelated donors, which maximised the chance that the transplanted organ would be rejected. Some mice were then treated to Verdi’s La Traviata, others listened to Mozart’s 40th symphony, while a third group heard music by the singer-songwriter Enya. A fourth group had no music at all, while yet another group consisted entirely of deaf mice to ensure that the observed effects were the result of hearing the music rather than, for example, picking up the vibrations.

The results showed that the opera produced the longest survival rates, closely followed by Mozart, while Enya did no better than silence. However, with only four or five mice in each group, the numbers were too small to be sure that opera is the best medicine for post-transplant mice and we must wait for a larger scale repeat of the experiment to confirm the results.

In the meantime, I thought I would see if I could offer any advice on improving the experimental design, so I trotted down to the Beachcomber Towers kitchens, starting belting out the “Brindisi” drinking song from Traviata and grabbed the first mouse that popped its head out of its hole to see what was going on.

As soon as the mouse saw me, it heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh it’s only you, Beachcomber,” it squeaked. “I feared it was another of those Japanese scientists trying to give us heart transplants.” “So you’ve seen the paper,” I said. “Naturally,” said the mouse, “but I found the methodology unconvincing.” “Go on,” I said, “what was wrong?” “Well for a start, what on earth possessed them to pick La Traviata? The poor girl dies of tuberculosis at the end. What sort of impression is that likely to make on a patient who’s just had a heart transplant? If they insist on using Verdi, why don’t they choose his only comic opera, Falstaff? Though I’d have thought that anyway something jolly by Rossini or Donizetti would be more likely to boost survival rates. And why Mozart’s 40th? It’s magnificent, of course, but a spot of his chamber music might be more appropriate in a hospital ward. I’d have gone for his K.563 divertimento or his D minor piano Fantasy K.397.”

“Have you ever considered a tail transplant?” I asked when I saw his had been cut off with a carving knife.

“Not until they sort the music out,” he replied and we left it at that.