My headline may be a bit misleading. So special that when he died in Princeton Hospital, on April 18, , the pathologist on call, Thomas Harvey, stole it. But Harvey took the brain anyway, without permission from Einstein or his family. Harvey soon lost his job at the Princeton hospital and took the brain to Philadelphia, where it was carved into pieces and preserved in celloidin , a hard and rubbery form of cellulose.
He divvied up the pieces into two jars and stored them in his basement. As Burrell explains emphasis mine :. For a time he worked as a medical supervisor in a biological testing lab in Wichita, Kansas, keeping the brain in a cider box stashed under a beer cooler. He moved again, to Weston, Missouri, and practiced medicine while trying to study the brain in his spare time, only to lose his medical license in after failing a three-day competency exam.
He then relocated to Lawrence, Kansas, took an assembly-line job in a plastic-extrusion factory, moved into a second-floor apartment next to a gas station, and befriended a neighbor, the beat poet William Burroughs.
Harvey would tell stories about the brain, about cutting off chunks to send to researchers around the world. Burroughs, in turn, would boast to visitors that he could have a piece of Einstein any time he wanted.
But that premise is nonsense and the studies are bunk, at least according to Terence Hines , a professor of psychology at Pace University. A couple of weeks ago, Hines presented a poster at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting outlining all of the ways in which each of the six studies is flawed.
His brain was removed before his body was laid to rest in a mausoleum in Moscow. The Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt born , died to study Lenin's brain. Vogt spent two and a half years preparing and studying Lenin's brain. He finally published a paper on the brain in where he reported that some neurons pyramidal neurons in layer III of the cerebral cortex of Lenin's brain were very numerous and large.
Cortical structure and mental skills: Oskar Vogt and the legacy of Lenin's brain , Brain Research Bulletin, , Where is Einstein's brain now? Later that day, Princeton Hospital pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy on Einstein and removed Einstein's brain. Harvey cut the brain into pieces. He was very protective of the brain and kept it jars at his house.
Over the years, Harvey gave several pieces of the brain to different researchers including Dr. Britt Anderson University of Alabama and Dr. Harvey moved around the country and he always brought the brain with him. Eventually, Harvey moved back to New Jersey. In , Harvey brought the remaining pieces of Einstein's brain to Dr. Elliot Krauss, chief pathologist at Princeton Hospital.
Reference: Abraham, C. Martin's Press, Einstein did not object to the study of his brain. However, he did not want any of the resulting findings publicized. References Anderson, B. Colombo, J. Einstein's , Brain Res Rev. Diamond, M. Editorial, Science , , Science , , Falk, D. The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs , Brain. Hines, T. Terence Hines. Hines discusses some of the problems with the Einstein paper published in Levy eventually tracked him down to Wichita, Kansas.
In the end, though, Harvey agreed to meet the reporter in his office in the small medical lab where he was working and it quickly became apparent, to Levy's surprise, that Harvey still aspired to publish a scientific report. When Levy pressed Harvey to see some pictures of the brain, a strange look came over the doctor's face.
Grinning sheepishly, he stood up, walked behind Levy to the corner of the room, and removed a beer cooler from a stack of cardboard boxes. The bottom box was labelled Costa Cider. It was amazing. In Levy's article, published in the New Jersey Monthly, he described the contents of one of the jars. A fist-sized chunk of greyish, lined substance, the apparent consistency of sponge. And in a separate pouch, a mass of pinkish-white strings resembling bloated dental floss.
A second, larger jar contained "dozens of rectangular translucent blocks, the size of Goldenberg's Peanut Chews". Back in , armed with Hans Albert Einstein's permission to conduct an investigation, Harvey had measured and photographed the brain and even commissioned a painting of it from an artist who had done portraits of his children.
In those early days, he was not acting alone, but had the support of Einstein's executor, Otto Nathan, and the physicist's friend, the neuropathologist Harry Zimmerman.
Harvey had overseen the division of the brain into blocks, and created 12 sets of slides containing tissue samples indexed to the blocks. These were delivered, as promised, to the great and the good of s neuropathology.
But Harvey heard very little back from these august men. Those who did reply found it to be no different from normal, non-genius brains. This mirrored the result Harvey had received when he first weighed the brain, and found it to be - at 1,g - towards the low end of the normal range for men of Einstein's age. All the time, as he energetically ferried small samples of Einstein's brain across the US, he doggedly hung on to the bulk of it. Among those who tried to take it from him was the US Army.
But taking possession the brain set in motion a painful chain of events for Harvey. He lost his job, he lost his marriage, he lost his career at Princeton. After the controversy over having taking the brain, he never regained his footing at the hospital. That explains why Harvey was in Wichita when Steven Levy caught up with him. When the article appeared in summer , Harvey was suddenly the centre of much attention.
The journal Science interviewed him and reporters camped out on his lawn. He was approached for samples, by, among others, the neuro-anatomist Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. With the package that Harvey sent to Diamond by post, of four sugar cube-sized pieces of brain in a jar previously used for Kraft Miracle Whip mayonnaise, the era of Einstein brain studies finally took off.
What have these studies told us about Einstein's brain and the nature of intelligence? Wilder Penfield, who had spent a few decades studying the brains of prison volunteers while they were awake. Penfield adeptly cut into the crown of the volunteer skulls, flapped the scalp and bone back to expose the brain. He applied a variety of stimuli to the brain and was able to map out the cortical regions controlling body functions. Harvey had been trained at Yale, which was home to several prominent neuroanatomists.
As such, he believed that the answer to finding the seat of intellect was by studying the microscopic anatomy, and not the intact brain. But in hindsight, a brain which has been cut up and disconnected from all the intricate neural connections is as useless as a telephone system disconnected from all its wires.
Twelve sets of slides were made at the University of Pennsylvania. By the end of , Harvey had in his possession several hundred microscopic slides, pieces of brain not dissected in formalin jars, and dozens of photos and sketches of the brain. He began to petition a group of noted scientists to review the material.
Unfortunately for, there was growing notoriety in the scientific and nonscientific community over the handling of the brain, and lack of any definitive information. Harvey was fired from Princeton Hospital—perhaps because of this notoriety, or perhaps due to any one of a few speculative rumors surrounding his personal life. He then moved to the Midwest, taking a job as a supervisor in a biologic testing lab in Wichita. The brain was then stashed in a cider jar kept in a beer cooler.
For years he fought for medical work amid licensure issues, a divorce, and frequent relocations throughout the Midwest. Among the 5 published studies of the samples, not one proved definitive of any spectacular finding.
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