einstein
einstein
einstein
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EPILOGUE<br />
EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND EINSTEIN’S MIND<br />
Einstein’s study, as he left it<br />
When Sir Isaac Newton died, his body lay in state in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey, and his pallbearers included the lord high<br />
chancellor, two dukes, and three earls. Einstein could have had a similar funeral, glittering with dignitaries from around the world. Instead, in<br />
accordance with his wishes, he was cremated in Trenton on the afternoon that he died, before most of the world had heard the news. There were<br />
only twelve people at the crematorium, including Hans Albert Einstein, Helen Dukas, Otto Nathan, and four members of the Bucky family. Nathan<br />
recited a few lines from Goethe, and then took Einstein’s ashes to the nearby Delaware River, where they were scattered. 1<br />
“No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th century knowledge,” President Eisenhower declared. “Yet no other man was<br />
more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.” The New York Times ran nine<br />
stories plus an editorial about his death the next day: “Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad stars and upon billowing oceans<br />
and tossing trees—and wonders. What does it all mean? How did it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three<br />
centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.” 2<br />
Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration. But there was<br />
one part of his body that was not cremated. In a drama that would seem farcical were it not so macabre, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more<br />
than four decades, a wandering relic. 3<br />
Hours after Einstein’s death, what was supposed to be a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton Hospital,Thomas<br />
Harvey, a small-town Quaker with a sweet disposition and rather dreamy approach to life and death. As a distraught Otto Nathan watched silently,<br />
Harvey removed and inspected each of Einstein’s major organs, ending by using an electric saw to cut through his skull and remove his brain.<br />
When he stitched the body back up, he decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein’s brain and keep it.<br />
The next morning, in a fifth-grade class at a Princeton school, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard. “Einstein died,” said<br />
one girl, eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information. But she quickly found herself topped by a usually quiet boy who sat in the<br />
back of the class. “My dad’s got his brain,” he said. 4<br />
Nathan was horrified when he found out, as was Einstein’s family. Hans Albert called the hospital to complain, but Harvey insisted that there may<br />
be scientific value to studying the brain. Einstein would have wanted that, he said. The son, unsure what legal and practical rights he now had in this<br />
matter, reluctantly went along. 5<br />
Soon Harvey was besieged by those who wanted Einstein’s brain or a piece of it. He was summoned to Washington to meet with officials of the<br />
U.S. Army’s pathology unit, but despite their requests he refused to show them his prized possession. Guarding it had become a mission. He finally<br />
decided to have friends at the University of Pennsylvania turn part of it into microscopic slides, and so he put Einstein’s brain, now chopped into<br />
pieces, into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his Ford.<br />
Over the years, in a process that was at once guileless as well as bizarre, Harvey would send off slides or chunks of the remaining brain to<br />
random researchers who struck his fancy. He demanded no rigorous studies, and for years none were published. In the meantime, he quit<br />
Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple of times, and moved around from New Jersey to Missouri to Kansas, often leaving no<br />
forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein’s brain always with him.<br />
Every now and then, a reporter would stumble across the story and track Harvey down, causing a minor media flurry. Steven Levy, then of New<br />
Jersey Monthly and later of Newsweek, found him in 1978 in Wichita, where he pulled a Mason jar of Einstein’s brain chunks from a box labeled<br />
“Costa Cider” in the corner of his office behind a red plastic picnic cooler. 6 Twenty years later, Harvey was tracked down again, by Michael<br />
Paterniti, a free-spirited and soulful writer for Harper’s, who turned his road trip in a rented Buick across America with Harvey and the brain into an<br />
award-winning article and best-selling book, Driving Mr. Albert.<br />
Their destination was California, where they paid a call on Einstein’s granddaughter, Evelyn Einstein. She was divorced, marginally employed,<br />
and struggling with poverty. Harvey’s perambulations with the brain struck her as creepy, but she had a particular interest in one secret it might hold.<br />
She was the adopted daughter of Hans Albert and his wife Frieda, but the timing and circumstances of her birth were murky. She had heard rumors<br />
that made her suspect that possibly, just possibly, she might actually be Einstein’s own daughter. She had been born after Elsa’s death, when<br />
Einstein was spending time with a variety of women. Perhaps she had been the result of one of those liaisons, and he had arranged for her to be<br />
adopted by Hans Albert. Working with Robert Schulmann, an early editor of the Einstein papers, she hoped to see what could be learned by