einstein

EPILOGUE
EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND EINSTEIN’S MIND
Einstein’s study, as he left it
When Sir Isaac Newton died, his body lay in state in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey, and his pallbearers included the lord high
chancellor, two dukes, and three earls. Einstein could have had a similar funeral, glittering with dignitaries from around the world. Instead, in
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
only twelve people at the crematorium, including Hans Albert Einstein, Helen Dukas, Otto Nathan, and four members of the Bucky family. Nathan
recited a few lines from Goethe, and then took Einstein’s ashes to the nearby Delaware River, where they were scattered. 1
“No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th century knowledge,” President Eisenhower declared. “Yet no other man was
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
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
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
centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.” 2
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
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
than four decades, a wandering relic. 3
Hours after Einstein’s death, what was supposed to be a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton Hospital,Thomas
Harvey, a small-town Quaker with a sweet disposition and rather dreamy approach to life and death. As a distraught Otto Nathan watched silently,
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.
When he stitched the body back up, he decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein’s brain and keep it.
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
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
back of the class. “My dad’s got his brain,” he said. 4
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
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
matter, reluctantly went along. 5
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
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
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
pieces, into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his Ford.
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
random researchers who struck his fancy. He demanded no rigorous studies, and for years none were published. In the meantime, he quit
Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple of times, and moved around from New Jersey to Missouri to Kansas, often leaving no
forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein’s brain always with him.
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
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
“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
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
award-winning article and best-selling book, Driving Mr. Albert.
Their destination was California, where they paid a call on Einstein’s granddaughter, Evelyn Einstein. She was divorced, marginally employed,
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.
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
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
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
adopted by Hans Albert. Working with Robert Schulmann, an early editor of the Einstein papers, she hoped to see what could be learned by