Albert Einstein’s preserved brain has crossed the Atlantic for the first time. It’s a journey that one of the 20th century’s greatest minds never intended.
Before Einstein died 57 years ago, he wrote in his will that he wanted to be cremated, his ashes discarded secretly to avoid creating a shrine. But in the early hours of April 18, 1955, after the man who invented modern physics died of a burst aortic aneurysm, the pathologist on call that evening did something very different.
Dr. Thomas Harvey did not have permission to conduct an autopsy, nor did he have permission to keep the brain for himself. But that’s exactly what he did — for four decades. ”Knowing that his brain was of interest to most everybody, I saved it and carefully preserved it,” Harvey told ABC News in 1996.
Harvey kept the most famous brain in the world after receiving a tentative — and retroactive — acceptance from Hans Albert, Einstein’s son, so long as the brain would be used for scientific purposes. But Harvey was no brain specialist and had no ability, at least on his own, to make sure that his prized possession was studied for science. And he clearly had more than science in mind.
He removed Einstein’s eyeballs and gave them to Einstein’s eye doctor, Henry Adams. To this day, they remain in a safe deposit box in New York City. As Brian Burrell wrote in his book, “Postcards from the Brain Museum,” “Why [Harvey] kept it will never be known for certain, but it can be inferred from comments made to various reporters that Harvey was inspired by Oskar Vogt’s study of Lenin’s brain, and he had the vague idea that cytoarchitectonics might shed some light on Einstein’s case [looking for physical proof for why Einstein was so smart]. A simpler and more appealing explanation is that [Harvey] got caught up in the moment and was transfixed in the presence of greatness. What he quickly discovered was that he had bitten off more than he could chew.”
Harvey had a technician cut the brain into more than 200 pieces. Many were saved properly, but others ended up in jars in his basement. Then when he moved to the Midwest, they sat in a cider box stashed under a beer cooler. Then, when he wanted to meet Einstein’s granddaughter, he put the jars in the back of a reporter’s Buick Skylark.
They traveled with him as he lost his medical license, moved to a half dozen states, and finally returned to Princeton, where the story began – only to give the brain to the pathologist who took the job he held that night in 1955. Again and again, Harvey promised to have the brain examined. But it never happened, at least not properly.
“Whenever [reporters] asked what was being done, Harvey would confidently proclaim that he was just one year away from publishing his results,” Burrell writes. “He would continue to give the same answer for the next forty years.”
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