If one wonders about the world’s greatest minds of the modern era, perhaps the one who comes out on top among the candidates for the number one spot is Albert Einstein. One story that many may not know is that, after his passing, his brain did not have a very fortunate fate. An unknown person decided to steal it without the physicist’s consent or that of his family.
Albert Einstein is perhaps the most important physicist in modern science, thanks to the development of his various theories that came to change forever the way humans understand physics. With his Theory of General Relativity, he overturned a 200-year s tradition created by Isaac Newton with his Law of Universal Gravitation. Einstein postulated his revolutionary equation E=mc2 that introduced the speed of light as a constant traveling through spacetime and made us understand that the Universe is much more complex than we thought.
The robbery that outraged the world
The world was shocked when, in the early morning of April 18, 1955, Einstein passed at the age of 76 at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. The cause was an abdominal aortic aneurysm, as determined by the autopsy performed by Thomas Harvey, the on-call pathologist on duty that morning. But Harvey did much more than that. Simply, without permission, he decided to take the brain of the most famous physicist in secret from everyone.
In life, Einstein made an important decision about how he would end the matter that had accompanied him throughout his life. “I want to be cremated so that people will not come to worship my bones,” the Nobel Prize-winning physicist had told his biographer. Einstein’s last wish was to be cremated immediately, and with this, he made it clear that he did not want his body, let alone his brain, to be studied.
But Thomas Harvey, without any consent, simply ignored Einstein’s decision; he took his brain and then hid it for 45 years in a jar that was kept hidden. Einstein’s family discovered a night later that his body was not complete.
[Albert Einstein with electrodes attached to his head to pick up impulses from his brain and magnify them, for study in 1950 in Princeton, NJ Dr. Alejandro Arellano kneels next to him. Credit: AP/DÍA]
Harvey then acted and managed to get retroactive permission from Einstein’s son, Hans Albert. Supposedly the agreement held that the goal of having subtracted the brain would be rewarded by subjecting it to scientific analysis to determine what would have made Einstein one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Harvey, of course, lost his job at Princeton Hospital and moved the brain to Philadelphia, where he sectioned it into 240 pieces that he kept preserved in celloidin, which is a hard, rubbery form of cellulose. He then separated the dissections into two different jars and stored them in his basement.
Things, of course, got complicated when his wife threatened to get rid of the brain, so Harvey decided to move it to Wichita, Kansas. There, the brain of the once great scientist was left abandoned in a cider box hidden under a beer cooler in the biological testing laboratory where Harvey worked.
Studies on Einstein’s brain
For 45 years, Harvey broke his word, and far from analyzing Einstein’s genetic material, he kept it in a jar. It was not until 1985 that he published his first study in the National Library of Medicine, in which he claimed to have found an abnormal proportion of two types of cells, neurons, and glia.
After the first publication, five more studies followed in which it was postulated that Einstein’s brain had abnormal folds and a series of other differences that supposedly gave him his sharp thinking in physics. However, they were all poorly received by the scientific community, which labeled them as false due to the great research bias. In addition, behind all the studies lay a great controversy for the simple fact of having taken the brain without the owner’s consent.
Harvey did not get the glory he thought he would achieve after his theft, on the contrary, his name was forever tarnished by the scientific community.
[Credits: Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia]
Currently, the only institution that publicly exhibits dissections of Einstein’s brain is the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia. But even it has been accepted that the samples in which Harvey dissected the brain do not provide any basis for serious research. “There is an abysmal difference between a living brain and a dead brain,” Mütter Institute curator Anna Dhody told Smithsonian Magazine. “A living brain has an infinite amount of things you can study and learn. What you can learn from a dead brain is quite limited,” she concluded.
Although this tragic story may have been part of the most insightful and important physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein’s legacy has been steeped in science forever. The hapless theft has had no power over the greatness of the ideas of the German physicist who proved on more than one occasion that he not only had a keen mind for science but also human kindness.
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera
