Einstein’s Brain Was Stolen And Went Missing For Decades
It might sound like the plot of a sci-fi B-movie, but Einstein's brain really was stolen shortly after his passing. In the 19th century, the brains of geniuses were often preserved so that scientists could try to determine the origins of that person's intelligence. For example, half of the brain of Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computing machine, is still on display at the Hunterian Museum at London's Royal College of Surgeons.
Einstein was aware that scientists might want to study his brain after his passing and explicitly forbade it, knowing that such studies rarely produce useful information. Nevertheless, when Einstein passed at Princeton Hospital in the early morning of April 18, 1955, the pathologist who examined him, Dr. Thomas Harvey, decided to remove the brain on his own initiative for future study. Dr. Harvey took Einstein's brain home, divided it into 240 pieces and stored it in two mason jars filled with celloidin. Shortly after Einstein's cremation, his son Hans Albert found out about the theft and was furious. But Dr. Harvey convinced him to let him keep the brain.
Taking the brain of the world's most famous physicist without permission did have professional consequences for Dr. Harvey. He soon lost both his job at Princeton Hospital and his marriage, then moved to the Midwest where he took a series of jobs either practicing medicine or running research labs. He kept Einstein's brain for the next several decades - at one point storing it in a cider box underneath a beer cooler - hoping to unlock the secrets of Einstein's intelligence. The fate of Einstein's brain was mostly unknown until 1978, when a reporter tracked Harvey down in Wichita, Kansas.
The magazine article about Harvey brought a flood of requests for samples of the brain to study, and starting in 1985, scientists began publishing their findings. Many of these studies did claim to find some differences between Einstein's brain and that of a "normal" person, but they also lacked representative control groups, making their findings suspect. And even if these studies had been conducted more effectively, neurology still hasn't determined whether the physical structures of the brain actually affect a person's intelligence.
Today, what remains of Einstein's brain resides at the Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Almost nobody is allowed to see it, not even researchers. But many more pieces of Einstein's brain can possibly still be found across America, thanks to Dr. Harvey's habit of giving away pieces of it to curious friends.
