An elderly man pries open a jar and fishes out a dripping human cerebellum. He carves off a chunk with a kitchen knife and places it in a plastic pill bottle. Then, wiping a hand on his pants, the man hands the bottle to an admiring visitor.
The brain was Albert Einstein’s. The man was Thomas Harvey, a pathologist who in 1955 removed, photographed and preserved the great physicist’s brain during autopsy. In the decades since, the brain has enjoyed a certain celebrity. In the ’80s, Harvey gave away slices to the curious, keeping the rest in a pair of glass cookie jars. (These bizarre transactions appear in the 1994 documentary Relics: Einstein’s Brain.) In the late ’90s, he carried it across the country in a Tupperware container to offer it to Einstein’s granddaughter, who chose not to keep it. Finally, he gave it back to Princeton Hospital, where he performed the autopsy decades before.
Ever since, researchers have pored over chunks, slides and photos of Einstein’s brain, counting cells, measuring dimensions, describing shapes and comparing it with the brains of ordinary people. Every deviation from the purported norm became a potential explanation for Einstein’s genius: his uncanny thought experiments, his kinesthetic imagination, his mathematical and musical abilities.
