Genius at Work

When Einstein died in 1955 his physical remains mostly vanished. The autopsy surgeon, one Thomas S. Harvey, removed Einstein’s brain and later stored portions of it in a jar at his private practice in Weston, Missouri. Einstein’s ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, managed to remove the eyes, which he kept in a bank vault. The rest of Einstein’s body was cremated and the ashes scattered, as biographies tell us, “at an undisclosed location.” (A persistent rumor has it that they were strewn into the Delaware River south of Princeton.)