In search of "traces" of genius, how pathologist Thomas Harvey stole Einstein's brain

When Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, Princeton Hospital's acting pathologist, Thomas Harvey, operated on him and removed his brain. Harvey, acting without family permission, seemed to think that the brain's gray matter would reveal the anatomy of genius.

Mathematician Brian D. Burrell, "tired" of his students complaining that they are not "Einsteins," wrote years later about the tradition of examining the brains of intellectuals in the search for intelligence. Einstein wanted his body to be cremated after death, but Harvey kept his brain and refused to submit it to the hospital. Tissue samples are not considered the property of the pathologist participating in the removal procedure. However, Harvey received permission from Einstein's son to use the material for scientific purposes. Part of the brain was preserved in a jar and the rest was distributed to the pathology laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. Under Harvey's strict guidance, while using the best practices at the time for preparing neurological tissue, Martha Keller spent eight months dissecting different parts of the genius's brain. Harvey sent some of this material to other scientists, but they found nothing significant. He stepped down from his role at Princeton Hospital in 1960 and took what was left of his brain with him on his way out of medicine. Characterized by Burrell as "quirky but scrupulous", Harvey sometimes piled his jars of material into a beer cooler. No one seemed particularly interested until the birth of Einstein's brain studies in the mid-1980s, but since then, there have been periodic reports claiming to explain Einstein through what remains of his brain. "Unusual features in the physicist's parietal lobes," reads a 2009 report. Burrell, hardly alone, is skeptical of what he calls "flawed brain studies that have collectively produced what one critic has ruefully called a 'genius neuromythology.' "A series of reports on his brain, each pointing to a different anatomical feature as the possible source of its brilliance, have emerged, all to great media fanfare," writes Burrell. "No one has discovered a plausible anatomical basis for its ability." Harvey returned the brain parts to Princeton Hospital's successor institution, Princeton University Medical Center. Meanwhile, the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, MD, has about 500 slides, plus the calibrated photographs that Harvey took. One fact remains, Harvey's brain photographs showed that the famously big-brained Einstein… actually had a physically small brain. But some people really want the brain of a genius to be different from ours. One of the first to be treated in this way was the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who died in 1855. The anatomist who took Gauss's brain ended up examining 964 other brains, including those of the poet Bryon and the naturalist Cuvier, as well as manual workers. The problem was that this anatomist found similar traits in people from all walks of life. "Despite enthusiastic efforts over the past two centuries to discern the anatomy of talent or genius, scientists are no closer to finding it now than they were in the 1800s," notes Burrell. We don't know who, if anyone, was born with a "mathematical" or "genius" brain, Burrell concludes, and that probably doesn't matter. "Behind the great achievements of a Gauss or an Einstein is in all cases a life dedicated to meditation, curiosity, collaboration and, perhaps above all, hard work."