Finding Einstein's Brain

By Frederick E. Lepore

Albert Einstein remains the quintessential icon of modern genius. Like Newton and many others, his seminal work in physics includes the General Theory of Relativity, the Absolute Nature of Light, and perhaps the most famous equation of all time: E=mc2.
 
Following his death in 1955, Einstein’s brain was removed and preserved, but has never been fully or systematically studied. In fact, the sections are not even all in one place, and some are mysteriously unaccounted for! In this compelling tale, Frederick E. Lepore delves into the strange, elusive afterlife of Einstein’s brain, the controversy surrounding its use, and what its study represents for brain and/or intelligence studies. 

Carefully reacting to the skepticism of 21st century neuroscience, Lepore more broadly examines the philosophical, medical, and scientific implications of brain-examination. Is the brain simply a computer? If so, how close are we to artificially creating a human brain? Could scientists create a second Einstein? This “biography of a brain” attempts to answer these questions, exploring what made Einstein’s brain anatomy exceptional, and how “found” photographs--discovered more than a half a century after his death--may begin to uncover the nature of genius.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813580401

Book preview

Finding Einstein’s Brain

(Photo courtesy of Brown Brothers.)

Finding Einstein’s Brain

Frederick E. Lepore, MD

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK,

NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lepore, Frederick E., 1949– author.

Title: Finding Einstein’s brain / by Frederick E. Lepore, MD.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017047395 | ISBN 9780813580395 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813580418 (web pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955. | Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955—Knowledge. | Harvey, Thomas Stoltz. | Brain. | Brain—Dissection.

Classification: LCC QC16.E5 L378 2018 | DDC 612.8/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047395

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Frederick E. Lepore

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Dean Falk, who had an idea.

To Lynn Lepore, who listened with conspiratorial intelligence.

To Ardean Everett Lepore, who loved words (and had the Scrabble scores to prove it).

To Michael J. Lepore, MD, who taught me to be curious in between seeing patients.

Contents

Preface

1 A Neurologist Walks in Princeton

2 April 18, 1955

3 What the Neuropathologist Knew … and Didn’t Know

4 The Lost Decades (1955–1985), the Cider Box, and the Microscope

5 The Exceptional Brain(s) of Albert Einstein

6 How Does a Genius Think?

7 The Pursuit of Genius

8 Where Do We Go from Here? (And Where Have We Been?)

Notes

Index

Preface

It is usually found that only the little stuffy men [in scientific work] object to what is called popularization, by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child.

—STEINBECK, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Simply put, this is a biography of the brain of an extraordinary scientist. We will learn whether 1,230 grams of inert cerebral tissue, studied for over six decades, has taught us anything about Albert Einstein as he lived and worked, the brains of other humans, or the nature of genius. To embark upon our study, we rediscovered Thomas Harvey’s photographs of Einstein’s intact brain that were taken in the spring of 1955 and then languished for many years in the basement of a home in Titusville, New Jersey.¹ Thereupon, we explored the intersection of twenty-first century neuroscience and Einstein’s grand achievements, illuminated by his vivid accounts of his processes of scientific thinking better known as gedankenexperiments.

The eminently successful writer of legal fiction John Grisham advises would-be authors to avoid the gimmick of prologues (or in my case, a preface).² Nevertheless, I’ll take my chances with a few prefatory paragraphs (both pro and con) as to why the intrepid reader should plunge into the next eighty-seven thousand–plus words.

Dead for over sixty years, Einstein still speaks to us about the majesty and the mystery of the Very Big and the Very Small. I will reassert that this is not a true biography of the man, but you will get a sense of him … and his science (and this will be time well spent). As I wrote about him, it gradually dawned on me that Einstein was an immensely likeable guy who could discourse freely and interestingly with a child.

Much of today’s consuming interest in the neuroscience of consciousness is to be found in the relationship of Einstein’s brain to his mind writ large. My occupational biases as a clinical neurologist aside, I will try to fairly assess if we are any closer to resolving whether the mind and the brain are separate (dualism) or one and the same (materialism). Can we really conjecture a mind apart from a brain without becoming quite giddy, like Alice when she saw the grin that remained after the Cheshire Cat had vanished quite slowly?³

Interwoven with the grand topics of theoretical physics and neuroscience is a frisson of academic politics. When presented with set after set of brain slices that Thomas Harvey, an academic outsider, had mounted on microscope slides, what did the best and the brightest neuroscientists do (or not do) with Einstein’s brain for over fifty years? And why (at the time of this writing) is the brain lost again?

My particular perspective on Einstein’s brain will be instructive, but it is not for everyone. For those who are going to have a problem with Finding Einstein’s Brain, get in line.

Neuroscientists will find it way too clinical and antithetical to reductionist systems neuroscience.

Neurologists will complain that they don’t treat patients with a diagnosis of genius—it’s not a disease.

Neuropsychologists will grumble about a neurologist (aka, a brain guy) writing about the mind.

Neurophilosophers will shake their heads over my imprecise language—Did he mean property or substance dualism?

Physicists will gape open-mouthed at the presumption of a guy who treats migraines writing about general relativity without resorting to math. (Actually, I included Einstein’s field equation of gravitation in chapter 6 to placate them. I fear they will see through my ruse.)

Neuroanatomists will grouse, Cortical surface anatomy! How quaint! Korbinian Brodmann and 1909 are asking for their study back.⁴

Neuroradiologists and cognitive neuroscientists will disallow any conclusions based on nonliving brain tissue and chant in unison, Where’s Einstein’s functional magnetic resonance imaging? Sorry, that particular signature technology of neuroscience didn’t arrive until thirty-six years after Einstein’s death.

I won’t belabor the cavils of psychiatrists, neurophysiologists, historians of science, phrenologists, iridologists (Einstein’s ophthalmologist purloined his eyes at autopsy, so there are no irises to study), Thomas Harvey critics (How do we know that it’s really Einstein’s brain?), neurogeneticists, et cetera. As I said, the line forms to the right.

I can only implore the reader to please heed the words of an old Arab proverb: The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on—and to turn the page.⁵

Dean Falk’s gyrus-by-gyrus and sulcus-by-sulcus analysis of Einstein’s brain incontrovertibly established its singular anatomy. Anatomy aside, do Thomas Harvey’s cerebral postcards from 1955 have anything to tell the modern reader about the mind of a genius? I believe that brain anatomy, as studied at least from the time of Paul Broca (and his examination of the brain of the aphasic Leborgne in 1861), has illuminated (and not obscured) the workings of the mind (see chapter 8). Nearly a century later, the birth of Einstein’s brain as an object of scientific study began sadly with his death on April 18, 1955. We shall see if Harvey’s brash and spontaneous brain dissection can speak informatively across the decades to modern neuroscience.

Finding Einstein’s Brain

CHAPTER 1

A Neurologist Walks in Princeton

More than sixty years after his death, the streets of Princeton, New Jersey, have not yielded the last traces of Albert Einstein’s life and times.

With a brief period as an undergraduate excepted, I have lived in Princeton for close to a quarter century and have walked or jogged daily through its tree-lined streets and campus quadrangles alone or with my wife, daughters, or a succession of golden retrievers. Most of the time, distractions—thoughts of a difficult clinical problem at the hospital that day or my dog tugging me in hot pursuit of an indigenous black squirrel—abound, but traces of Einstein emerge from the landscape if you give them a chance. Even with its doorpost numbers painted over, Einstein’s white clapboard house at 112 Mercer Street is readily identified (Figure 1.1).

The cash-strapped Einstein purchased it in 1935 with proceeds from the sale of an important manuscript on relativity theory after the Nazis blocked his Berlin bank accounts.¹ This was Einstein’s last home, and although well maintained it is not consistently lived in. From his front porch, Einstein would walk southwesterly for less than a mile—he never obtained a driver’s license—to his ground-floor office in Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. His walk back home, sometimes deep in conversation with colleague Kurt Gödel, traversed the magnificent greensward sloping up from Fuld Hall (Figure 1.2) and evokes appreciative contemplation as I retrace his steps on an autumn afternoon.

Figure 1.1. Within walking distance from the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein lived at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton from 1935 to 1955. (Photo by Frederick E. Lepore, 2011.)

Einstein feared postmortem canonization of the artifacts of his life, and you will search in vain for plaques identifying the buildings where he lived or worked. The human impulse to remember the great is not to be denied indefinitely (or in this case for more than fifty years after Einstein’s death), and in 2005 the Borough of Princeton did visibly acknowledge its most famous resident by placing Robert Berks’s leonine bust of Einstein on a pedestal (Figure 1.3) in EMC Square. And so on my way to mail a letter, I will not infrequently look up and engage the sightless bronze eyes of the sage who saw the curvature of space-time.

Neighborhood rambles aside, how did I become involved in the pursuit to understand a little more about our epoch’s (arguably) greatest intellect? Growing up, I was fascinated by my father’s stories of his military service as a doctor on Tinian, from which the B-29 bomber Enola Gay took off to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. This introduced me to the ominous implications of Einstein’s iconic formula E = mc². As a college sophomore, I learned more about the atom and relativity from physics professor Eric Rogers, who worked in the 1920s as an assistant to Lord Rutherford (the discoverer of the proton) at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. My interest in the Very Small (quantum mechanics), the Very Large (the universe), and Einstein remained in my intellectual portmanteau as I went through medical training and eventually became a neurologist specializing in vision disorders (neuro-ophthalmology). Although neurologists know a lot about brains, our stock-in-trade is damaged brains, not the brains of geniuses. (An in-between case would be a patient of normal intellect who wants to be a genius and requests, with more hope than judgment, cognitive enhancement drugs, such as methylphenidate and modafinil.)

Figure 1.2. Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, opened in 1939. Einstein would walk out the front door and up the gently sloping front lawn on his way home. (Photo by Frederick E. Lepore, 2011.)

Figure 1.3. Einstein posed for sculptor Robert Berks for two days in 1953, and in 2005 Berks donated this rough cast-bronze bust to the Borough of Princeton. Fittingly for the scientist whose theory of general relativity was proven correct by the total solar eclipse of 1919, this photograph was taken on August 21, 2017, as a total eclipse traversed America from coast to coast. (Photo by Frederick E. Lepore, 2017.)

Two events in 1999 greatly increased my curiosity about Albert Einstein. First, Sandra Witelson, PhD, a professor of neuroscience at McMaster University, published an article with five photographs of Einstein’s brain in the venerable medical journal the Lancet.² The paper described Einstein’s exceptional brain with enlarged inferior parietal lobules and concluded that anatomical features of parietal cortex may be related to visuospatial intelligence. The study was hailed as elegant and consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience by Steven Pinker in the New York Times.³ Second, Einstein nosed out Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gandhi as Time magazine’s Person of the Century and was characterized as the embodiment of pure intellect and the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.⁴

Time’s reiteration of Einstein’s profound and pre-eminent legacy, in concert with Witelson’s startling observations, occupied my thoughts during the winter of 1999–2000 and led me to submit a proposal to write a scholarly article for the Dana Foundation. Published in March 2001, my article Dissecting Genius: Einstein’s Brain and the Search for the Neural Basis of Intellect questioned the premise that somehow Einstein was a parietal lobe genius but more importantly explored why the intense interest in Einstein’s brain is emblematic of our abiding curiosity about intellect in general and genius in particular.⁵

Not being a neuroanatomist, I lacked the expertise to authoritatively agree or disagree with the four (surprisingly few!) anatomical studies of Einstein’s brain that existed in 1999. I set out to learn everything I could for my writing project, and on May 15, 2000, I went to the autopsy room of the Medical Center at Princeton (MCP), which has no affiliation with Princeton University, to speak with my former Robert Wood Johnson Medical School colleague and the chief of pathology, Dr. Elliot Krauss, MD, and to photograph Einstein’s brain. Or rather, the 180 or so gauze-wrapped sections floating in what suspiciously resembled two large cookie jars filled with formalin! My first surprise (in a long succession of surprises and revelations) was that Einstein’s brain had ceased to be two intact hemispheres sometime in the spring or summer of 1955 (and we are not exactly sure when the braincutting took place). As I clicked off one thirty-five-millimeter Kodacolor shot after another, I was awestruck, obsessed, fascinated, and worried about the correct f-stop on the lens (and aghast at the prospect of screwing up the photos). Somewhere between the exhilaration of scientific curiosity in overdrive and the fear of a botched photo op, I became intrigued by the prospect of a story exploring Whatever became of Einstein’s brain? Was this photo session a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? I didn’t think so at the time, but astonishingly, it was. Those pictures (Figure 1.4), which made the cover of the journal Cerebrum and have been extensively reprinted, were the last published color photographs taken of Einstein’s brain—a brain that inexplicably continues to be hidden from public view and scientific scrutiny to the present day.

Figure 1.4. Taken in May 2000, to my knowledge this is among the last published color photographs of most of the remaining gauze-wrapped, celloidin-embedded blocks of Einstein’s brain. Etched in the upper-left surface of the jar is GSMUP for Graduate School (of) Medicine University (of) Pennsylvania where Thomas Harvey returned in the spring of 1955 to dissect Einstein’s brain. (Photo by Frederick E. Lepore, 2000.)

The shock of my first encounter with the gauze-shrouded jigsaw puzzle that was Einstein’s brain was not cushioned by Michael Paterniti’s article Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein’s Brain, which had appeared in Harper’s Magazine in October 1997. Paterniti wrote that the brain was chopped into nearly two hundred pieces. His count was probably off by 10 percent, but in his defense there is still no published inventory of the contents of the two glass jars today. More importantly, the article introduced eighty-four-year-old Thomas S. Harvey, MD, the pathologist who had performed Einstein’s autopsy.⁶ I realized that to learn more about Einstein’s brain, I would have to find Dr. Harvey, who conveniently lived in the neighboring town of Titusville, New Jersey. Unfortunately for me, the journalistic style of Paterniti’s Harper’s article and subsequent book of the same title offset the value of his information.⁷ Both describe a road trip across America, during which Paterniti drove Dr. Harvey from New Jersey to California with the goal of showing the brain to Einstein’s adopted granddaughter, Evelyn. The Harvey family was deeply troubled by Paterniti’s eccentric characterization of Dr. Harvey, which included the account of a meeting with William S. Burroughs, who probed, Tell me about your addictions, Doctor. As a result, from that time forward, Dr. Harvey’s sons exhibited justifiable wariness (to my mind, at least) toward inquiries about their father, and this would greatly complicate scholarly access to Dr. Harvey’s Einstein archives after his death in 2007.

I met Dr. Harvey on June 4, 2000. Over the course of several hours, the Yale-educated pathologist with a slight midwestern drawl went over his forty-five-year-long quest to see the difference between your brain and a genius’s.⁸ On his sunny deck in Titusville, Harvey reminisced about convalescing from tuberculosis as a fourth-year medical student, opened his slotted boxes overflowing with microscope slides of Einstein’s brain, and underscored the need to follow up on Witelson’s study of Einstein’s anomalous parietal lobes from the year before. Early in 1955 Harvey had committed to the proposition that the brain’s microscopic structure, termed neurohistology (and not gross anatomy), was the royal road to Einstein’s genius. (I had never really related this to gross morphology of the brain, he said.) He voiced his disappointment over the lack of reports from experts and the fact that we had only one brain to study.⁹ We were never to meet face-to-face again, but I will always remember the spirit of scientific inquiry defining his professional life and expressed even in his ninth decade at his retreat in rural New Jersey. Only later would I come to realize the great personal cost incurred by his pursuit of Einstein’s genius.

With the 2001 publication of Dissecting Genius showcasing color photographs of Einstein’s brain for the first time, I had made the case for the intense interest surrounding the brain without any consideration for a research agenda, and Einstein’s brain seemingly returned to its half-century-long scholarly slumber.¹⁰ That slumber was not to be long-lived.

Dr. Harvey, knowing of my interest (as a card-carrying—OK, it’s a visual acuity testing card; we don’t have membership cards—neuro-ophthalmologist) in the brain’s visual system, suggested further study of Einstein’s occipital lobes (one of the brain’s visual centers). Again, I should mention that I take care of living patients rather than postmortem specimens, so I sought the advice of two academic neuropathologists. They in turn referred me to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), the high church of pathologic anatomy. In biomedical matters, seeking the advice of appropriate specialists is de rigueur; however, this conventional stratagem was consigned to failure when Dr. Harvey and his colleague Dr. Krauss requested specific research proposals for the Einstein brain specimens. The AFIP was willing to accept the specimens only if no strings were attached and would not consent to any specified research program as a condition for donation. Unbeknownst to the denizens of the AFIP in 2001, Harvey could remember all too well the 1955 conference convened by Dr. Webb Haymaker, head of neuropathology at the AFIP. Lieutenant Colonel Haymaker imperiously demanded that the small-town pathologist from Princeton hand over Einstein’s brain to the Big Boys of academic neuropathology. Harvey did not relinquish the brain but was left with a very bad impression. Accordingly, he was not about to let history try to repeat itself, and the AFIP came away empty-handed again in 2001. The ghosts of the 1950s would continue to influence the scholarly pursuit of the brain, and Harvey’s on-again, off-again relationship with the academic establishment will be an ongoing leitmotif as we trace the errant course of Einstein’s brain.

However, the AFIP was not through with Harvey. On November 7, 2001, Adrianne Noe, PhD, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) of the AFIP, wrote to me inquiring about my willingness to discuss the NMHM as a repository for the brain of Albert Einstein with Drs. Harvey and Krauss. My efforts as a good broker and her entreaties of access to cutting-edge nondestructive imaging modalities notwithstanding, Harvey stuck to his guns, and the brain remained at the MCP. Although Dr. Noe’s relationship with AFIP was to radically change, her curatorial interest in Einstein’s brain never flagged, and biding her time, she is to rejoin the hunt nine years later.

For the six years following 2001, the world seemingly forgot about Einstein’s brain. As if memorializing this transient global amnesia (note: not the kind that I diagnose in the clinic), in 2001 Carolyn Abraham’s terrific account of the bizarre odyssey of Einstein’s Brain—Possessing Genius—drew to a close with the damp and unglorious wedges of the brain displayed on Dr. Krauss’s desk, still in the dubious service of science.¹¹ Occupied with the day-to-day management of the Department of Pathology of the MCP, Dr. Krauss has authored no published Einstein research to the present day. One paper, a description of abnormal astrocytes in a piece of Einstein’s cortex that Drs. Harvey and Krauss loaned out, emerged from Argentina in 2006. This microscopic finding was of unknown significance.¹² After arranging to receive brain tissue blocks, slides, and photographs from Harvey in 1995, Sandra Witelson wrote Harvey in December 2005 requesting to borrow some of your original Nissl slides to evaluate the cell density in Einstein’s inferior parietal lobes.¹³ Whether she ever received the additional slides or not, only one subsequent abstract on Einstein’s cytoarchitecture came forth. The brain’s obscurity persisted at the time of Dr. Harvey’s death on April 5, 2007. He died of complications from a stroke in the same hospital where he had performed Einstein’s autopsy almost fifty-seven years earlier.

On December 22, 2007, I received an e-mail from Dean Falk, PhD, chair of the Department of Anthropology at Florida State University. She had read Dissecting Genius and wished to access the photographs that were taken of Einstein’s gross brain in 1955.… Can you point me in the right direction? Although Witelson had reproduced five such photographs in her 1999 Lancet article,¹⁴ I was certain more photographs must exist. I just didn’t know where to find them.

Undeterred, Falk and I approached two likely sources—Elliot Krauss and Sandra Witelson. Krauss had tissue blocks but no photographs of the intact brain, and Witelson did not respond to Dean Falk’s collegial entreaties. Professor Falk soldiered on and reanalyzed the five grainy photos reproduced in the Lancet. Her paper New Information about Albert Einstein’s Brain appeared online in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience in 2009.¹⁵ This publication reawakened scientific interest in Einstein’s brain and was cited as one of the top one hundred science stories in 2009 (number ninety-three: Re-analyzing One of the Greatest Brains in History) by Discover magazine.¹⁶ It also intensified the pressure to find the missing photographs of Einstein’s brain … and that’s when I remembered Cleora Wheatley.

After leaving Princeton and its environs for his native Midwest in the 1970s, Harvey, thrice-divorced, returned in 1995 and lived the remainder of his life with his former business associate and Princeton Hospital nurse, Cleora Wheatley. I met them both when I interviewed Harvey on June 4, 2000. Then, as now, Cleora was fiercely independent, and after Harvey’s death in 2007 she continued (well into her nineties) to live alone in her modest ranch house among the trees and hills of Titusville. Would Harvey have entrusted his Einstein archives (including photographs) to her safekeeping? Harvey was an inveterate photographer who used a thirty-five-millimeter Exakta camera for his specimens, and he had enlisted the aid of a photographer, Howard Schroeder, for his Einstein project. In and of itself, Harvey’s photographic proficiency and tendency to keep his specimens close at hand (brain fragments … kept in a cider box, under a beer cooler, in Harvey’s office) did not clearly point to a particular storage location for his Einstein brain photos.¹⁷ As I came to learn, Harvey was capricious in his distribution of Einstein materials, and different researchers received different sets of specimens. No investigator received a complete set of tissue blocks, slides, and photographs. Even worse, there is no address book or catalog of the destinations of all the Einstein materials Harvey created. As many as twenty-four hundred microscope slides may have been cut, stained, and mounted by Harvey and University of Pennsylvania technician Marta Keller,¹⁸ but the whereabouts of well over two-thirds are still unknown.

To pursue a comprehensive neuroanatomical study of a genius, Dean Falk had impressed upon me the need to obtain more photographs of Einstein’s undissected brain in general and his frontal lobes in particular. After going down too many blind alleys and with nothing to lose, I phoned Cleora on May 1, 2009. After expressing my sympathy for the loss of Dr. Harvey two years earlier, I inquired whether he had kept any Einstein-related materials at her house. She offhandedly replied that a number of boxes (eventually, eight were archived) were sitting in her cellar! As luck would have it, Dr. Harvey’s middle son, Arthur, was visiting her that day. I acquainted them with Dean’s recent study and the crying need to obtain additional photographs to better delineate Einstein’s cortical anatomy. Arthur informed me that his eldest brother, Thomas, who was serving as executor to Dr. Harvey’s estate, must grant access to the Einstein materials.

When I called Thomas’s home in North Carolina, his wife, Nancy, tactfully informed me that he was not answering phone calls regarding Einstein in the wake of the Harvey family’s wounded feelings over the comic tone of Paterniti’s book, Driving Mr. Albert. I spent a great deal of time persuading her that I did not subscribe to the Michael Paterniti school of journalism and that I was seeking to further the research that Dr. Harvey had begun in 1955. As a result, Thomas spoke with his brother Arthur, and I learned that the Harveys had written the MCP with the intent of giving the boxes to Dr. Krauss.

This was not welcome news, and the prospects for open scholarly access dimmed considerably. With Krauss as the sole custodian of the single-largest cache of Einstein brain tissue (about half the brain was returned to Princeton, according to Harvey),¹⁹ no peer-reviewed research publications under his senior authorship were forthcoming (and none would appear as of 2017). Dr. Krauss would infrequently loan brain tissue to other investigators and he had intoned a lugubrious philosophical sentiment—It’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?—when showing the brain to journalist Carolyn Abraham. She trenchantly and regretfully observed that a single, smalltown pathologist is left to decide the fate of history’s most celebrated brain.²⁰

I wrote to Arthur on May 17, 2009, and pointed out that with the exception of Dean Falk’s research based on limited photographs, Einstein research had been in the doldrums for a decade. The newly discovered archives in Cleora’s basement were too important to be entrusted to the judgment of a single curator. Steering clear of the notion of solo curatorship, I asked Arthur and his extended family to consider academic institutions, such as the Smithsonian Institution; the American Museum of Natural History; the AFIP; Princeton University; and somewhat self-servingly, my own medical school, Robert Wood Johnson, at which I could assemble a multidisciplinary team to study Einstein’s brain. (Dear Reader, if my plan strikes you as a trifle ad hoc and improvised, don’t worry, it most assuredly was.) In my defense, there are no Institutes for the Study of the Gross and Microscopic Neuroanatomy of Supergeniuses. The study of profound geniuses is a very infrequently traveled detour from mainstream neuroscience, which embraces a reductionist paradigm and increasingly focuses on so-called simple nervous systems, such as Caenorhabiditis elegans, a roundworm endowed with 302 (count ’em, 302) neurons. The scientists who study the physical trappings of empyreal reaches of intellect are few and far between, and they remain separate from their parent institutions under the guise of one- or two-person subspecialty shops. Katrin Amunts and Karl Zilles in Germany; Sandra Witelson in Canada; and my collaborator, Dean Falk, are all investigators par excellence in this esoteric field of scientific inquiry. As the Harvey family considered the list of potential recipient institutions, which by now had expanded to include Yale, Harvard (McLean Hospital), and the Institute for Advanced Study, I remained hopeful that the pitfall of a single curator for the newly found Einstein materials could be avoided by the intercession of a renowned scholarly institution. My hopes were soon to be dashed!

A few days before I began my attempt to redirect the disposition of Dr. Harvey’s archives, David LaBerge, PhD, e-mailed Dean Falk with an intriguing proposal for collaborative research. LaBerge, professor of cognitive sciences emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, had read Dean’s recent article on Einstein’s brain and was particularly interested in her detailed descriptions of the parietal lobes. He hypothesized that the thickness of the cortex was a crucial factor for holding over time of an image (or a perception). He had studied the apical dendrites (elongated cell processes) of layer five (there are six layers in the neocortex) of cortical pyramidal neurons and found layer five apical dendrite length to be highly correlated with cortical thickness. Moreover, the dendrite length increased across the mammalian phyla from mouse to human.²¹ As an informal illustration of his hypothesis, he wrote that cats (with longer layer five apical dendrites) can hold their attention to a mouse hole from the outside longer than a mouse [with shorter dendrites] can hold its attention to the hole from the inside; this helps cats catch mice.²² The logical upshot of this hypothesis would be "to measure