EINSTEIN BRAIN

Doctor kept Einstein's brain in jar 43 years

Seven years ago, he got 'tired of the responsibility'
News Item reproduced from post-gazette.

Sometimes a man and his popular identity become indistinguishable, which was the case with Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who, during a 1955 autopsy of Albert Einstein, removed 2.7 pounds of gray matter from the physicist's skull, then took it home with him and kept it in a jar.

Albert Einstein writes an equation for the density of the Milky Way on the blackboard at the Carnegie Institute, Mount Wilson Observatory headquarters in Pasadena, Calif., in 1931.

Einstein was already legendary by then, but in the years that followed, a body of legend -- some of it true, much of it not -- grew around Harvey as well. He was, by varying explanations, creepy, awkward, nervous, self-aggrandizing, a hunchbacked grave-robber, a lousy husband, a malicious doctor, a good man.

This year, the stories about the man who made off with Einstein's brain may enchant, or appall, more people than usual. It's Einstein's big year, the 50th anniversary of the physicist's death and the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "annus mirabilis" -- his miracle year -- when the one-time pacifist patent clerk lay the mind-bending foundation for atomic weapons, quantum physics, global-positioning-system devices and much else. So in physics classes, at hospitals bearing his name, at universities, at museums, in scientific journals and in television specials, people are celebrating Einstein, his ongoing contributions to science, and that beautiful brain of his, the world's oddest souvenir.

And it long belonged to Harvey. For years, one of Harvey's teachers told anyone who would ask that Harvey was dead, and the brain was missing. Maybe he was mad at Harvey, or jealous, or just tired of answering questions.

Yes, Harvey made some enemies, including some in the Einstein family, and he was eventually dismissed from Princeton Hospital, where he worked in the 1950s. But he isn't dead. He's just old. He's 93, living in a small New Jersey town called Titusville. He's hard of hearing, and his naturally slow manner of speaking has grown slower.

He has a simple explanation for why he did what he did.

"I didn't know anyone else wanted to take it," Harvey sighed a few weeks ago.

On April 18, 1955, the day the 76-year-old Einstein died, a young Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey wasn't even supposed to be on duty. When he walked into the Princeton morgue, he was actually a last-minute replacement for Dr. Harry Zimmerman, a neuroanatomist from New York.

But that's how history works sometimes, turning on a series of coincidences and surprises. According to a passage in Michael Paterniti's dreamlike narrative, "Driving Mr. Albert," Harvey got to the brain after first working through the rest of Einstein's body: "Bearing down on a buzz saw, he cut through Einstein's head. He cracked the skull like a coconut, he removed the cap of bone, peeled back the viscous meninges, and snipped the connecting blood vessels and nerve bundles and the spinal cord."

And there it was, a "huge, rough pearl." Harvey reached into the skull, took hold of the brain and didn't let go. He dissected it into thin chunks, kept it in a soup of formaldehyde and toted it with him, from New Jersey to Kansas to California and back again over the years. He gave away bits of the brain to researchers, but always, the bulk of the prize was his.

The rest of Einstein's body was cremated.

Dr. Sandra Witelson, a professor at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine in Ontario, Canada, was one of the fortunate recipients. She and her school now own about a fifth of Einstein's brain.

Harvey sent Witelson, a top researcher in the neuroscience field, a fax about 10 years ago asking if she'd like a piece of Einstein's brain. She'd never requested such a specimen, and hadn't met or spoken with Harvey in her life. "Yes, well, needless to say, it was unexpected."

After Harvey made the offer, Witelson requested part of the parietal lobe, the brain's center for conceptual thinking and math skills. She suspected this lobe may have been the genesis for the theories of relativity.

In his 80s at the time, Harvey drove to Canada alone, brain in his trunk, and delivered the sample to Witelson. In 1999, she published a study on the lobe, "The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein," and in so doing became enshrined among the small fraternity of researchers with whom Harvey has arbitrarily shared his treasure.

"I think that Dr. Harvey was very wise in how he handled the situation of removing the brain, being its keeper, and trying to find the best and most fruitful researchers," Witelson said. "He deserves a lot of credit for that." If someone other than Harvey had received the brain, it might have been lost to history.

But others have been less charitable in their take on Harvey and his motives. Doctors from California to Canada thought he was a sham artist who grabbed the brain for no reason better than he thought it would be a neat bookshelf trophy. Einstein's son said Harvey took the brain without permission.

One book, "Possessing Genius" by Carolyn Abraham, suggests there was a secret deal between Harvey and the family that would allow Harvey to care for the brain. Evelyn Einstein, 64, the physicist's granddaughter, disputes that version of events.

"He implied he had a right to take the brain. He did not. That's just simple theft," she said, still spitting mad five decades later. "I don't have a friendly thing to say about him.... How would you feel if someone stole parts of your ancestors? Harvey and the granddaughter met several years ago, when Harvey visited California, where Evelyn Einstein still lives today.

The brief, uncomfortable visit didn't change her opinion of the old doctor.

"I was outraged," she said. "I never told him that, though."

She could tell him today, but the confession would be moot. Harvey has finally separated himself from his long-held identity.

He gave it away the year after an odd-couple road trip across America with Paterniti, the writer, who, in his book about the trek, painted Harvey as a man greatly protective of the brain, refusing to let Paterniti even have a glance it. Harvey kept it locked in the trunk of the Buick Skylark for most of the trip. On the few occasions when Harvey opened the container that held the brain, Paterniti wasn't around.

Yet after safeguarding the brain for decades like it was a holy relic -- and, to many, it was -- he simply, quietly, gave it away to the pathology department at the nearby University Medical Center at Princeton, the university and town where Einstein spent his last two decades.

"Eventually, you get tired of the responsibility of having it. ... I did about a year ago," Harvey said, slowly. "I turned the whole thing over last year."

It was actually seven years ago, in 1998. He was 85 when he delivered it to a stunned but grateful Dr. Elliot Krauss, a pathologist at Princeton. Harvey's own brain, one of history's more remarkable links to Einstein's, is moving on now, too.