It was just one more chapter in the twisted history of a brain that was born in 1879, hatched the secret of relativity in 1905 and was liberated from its body by a Princeton pathologist 50 years later. No further news came until the summer of 1978, when I came into the picture; my editor at a regional magazine asked me to find it. I deduced that it was still in the hands of the pathologist, Dr. Thomas Harvey. I tracked him to Wichita, Kans., where, after much cajoling, he sighed deeply and pulled from a cardboard box two glass jars with the sectioned pieces of Einstein’s brain. Eureka! Harvey told me that so far in his ongoing study he’d found no variations from the norm.
My article encouraged Berkeley neuroanatomist Marian Diamond to get some samples from Harvey; she counted 73 percent more glial cells than the norm. (Glial cells help keep the network of neurons humming.) In 1996, another study indicated that the Nobel winner’s cortex was “more densely populated with neurons.” But there was no indication that the density led to E=mc².
The McMaster researchers, led by Sandra F. Witelson, began their work when Dr. Harvey sent them some samples in 1996, as well as photos of the brain before sectioning. Unlike brains in a control group of 35, Einstein’s had a short sylvian fissure (a groove on the side), and a brain part known as the operculum was undeveloped. This may have allowed Einstein’s parietal lobes, believed to affect math, music and visual images, to grow 15 percent wider than average. “The thing that’s compelling,” says Witelson, “is that the differences occur in the region that supports psychological functions of which Einstein was a master.”
The Lancet findings may well be a valuable jumping-off point for further research. But will taking the measure of parietal lobes really tell us why Einstein stands atop the scientific pantheon? His genius was unique, a control group of one. That’s why his brain fascinates us, and has been the subject of potboilers, poems, screenplays and paranoid cloning plots. And that’s why, when I beheld Albert’s brain matter bobbing in the formaldehyde like soggy tofu chunks, my own mind spun with amazement and wonder. When it comes to appreciating the most famous brain of our century, it ain’t the meat–it’s the emotion.
