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 the thickness of the parietal region in Einstein’s brain, and compare it with similar measurements of control brains.” Up to this point, Dean and I had focused on finding old photographs of Einstein’s intact and partially dissected brain with the purpose of rigorously analyzing the gyri (ridges) and sulci (crevices) of its surface anatomy. LaBerge was taking a radically different approach by proposing to study the microscopic connections (axons and dendrites) between Einstein’s neurons. Reader, you might well be thinking that the study of the microscopic anatomy of biologic materials has been fairly routine since the advent of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes in the seventeenth century, but this has been only partly true in the instance of Einstein’s brain. Although Marian Diamond had performed cell counts of Einstein’s neurons and glial cells nearly a quarter century earlier, amazingly, no one had measured the connections (or in this case apical dendrites), as LaBerge boldly proposed. Extrapolating from the anatomy of apical dendrites, LaBerge was collaborating with a biophysicist, Ray Kasevich, to formulate an electric circuit model showing how the apical dendrite’s increased length might fine-tune the resonating frequency of the pyramidal neurons embedded in the recurrent corticothalamic circuits. This would lead to “clearer” mental images “relatively free of distracting noise (and therefore more sustainable over time).”²³ With Dr. Harvey’s archives in philanthropic limbo and unobtainable, the only game in town for LaBerge was to access Elliot Krauss’s repository of Einstein brain tissue.

As Dr. LaBerge was to discover, Krauss alternately blew hot and cold on the prospects of collaborative research. LaBerge e-mailed that after a “very pleasant 7-minute conversation,”²⁴ Krauss agreed to send a copy of Harvey’s “road map”—pencil sketches of Einstein’s brain with the locations of the 240 tissue blocks numbered and demarcated (Figure 1.5).

Dr. Harvey had numbered the microscope slides to correspond with their cortical sites of origin, making the road map an invaluable key for neurohistologic research. True to his word, Krauss e-mailed the road map to LaBerge on July 22, 2009. Unfortunately, this was to be the zenith of a proposed collaboration with Dr. Krauss. Repeated entreaties for a loan of the numbered slides cut from cortical areas of interest went unheeded. Two obstacles became readily apparent. First, Krauss was increasingly reluctant to send out tissue because he could not directly observe what the “researchers are doing,” and he feared that samples would “not be returned.” Second, although he assured LaBerge that “a slide had been taken from each slice” of brain, he did not vouchsafe for a complete set of microscope slides at the MCP. It would turn out that his slide set was incomplete (with fewer than ninety slides), and when I informed him of the seven additional slide sets in the boxes in Cleora’s cellar, in a last-ditch effort to complete his set he vainly importuned Arthur Harvey for more slides. The frustrating confusion over Krauss’s slide set reflects Dr. Harvey’s haphazard allocation of Einstein materials. More fundamentally, it shows that Krauss was preoccupied with the daily running of a busy hospital pathology service and that investigating the neuroanatomy of genius was simply not a priority for him.

Figure 1.5. Five (of nine) diagrams of the orientation of the 240 blocks sectioned from Einstein’s cerebral hemispheres. Sketched by Harvey in 1955, these served as “road maps” for the locations of each numbered brain block from which microscope slides were sectioned. Although the brain stem and the cerebellum were preserved, they were not incorporated in the schema of numbered brain sections. (Harvey Collection, National Museum of Health and Medicine.)

Dean Falk had successfully interested the distinguished neuroanatomists Karl Zilles and Katrin Amunts in our fledgling project. No strangers to the anatomy of genius, they had demonstrated the distinctive cytoarchitecture of Broca’s (language) area in the brain of Emil Krebs, who fluently spoke more than sixty languages.²⁵ With this international research team taking form, we invited Dr. Krauss to join us. He never responded and on December 2, 2009, he confirmed that he would not allow Einstein’s slides to leave the MCP. From that day forward, the largest extant collection of Einstein brain tissue ceased to be available (if it ever truly was) for open scholarly study. We were back at square one with no photos, no slides, and no brain tissue.

By October 2009 the Harvey family had narrowed the field down to Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS), Yale, Princeton, the Smithsonian Institution, or the AFIP as the future home of their father’s archives. On May 17, 2010, I had the unenviable privilege of informing my boss, Dean Peter Amenta of RWJMS, that our medical school was runner-up in the pursuit of the collection of Thomas S. Harvey, père. As spelled out in the letter of Thomas J. Harvey, son and executor, the Einstein materials were going to “the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which is part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.” Fifty-five years after the failed strong-arm tactics of Dr. Webb Haymaker of the AFIP and nine years after Adrianne Noe’s futile bid on behalf of the AFIP and the NMHM for the Einstein materials, the AFIP had at last won out … or had it?

In its heyday the AFIP was the mecca of diagnosis, teaching, and research in pathology. As a University of Virginia neurology resident, I dutifully made the pilgrimage from Charlottesville to Washington, DC, and spent a week learning the rudiments of neuropathology from AFIP pathologists while studying the magisterial green and tan AFIP brain tumor monographs. The AFIP’s mission of research was world-renowned, and its tissue repository contained fifty-five million glass slides, thirty-one million paraffin blocks, and more than five hundred thousand wet tissue samples.²⁶ By 2005 federal budget priorities were changing, and the disestablishment of the once mighty AFIP began in earnest. The decline was irrevocable, and on September 15, 2011, the AFIP closed its doors after 150 years. In the past the AFIP had been inextricably interlinked with the Army Medical Museum, which was the forerunner of the NMHM. From the perspective of the NMHM, the formidable research operations of the AFIP were slowly receding from sight in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and in 2011 they vanished altogether. When Adrianne Noe drove to Titusville in June 2010 to pick up the boxes of Einstein materials and deliver them to the NMHM, the Harvey family was unaware of the imminent demise of the AFIP-NMHM partnership. Without this partnership, future collaborative research on Einstein’s brain would be imperiled.

The NMHM, if not the soon-to-be-defunct AFIP, was the clear winner of the Einstein sweepstakes. And our primary object was to gain access to the NMHM’s prize acquisition. Here, we ran head-on into Dr. Noe’s curatorial prerogative, which, for the time being, prevailed over research initiatives. For example, although Einstein’s brain was arguably the NMHM’s most important holding (with the bullet that killed Lincoln running a close second), the museum did not publicly acknowledge the Harvey bequest until more than two years after the fact. (This tactic beggared credulity, and I later told Adrianne that this would be as if Thomas Hoving had kept the imminent blockbuster King Tut exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under his hat in 1976 … of course, he didn’t, and eight million attended!) The Harvey family supported our efforts and wrote, “We believe that it should be possible for Dr. Lepore and his partners to carry out their study with the National Museum of Health and Medicine as the custodian of the material.”²⁷ Nevertheless, multiple requests to examine the cartons from Cleora Wheatley’s cellar elicited vague and evasive responses from Dr. Noe and the NMHM that appeared to be stalling for time. Admittedly, the NMHM was being relocated to a new building at Fort Detrick in Silver Spring, Maryland, and some delay was inevitable. However, over a year had elapsed since the boxes had left Titusville, and no publications, exhibits, or public announcements regarding the Einstein acquisitions had issued forth from the NMHM. On July 29, 2011, bursting with impatience, I wrote Adrianne Noe again, requesting a full day to examine the Einstein materials and remonstrating that “the Einstein materials are too important to be withheld from the scientific community any longer.”

Eventually (very eventually!), Dr. Noe graciously acceded to my request, and the NMHM threw its doors open for Dean Falk and me on September 12, 2011. We learned that the NMHM is very different from most museums and is administered by the Department of Defense. It is part of Fort Detrick, the current host of the U.S. Biological Defense Program, and as we drove past sentries, we were informed that no photographs of the grounds were permitted. Undeterred, in the eight fleeting hours granted to us, we pored over 567 microscope slides, documents that included Einstein’s Last Will and Testament, and dozens of hitherto unknown and unpublished photographs of Einstein’s whole and partly dissected brain that Dr. Harvey had taken in the spring of 1955. For more than a half century, the records surrounding Einstein’s autopsy had been out of bounds to scholarly inquiry and questions were rampant. Did Einstein’s will forbid the study of his brain? No. Did the collection contain more than the five photographs of the brain published by Witelson in 1999? Yes, many more. Were there any microscope slides stained to show the myelinated “wiring” (composed of axons and dendrites) of brain cells? Yes. Did the executor of Einstein’s estate or religious authorities criticize Dr. Harvey? Yes. And on and on. Over the course of eight hours, we found answers to questions persisting since 1955 and set the course for future investigations into the neural underpinnings of Einstein’s genius. The intellectual exhilaration experienced on that day in Silver Spring was scientific exploration at its most invigorating. As a clinical scientist, my closest experience to the pure discovery of the newfound Einstein archives was on a field expedition to the Mariana Islands in the remote Western Pacific. There, I examined dozens of patients and wrote the first comprehensive description of the neuro-ophthalmological findings in Lytico-Bodig, an invariably fatal (and now, thankfully, vanishing) neurological disease of the indigenous Chamorran people.²⁸

The myriad notes and digital photographs we took that sunny September day would provide the foundation for our discovery of Albert Einstein’s astonishing brain anatomy. Months of work lay ahead of us. Before we can proceed any further toward an account of our findings and the frontiers of neuroscience, however, we must go back in time to April 18, 1955, and turn our attention to a seventy-six-year-old physicist with an inoperably ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm and to an audacious college-town pathologist waiting in the wings.