The strange story of Einstein’s brain – PBS NewsHour
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Dr. Howard Markel Dr. Howard Markel
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On one of the last days of his life, Albert Einstein was busy at his desk.
He was working on a national television address marking Israel’s seventh anniversary as a sovereign nation and Jewish homeland, his views shaped by his own experience being targeted by and escaping Hitler’s Germany. As he sat and wrote, the Nobel-winning physicist began experiencing severe chest and belly pain; the most important artery in his body burst like a worn-out rubber tire.
That “blowout” then sheared – or dissected – along the rest of the blood vessel, a dire situation that typically leads to death by exsanguination. Today this event is routinely treated with an arduous multi-hour surgery to replace the damaged blood vessel with artificial conduit made out of Dacron. In the early 1950s, these graft operations were still being perfected by surgeons and undergoing it remained almost as risky as the untreated condition.
This great mind maintained a realistic outlook on his own mortality. “I want to go when I want to go,” Einstein told his doctors. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go.”
Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm on April 18, 1955. He was 76.
Smoking makes one roughly eight times more likely to develop an aneurysm; Einstein was a devotee to pipe-smoking. He was typically enveloped in a cloud of smoke when he took his daily constitutional walks across the Princeton University campus. Along the way, he might stoop to pick up stray cigarette butts, pull out the tobacco left in them, and place it in his pipe for a free smoke. In an era before tobacco was widely linked to cancer, Einstein insisted that smoking “contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.”
Photo by George Rinhart/ Corbis via Getty Images
Soon after his death — an event that made front-page news around the world — rumors began to spread that Einstein’s death was caused by syphilis. (The late stages of this sexually transmitted infection can lead to aortic aneurysms.) Einstein may have been a man of many affairs, but his autopsy revealed no evidence of syphilis in his body or brain.
Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany into a secular, Jewish family. The boy did not speak full sentences until he was 5 years old and his parents worried that he might be developmentally delayed. That year, Einstein was given a compass, which he found captivating, thus beginning his lifelong exploration into the unseen forces guiding the world and universe. At 12, he loved to read what he called his “sacred little geometry book.”
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Einstein spent the first decade of the 20th century bouncing from job to job, tutoring and serving as a low-level patent officer in Bern. He became a Swiss citizen during this period and completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Zurich. Everything began to change after 1905 when the 26-year-old clerk published his first four papers in Annalen der Physik. His first wife, Mileva Marić, helped him plot out and write these papers without attribution or credit. One of them included the famous equation E=mc2; another described the photoelectric effect, a discovery that won him a Nobel Prize in 1921.
After working as a professor and scholar in Zurich, Prague and Berlin, he was offered a prestigious appointment in 1932 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he hoped to split his time between Berlin and the United States. As he traveled, first to Belgium and then England, he learned of the Nazi propaganda offensive against his work and character. His home was ransacked by Nazi brownshirts on the premise that he was hiding a large cache of weapons in his basement. Even the Prussian Academy of Sciences, his former academic home, denounced his scientific work and expelled him.
From England, Einstein sailed to the United States, escaping likely death. As he told the press in 1933, “I do not want to remain in a state where individuals are not conceded equal rights before the law for freedom of speech and doctrine.” That same year, the German Student Union instigated the burning of Einstein’s books, along with the works of other prominent Jewish writers, including Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka.
The combination of Einstein’s brilliance, engaging personality and heroic stance against a murderous despot made him one of the first scientific stars of the 20th century. He spent the rest of his life in Princeton, expounding on relativity, war, and peace, forging ahead in his research, and hob-knobbing with all types of celebrities and leaders. One such intimate was Charlie Chaplin — then one of the most famous men in the world.
READ MORE: How Galileo’s groundbreaking works got banned
As a point of disclosure, I have been fascinated with Dr. Albert Einstein since I was a little boy growing up in Oak Park, Michigan, in the 1960s. (It hardly hurt that, at the time, I attended Albert Einstein Elementary School.)
This belated eulogy now must turn decidedly weird. It begins with Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who was on call and conducted Einstein’s autopsy. While most of Einstein’s body was cremated shortly after his death, his ashes spread in an undisclosed location, Harvey removed Einstein’s brain from the autopsy suite for further study without initial permission from the family. (He did obtain permission after the fact from Hans Einstein, Albert’s eldest son.)
Pathologist Thomas Harvey holds the brain of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein in a jar in Kansas in 1994. Harvey performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955, and retained parts of the brain for scientific study. Photo by Michael Brennan/Getty Images
After dissecting and photographing Einstein’s brain, some of it was carefully sliced and made into microscopic slides. Harvey stored much of the preserved brain in a jar in a cider box.
As Frederick Lepore reported in his 2018 book, “Finding Einstein’s Brain,” the dissected brain was ultimately returned to the Einstein heirs, who promptly donated it to the Mütter Medical Museum in Philadelphia.
Harvey, who later lost his medical license after failing an exam, thought mere neuroanatomy and cellular structure alone could help define genius. His grand conclusion: Einstein’s brain looked “different” from most brains, ergo it must have functioned differently. Although other researchers have confirmed some of these differences, none of it has fundamentally explained Einstein’s beautiful mind. The pathologist might have benefitted from reading the blackboard in Einstein’s office that supposedly carried the quote: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Left: Albert Einstein holding a pipe. Photo via Getty Images
By Nsikan Akpan
By Andrew Wagner
By PBS NewsHour
Dr. Howard Markel Dr. Howard Markel
Dr. Howard Markel writes a monthly column for the PBS NewsHour, highlighting momentous historical events that continue to shape modern medicine. He is the director of the Center for the History of Medicine and the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix” (W.W. Norton, September ’21).
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