because that was the only place we had.” As she added: “It was locked.” Hughes saw the brain regularly. Ehrich, the department chair, lectured on Saturdays, and she prepared his teaching materials: “I’d go in on a Saturday, get a cart, go to the closet, put six brains on it, put rubber gloves on, wash the brains off, put them on a metal plate, a pie plate, and give them out. The doctor-students would dissect them while Dr. Ehrich was speaking.” But information about the brain’s presence was restricted to those who needed to know. According to Hughes, “We were told not to mention to anybody that we had the brain in our lab, because they were actually afraid that it would be stolen.” Fox told her husband. “I told my mother, and she didn’t care,” said Hughes. Eventually, the whole brain was sectioned, “as far as we know,” Lepore told me in our later e-mail exchange. So it did leave Penn “in parts.” That phrase has its own visceral impact, but Harvey in fact had accurate dissections, responsibly done in a scientific and confidential manner by one of the best technicians of the day. After Harvey left Penn with his blocks and slides, Hughes said, “Dr. Ehrich wanted to have a plaque put up, stating the location at Penn where this work was performed.” Whether he never got around to making an official request or whether his request was turned down is not known.
reason for Einstein’s genius?” “None as far as I know,” Keller wrote. These findings concur with most research on Einstein’s brain from the start. For instance, its weight was normal (the relationship of brain weight or size and mental powers is an continuing question). In addition to preparing work for Harvey, Keller prepared slides for several clinical scientists around the country to whom Harvey sent them. Harry Zimmerman, his former mentor, received a set and noted that he did not expect to “find the cells that made him a genius.” According to Lepore, the other slide recipients apparently had nothing to report. Harvey’s own examination found “plaques and neurofibrillary tangles” associated with Alzheimer’s disease but “within normal limits for a man his age”; he apparently did not publish this result. Later studies, done with specimens from Einstein’s brain that Harvey provided to select scientists over the years, have shown that a “neural basis of intellect” still eludes us, Lepore concluded. But, he added, neuroscience is a young field and may
yet produce interesting links between the organ and intellectual creativity. If that happens, he suggested, Einstein’s brain may yet make a contribution. Harvey died in 2007, but nine years earlier he gave the remaining parts of the organ – some 170 of the original 240 celloidin blocks – to the Princeton Medical Center. Parts also are held at a brain bank assembled by the neuroscientist Sandra F. Witelson, Ph.D., at McMaster University; and, according to Lepore, at an institution that has requested anonymity. Based on what he has seen, Lepore credited Harvey for the “meticulous and systematic preservation of Einstein’s brain.” Which is exactly the conclusion that Penn’s former employees reached. “Dr. Harvey might have really managed to protect that tissue so that farther down the road, further studies could be made,” said Fox. “He may end up being the hero.”
Research results so far
Marta Keller wrote down her observations of the brain only after Edna Hughes posed some questions to her in a letter in 2000. Keller, who died at 96 two years later, remembered Einstein’s organ as “a perfectly healthy, normal adult brain.” Asked about its convolutions – as if the fissures might have patterns relating to intelligence or creativity – Keller said they were typical. Hughes also asked her about “any unusual conclusions reached, giving the
Top: Edna Hughes, second from right, and Monica Fox, right, with Graduate School of Medicine students. Bottom: In the foreground is the wheel of the histology lab’s Sartorius microtome, used for slicing brains for slides. From left to right, Edna Hughes, Marta Keller, Donna Liormanas, and Barbara J. Smith.
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