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Driving Mr. Albert
You've all heard the scientific folktale about Einstein's brain, right? In l955, during an autopsy after the great man's death, Einsten's brain was removed from his body, ostensibly to be studied for clues to his genius. The tale varies and gets murky after that, but most versions have it that the brain supposedly disappeared and was languishing in some file cabinet or basement.
Some rumors had it that the brain had been cut up and parts resided in various attics and garages around the United States and Canada. Other parts were said to be in the posession of the controversial doctor who performed the autopsy, an odd old man who had vanished from public view. Einstein's family, went the tales, wanted no part of his brain, or of the notion that anything could be learned from it.
Freelance writer Michael Paterniti heard the rumor, along with almost everyone else in America who is interested in science and/or technology, and was fascinated by it. He happened to mention it to his landlord in New Mexico, who didn't even blink. "Yeah," said the landlord, "the guy with the brain lives next to William (Burroughs, the writer) in Kansas. He used to be a pathologist."
So it turns out a shocking percentage of the rumor was true and soon thereafter, Paterniti tracked down the pathologist and the brain (which was stored in formaldehyde-filled Tupperware jars in New Jersey, and offered to drive him to California, where the doctor wanted to take it to Einstein's grand-daughter. Soon the two were barrelling across America in Paterniti's Buick Skylark headed for California, munching donuts, staying in cheap motels, the brain bouncing along in the trunk.
One of the amazing thing about this story is that it could have been any one of us who heard the rumor, checked it out and ended up with the brain in the trunks of our cars. But not all of us could have written so terrific and haunting a book. "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain," details the journey of Paterniti and the bizarre octogenarian Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who impulsively separated Einstein and his brain during the latter's autopsy and hid it in various garages and basements for four decades while lawyers and ethicists fought over what to do about it, then essentially forgot that it existed.
Dr. Harvey, it turns out, is a man of few words, hardly any of them lucid or revealing. Most of them are phrases like "Way-ell, it sure has been a wonderful specimen."
Harvey, no longer a physician, bounced around the country, ending up working in a plastics factory, and can't really give a lucid accounting of why he took the brain or what he really intended to do with it. One gets the sense though that the act -- branded by some as ghoulish thievery -- ended up ruining his life in some way that even he couldn't describe. But those details don't really matter. In the hands of Paterniti, this is a surreal yarn about myth, genius, desire science and the great rewards of curiousity. There's a wonderful hacker quality to Paterniti, a mystery-solver who can't rest until he figures out the puzzle of what happened to the brain bouncing around in the Tupperware jars, the only remaining physical legacy of the century's greatest thinker.
Although nothing all that dramatic happens on the trek across America -- the odd couple stops and visits with the writer Burroughs and Paterniti can't help exclaiming to incredulous strangers all along the way what's in the trunk of the car -- the writing more than carries the yarn, as when Paterniti describes his first encounter with the loopy Dr. Harvey:
"Harvey appeared from the darkness with a big cardboard box in his hands. Then he set it down and, one at a time, pulled out two large glass cookie jars full of what looked to be very chunky chicken soup in a golden broth: Einstein's brain chopped into pieces ranging from the size of a turkey to a dime...And then he noticed me, noticing. Perhaps he saw my fascination, too, or maybe he was mad at himself for revealing so much, after all. Dr. Thomas Harvey had spent these last decades invisible to most of the world. He immediately gathered the cookie jars back up, returned them to the box, and Quasimodoed from the room, leaving me nothing but the after-vision. Flashes of bright light, the chill of a visitation."
As great as the writing, and as funny as Paterniti can be, he also knows he has a poignant tale to tell, about the boundless fascination the world holds for one of its most amazing minds. In what other country in the world could this possibly have happened? And what would Einstein himself have made of the spectacle of his brain tissue being carted all over the country for decades in plastic jars? Harvey, Paterniti comes to believe, just couldn't bear to put the great mind into the ground and hoped that somebody somewhere might unlock the key to Einstein's genius. And the hapless pathologist paid for his impulse, spending the rest of his life in controversy, then obscurity. Paterniti is always conscious of Einstein, his sorry personal life and his eerie presence every step of the way.
"Driving Mr. Albert" was initially published as a magazine piece, and in a narrative sense, it comes up a bit short as a full-fledged book. But it's a great magazine piece, and a surprisingly powerful and entertaining story. Paterniti is a very fine writer, and he showed amazing, almost inspirational, enterprise in getting to Einstein's brain. The story of the brain's final trek -- it does find a home, Harvey's untimately revealed purpose in letting Paterniti into his life -- is a brilliant rendering of one of the most bizarre folktales in modern science. You cannot spend a better afternoon or evening this summer than in reading this book (soon to be a major motion picture, by the way).
purchase this book at fatbrain.
"Would you like it if someone kept a piece of one of your relatives after they died? Without even asking your permission or letting you know what they were doing?"
Wandering off-topic a bit, this is pretty much the same thing that happened in the Middle Ages to people who were deemed destined for sainthood -- people would dismember their corpses for relics. In some cases, the whole body was systematically chopped up into preserved parts.
The church, IIRC, didn't share your opinion of this practice -- most holy places kept reliquaries with these little bits o' saint (among other things, like Saint Soandso's chamberpot, or the ubiquitous "pieces of the True Cross"). A good reliquary would enhance the prestige of these holy places -- the same sort of logic as a trophy case in a high school, I suppose.
This sort of thing is really fascinating about human nature. We imbue objects with the significance of events or people they were associated with. Why? In some cases -- like Einstein's brain -- there is no more historical evidence to be obtained from it, but there is still that mystical quality.
BTW, don't embalmers remove the brain anyway?
phil
Here's another piece to this (sorry...)
h tml
Dr. Sandra Witelson of McMaster University did some of the work on Einstein's brain. I attended a talk by her a few months back, which was quite interesting. There is a review/summary of the talk at:
http://www-msu.mcmaster.ca/sil/20_01_00/einstein.
Her work involves studying the effect of brain morphology on function, and yes, they did in fact find differences in his brain. (And yes, he'd agreed to donate his brain to researchers before he died)
*Insightful*? Gods below.
When you die, what's left is meat, bones, and miscellaneous scrap. Why in the world is this garbage worthy of respect? Would it have been more "respectful" (I threw those in for you, quoteboy) to have incinerated this brain? Would it have been more "respectful" to have pumped the body full of preservative chemicals and sealed it in an overpriced box, to be buried in the ground?
If someone has some "scientific" use for body parts after the body has died, by all means, let him use them.
Let's hope not, but we've all seen what can happen in the name of "science".
You mean like vaccines, organ transplants, blood transfusions, and cures to crippling diseases?
Hey everyone, let's play Mad-Libs! Complete this sentence: We've all seen what can happen in the name of [abstract noun]!
remember reading in some Scientific American or some such magazine that researchers had determined that Einstein had a much higher percentage of Glial cells in his brain than does the average population.
Aye, but it's the old cause-and-effect argument again. Was his brain so significantly difference because he was such a genius or did he spend so much time contemplating the universe that parts of his brain were stimulated and enlarged? I believe that a lot of current theories support the latter, but at a guess I'd say it was a combination.
There seems to be a lot of research highlighting the differences between Al's brain and mere mortal's brains. I wonder if you took any two brains from the population would you find significant differences? Just a thought.
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I read this article when it first appeared a couple years ago. It was entertaining as a story, and the writing was descriptive and clear. But it never tackled any of the deeper questions like /.ers are covering on ethics of carving out a dead corpse's brain and hiding it away. When I heard the author/adventurer was going to rewrite it as a book, I was hopeful he would put some thought into it and at least ask some of the questions, even if he didn't directly draw conclusions. From the J-K review, it sounds disappointing the issues were ignored.
Does anyone have a reference to the original series of articles? It would be interesting to find it published on the web somewhere, but all my searches turn up reviews of the book.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Einstein helped shape quantum mechanics. He took the formulae and derived results from them which are completely counterintuitive - most of these results could be proven by experiment afterwards.
Einstein was of the opinion that quantum mechanics wasnt the pretty everything-and-the-kitchen-sink theory, but he accepted that it had correct results.
Did you ever hear of e.g. Bose-Einstein condensation (atom laser) or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rose (EPR) paradoxon, both results predicted by Einstein and observed only during the last few years.
Quantum mechanics wouldnt be what it is today - physics best thought through (even though not understood) and tested theory, hadnt it been for Einsteins permanent criticism.
From the Marine Mammal Myths page:
The brain of the sperm whale weighs 7,800g, the elephant's weighs 7,500g, man's weighs 1,500g, the dolphin's 840g, and the brain of a mouse weighs 0,4g. If these figures are used to determine intelligence, then the sperm whale and the elephant are five times as intelligent as man, who in turn is twice as intelligent as the dolphin, which in turn is 2,000 times as intelligent as a mouse. Should we rank animals in order of how large their brains are in relation to their body weight, then the mouse would come out on top with its brain comprising 3.2%, the dolphin's 0.9% and the sperm whale's 0,021%. Neither absolute brain weight nor the relationship between brain weight and body size provide us with sensible criteria for comparing the intelligence of different species.
Not bad. This is the kind of response that might prove useful to trolls when they grow out of their juvenile insensitivity.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I believe that respect for the dead is a meaningful concept. However, I also believe that the dead are gone, permanently, and that god -- if any such thing exists -- doesn't really care what we do with their bodies.
Therefore, respect for mortal remains is valuable only insofar as it respects the wishes of the living (either to comfort the survivors or quell the fears of the not-dead-yet). If Einstein volunteered his brain for research, and his family never complained, then I see nothing morally offensive about what was done with it.
Pragmatically wasteful, maybe.
(though maybe not, if we can study the brain more expertly than we could have had it been decanted right away)
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Shouldn't it be a "science" piece? At least then we'd have a picture of good 'ol Al.
(I know. Realistically it should be Enlightenment or some such).
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
how much of his own and other people's time did Einstein waste with his misdirected GUT work, the cosmological constant, and arguing against quantum mechanics?
How is arguing against a scientific theory a waste of time? Scientific theories which go unchallenged are worthless, no matter which side is correct, popular, orthodox, etc.
-- Sigs are for losers
If Einstein wanted his oblivious, dead parts chopped up for medical study, then it is respectful to honor his wishes. If Einstein wanted his intact corpse to wither in a beautiful box, society should also honor those wishes.
Regardless of what his wishes were, the uniqueness of if his brain and the inability of his corpse to defend itself, does not give any society the right to ignore his desires.
Maybe someone could provide some info on what Einstein's true intentions were. Either way, society should honor the man by honoring his individual choice.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
the size of a turkey? Last time I bought a turkey, it was larger than two human brains. Is this a typo?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
There was another Slashdot story about the famous brain a while back.
Here is another book review by Craig Seligman of Salon.
And this is a whole site dedicated to the brain itself.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
...that part of the reason that Einstein was so brilliant in matters of physics is that he had a genetic defect that caused one part of his brain to never grow. The effect of this is that the area immediately adjacent to this section, which is the section of the brain responsible for spatial perception, was approximately 15% larger than in most human brains. This improved ability to process spatial relations allowed Einstein to think in 4 dimensions probably with nearly the same ease that we traditionally think in 3. (His great practice with the topic surely helped as well.)
Unfortunately, I can't remember any of the sources I got this from, so it could just all be rumor. Anyone have any ideas?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I already heard about taking a brain off its dead owner but at least "they" gave us some info about it, like its weight. :-(
Some typical celebrities brains are Russian writer Ivan Tourgueniev's (one of the heaviest now) which was almost 5 pounds (2,5kg) of French writer Anatole France which was amongst the lightest.
In Einstein case we don't even know how heavy it was but maybe it is because by studying M. France and Tourgueniev organs we already knew that size doesn't matter...
Anyway, carrying it in a plastic container sounds quite weird and I don't think it smelled good after some of these Tupperware meetings.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Oh, I found a link about Einstein's glial cells.
As for Einstein's brilliance. I think he truly was an intuitive genius having published five ground breaking papers in 1905 and devising SR and GR. Not to mention making an important argument in QM in the form of the EPR paradox which led John Bell to try to prove Einstein right though Bell ended up showing that QM is weird after all. He did however lack some advanced mathematical skills otherwise he wouldn't have required having mathematical assistants throughout his career.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I am an organ donor, and wouldn't hesitate to give my body to science. I hate the concept of cemeteries. I think there are much better ways to remember the dead than to fence them in and put a rock over their head.
What would be more hurtful to me is that people might argue about it as they have done with Einstei
It's really more a travelogue and portrait of the strange Dr Harvey than what I had been expecting, which was sort of America as Einstein would see it, through a lens of relativity and the mind-expanding concepts of quantum physics. (Initial reviews had suggested that Paterniti, thanks to having the brain in the trunk, had found himself almost channelling Einstein throughout the trip, which sounded fun).
That said, there are a few moments when he does engage in some quantum flights of fancy, and we do get lots of interesting tidbits from Einstein lore.
It's amusing to see what a muddle the scientific community made of the brain. First Harvey messed up the preservation, so all the DNA denatured. Then, after it became clear that there was nothing very special about the brain from a macro perpsective (which is pretty much what you would expect) rather than say, "okay, that's that", he perpetuated this cult of perpetual study, where fascinating findings were always around the corner. Sad, but a telling insight into human nature. In the end, Einstein's brain became a totem, attracting the sort of people who needed one.
Fatbrain. Highly appropriate