Albert Einstein’s brain became the center of a decades-long, controversial afterlife after his death. When Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76, he had just faced a painful choice about extending life, famously telling doctors he preferred to pass away on his own terms rather than undergo surgery. He had clearly instructed that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered privately to prevent the rise of public shrines or symbols of reverence. Yet these wishes were not honored in the immediate aftermath.
During the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, chief pathologist Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain without explicit permission from the family. Harvey, whose expertise lay in general pathology rather than brain science, later offered several explanations: he claimed to have assumed consent had been granted, believed the brain should be studied for science, and felt a responsibility to preserve it. However, contemporary reports and later historical research show that no clear authorization existed at the moment of removal. Only days later did Harvey obtain retroactive consent from Einstein’s eldest son, Hans Albert Einstein, and that approval came with strict caveats: any research should be conducted in the scientific interest and results published in reputable journals. By then, Einstein’s stated wishes had already been breached.
Harvey did not stop with the brain. He reportedly removed Einstein’s eyeballs as well, later handing them to Einstein’s ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams. Those eyes are said to remain in a New York safe deposit box, a detail that adds to the era’s eerie myths surrounding Einstein’s remains. Within months of the autopsy, Princeton Hospital dismissed Harvey, in part because he refused to return the brain to the institution.
Hans Albert Einstein accepted Harvey’s explanations, but the hospital’s director did not. Harvey left Princeton with Einstein’s brain in his custody as his professional standing began to crumble. What followed was not a controlled research program but decades of haphazard handling. Harvey photographed the brain, weighed it, and cut it into roughly 240 pieces. He preserved the fragments in jars and created microscope slides—12 sets in total—without formal institutional oversight.
Some samples were sent to researchers; most stayed with Harvey. Over the years, the brain traveled with him as he moved between jobs and cities, reportedly stored in containers ranging from laboratory jars to a beer cooler. For a long time, few findings emerged. The first major study based on Einstein’s brain appeared in 1985, three decades after his death, led by neuroscientist Marian Diamond. It reported an unusual neuron-to-glial-cell ratio in certain cortical regions and suggested this cellular balance might relate to cognitive abilities.
Media coverage at the time was sensational, implying a magical neural secret behind E = mc². Within the scientific community, however, the reaction was more measured. Critics argued that conclusions drawn from a single brain—without robust control samples or consistent methodology—could not reliably explain intelligence. “You can’t take just one brain of someone who is different from everyone else, and say, ‘Ah-ha, I’ve found the thing,’” noted Terence Hines, a psychologist who has long criticized the Einstein brain research. He dismissed such claims as unconvincing. Still, additional anatomical differences were identified in later analyses.
A 2013 study co-authored by anthropologist Dean Falk reported that Einstein’s corpus callosum—the fiber bundle connecting the brain’s two hemispheres—was thicker in certain areas than in control groups, hinting at greater inter-hemispheric communication. Falk also noted variations in Einstein’s frontal and parietal lobes, including an extra ridge in the mid-frontal region associated with planning and working memory, and asymmetry in the parietal regions tied to spatial reasoning.
Another frequently cited feature was a pronounced “omega sign” on the right motor cortex, a trait sometimes observed in left-handed musicians, which aligns with Einstein’s lifelong violin playing. Yet researchers repeatedly caution against drawing direct causal links between these brain traits and genius. No two brains are identical, and many highlighted features fall within the broad spectrum of normal variation.
Harvey himself acknowledged in 1978 that all early research indicated Einstein’s brain fell within normal limits for a man of his age, though he did not publish this promptly. Over time, the narrative shifted from neuroscience to curiosity and myth. In 1978, journalist Steven Levy located Harvey in Wichita, Kansas, after learning the brain was missing from Princeton. When Levy requested photographs, Harvey instead opened a cooler containing jars of tissue, a moment that revived public intrigue and scrutiny.
Relayed in works such as Postcards from the Brain Museum by Brian Burrell and Finding Einstein’s Brain by Frederick Lepore, the story is reconstructed from archival records, interviews, and decades of reporting on Harvey’s custody. Harvey lived until 2007, passing away at 94. By then, portions of Einstein’s brain had moved from private possession into public institutions: the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia received 46 sections, and other fragments were sent to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, bringing the brain’s long, strange journey into formal collections to a close.
What remains is not a definitive key to genius, but a peculiar historical episode. A mind renowned for changing science spent forty years divided into jars, studied sporadically, debated endlessly, and ultimately taught us more about society’s obsession with genius than about the nature of genius itself. Would you agree that this episode reveals more about human curiosity and ethics than about biological genius, or do you see a still-unrevealed scientific insight hidden in Einstein’s brain?
