On this day in the New Scientist in 1979, Stephen Jay Gould contributed to the debate which had been raging about Einstein’s brain ever since the New Jersey Monthly found the elusive organ the year before in
a Mason jar packed in a cardboard box marked COSTA CIDER … under a beer cooler
Thomas Harvey, pathologist at the Princeton Hospital where Einstein had died (famously uttering his last words, in German, to a nurse who sadly didn’t speak German), “had the brain sectioned and distributed to various specialists”.
To be precise, he’d had it cut into 240 blocks, and had 12 sets of 200 slides made containing tissue samples, which had been distributed to “the great and the good of 1950s neuropathology”. (The whole New Jersey Monthly article is still online, incidentally, and well worth a read.)
Following its revelations, another esteemed organ, Science, covered it under the headline Brain That Rocked Physics Rests in Cider Box, quoting Levy:
They slightly skirt round the fact, though, that 23 years later, precisely bugger all had been published about the brain — presumably because, when not operational, there wasn’t a great deal it could tell them.
Gould considers all this — and the case of Georges Cuvier (The ‘Aristotle of French biology’), whose brain was also examined after his death — and concluded that people fixating on organ dissection as a means of understanding genius and its sources are wasting their time.
…but, most importantly, he concludes with these words:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
