When Albert Einstein died on April 18th, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed the autopsy. He was supposed to determine the cause of death. He was not supposed to keep the brain. He kept the brain.

Harvey removed it during the autopsy, weighed it, and then, without asking the family or the hospital, took it home. When Princeton found out, he lost his position. When Einstein's son Hans Albert found out, he reluctantly granted retroactive permission for scientific study, on one condition: that the results be published in reputable scientific journals. Harvey agreed.

Then he disappeared with the brain for forty-three years.

Harvey lost his medical licence in 1988 after failing a competency exam. He lost his marriages. He moved from New Jersey to Kansas, where he worked in a plastics factory. He kept Einstein's brain in a cider box under a beer cooler in his office.

Over the decades, he sliced the brain into two hundred and forty blocks and mounted them on microscope slides. He mailed pieces to researchers who wrote to ask for samples, once sending a chunk to a UC Berkeley professor in a mayonnaise jar. He drove across America with the rest in a duffel bag in the trunk of his car. In 1997, a journalist named Michael Paterniti convinced Harvey to drive with him from Princeton to California to deliver a piece of the brain to Einstein's granddaughter, Evelyn. She declined to keep it.

The science that emerged from the brain was inconclusive at best. Some researchers claimed Einstein's parietal lobes were unusually large. Others said the differences were within normal range. The definitive study of genius that Harvey had promised never materialised.

In 1998, Harvey, now eighty-five years old, returned what remained of the brain to Princeton Hospital. He had kept it for forty-three years. He had published nothing.

Thomas Harvey died in 2007. He was ninety-four. The brain he took is now split across several institutions, with slides at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland.

Albert Einstein had asked to be cremated. His ashes were scattered in the Delaware River. His brain never got the memo.

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