After Albert Einstein's death in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey at Princeton Hospital conducted an autopsy in which he removed Albert Einstein's brain. Rather than putting the brain back in the body, Harvey decided to keep it for study. Harvey did not have permission to keep Einstein's brain, but days later, he convinced Einstein's son that it would help science.
After losing his job, Harvey took the brain to a Philadelphia hospital, where a technician sectioned it into over two hundred blocks and embedded the pieces in celloidin using a variation of the Economo method. Harvey gave some of the pieces to Harry Zimmerman, and placed the remainder in two formalin-filled jars, which he stored in the basement of his house in Princeton.
He would try to interest a brain researcher in his quest, but most of the inquiries he fielded came from reporters. Whenever they asked what was being done, Harvey would confidently proclaim that he was just one year away from publishing his results. He would continue to give the same answer for the next forty years.
In the early 1990s, Harvey returned to Princeton, his wanderings not quite over. In 1997 when he embarked on a cross-country road trip with a freelance magazine writer named Michael Paterniti. Harvey wanted to meet Einstein's granddaughter in California. When he met the granddaughter, Harvey toyed with the idea of giving her the brain. He even left it at her house accidentally. But she didn't want it.
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