Driving Mr Albert; A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

Driving Mr Albert; A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Paterniti, Michael. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780316648585.

It is the strangest road trip of them all - two men, four thousand mile journey, and the most celebrated brain of the 20th century. As the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on April 17th 1955, it was Thomas Harveys job to carry out the autopsy on Albert Einstein. It must have been a humbling experience , coming face to face with the world-famous physicist, whose theory of relativity was so complex it was fourteen years before it was understood enough to be verified. Whos to say what inspired Harvey - greed or beneficence, pettiness or awe - but in an instance that was to shape his life forever, he cut the brain out of Einsteins head and removed it for himself. Harvey chopped the brain into two hundred pieces, gave a third away, and kept the rest hidden in glass jars. Floating in murky formaldehyde. Until 1997 when, aged eighty-four, Harvey decided the brain should be taken to Berkeley, to Einsteins grand daughter Evelyn. It fell to the writer Michael Paterniti to drive him the four thousand miles from New Jersey to California. This is his chronicle of those events.