#187 Albert Einstein

Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered, so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration. But there was one part of his body that was not cremated. In a drama that would seem fake were not so horrifying. Einstein's brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic. Hours after his death, a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton hospital, Thomas Harvey.

When he stitched the body back up, Harvey decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein's brain and keep it. The next morning in a fifth grade class at Princeton School, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard. Einstein died, said one girl, Eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information. But she quickly found herself topped by an unusually quiet boy who sat in the back of the class.

My dad's got his brain, he said. Einstein's family was horrified. Harvey insisted that there may be scientific value to studying the brain. Einstein would have wanted that, he said. Einstein сан

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