Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain (review)

Sometime in the mid-1970s, what at the time seemed like two noteworthy specimens arrived on the surgical pathology bench during the same week, a week I had been assigned to put up such specimens as part of my pathology residency. In those days, the professional hockey team in the town where I was training was fresh off of a Stanley Cup Championship, so there was more than the usual interest in the two sets of "bone chips" that came to me. Indeed, these "joint mice" had been removed from the elbows of two star hockey players on that team. The thought occurred to a resident making around $15,000 per year that bone chips from two local sports heroes might fetch a handsome price as relics—but I can comfortably report that I suppressed that brief entrepreneurial flash and handled the specimens just like any of the others that had to be processed that week. But I do wonder what those specimens were worth then in a post-Stanley Cup market . . . or what comparable relics would be worth now when the same hockey team makes headlines only for firing its coach each year. Value is relative.

It is, quite aptly, onto a panorama of cultural relativism that Carolyn Abraham crafts her account of the journey taken by an even more notable anatomic relic, the brain of a 20th-century icon, Albert Einstein. Although it may be the literal movement of the famous physicist's organ through the time and space of contemporary America that occupies Abraham's absorbing narrative, that preserved mass of protoplasm comes in her work to reflect the relative values of those whose paths it happens to cross from the moment is was removed during Einstein's autopsy at Princeton Hospital on April 18, 1955, up to the present moment. As the metaphorical centerpiece of Abraham's intricate presentation, Einstein's brain posthumously comes to elaborate another sort of relativity thesis, one that owes its value to Abraham's sensitivity, her thorough research, and her impartial journalism. I suspect Abraham's narrative also presents a vision of the relative that the great physicist himself might have appreciated.

Among the questions that emerge from Abraham's novel treatment of her subject are many that will engage those interested the cultural and historical contexts of modern science. For example, the book explores—rather tangentially but persistently—the relative importance of key individuals in scientific discovery, as opposed to scientific progress' being the result of tiny and even fitful cumulative steps from aggregates of sometimes anonymous workers over the course of time. This particular theme finds its fullest manifestation in the person of Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the Einstein autopsy and took the decisive step of saving the brain, a move that has been criticized and condemned by some but applauded by others as a prerequisite to vital inquiries that might be made into the structural basis of genius. For as decisive as this initial step was, Harvey's subsequent decisions have seemingly been plagued by desultoriness and even paralysis. Harvey becomes, essentially, the self-appointed custodian of the brain tissue, and he doles it out through the years with a curious mixture of parsimony and generosity, selecting recipients either haphazardly or according to criteria that elude most observers. In the figure of Harvey, we thus have a personification of two differing views of science: one in which a controlling individual may be dominant—at times even imperious; and another in which any direction that may be afforded by controlling forces is more passive or coincidental. As with Harvey himself, either possibility can be true; the answer remains impenetrably mysterious.

But then Harvey simultaneously represents another related kind of symbolic tension. A practicing Quaker, Harvey's personal self-worth appears to derive more from the...