Transcript
Introduction
"Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration, but there is one part of his body that was not cremated. In a drama that would seem fake or 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’s son, unsure what legal and practical rights he now had in this matter, reluctantly went along."
"Soon, Harvey was besieged by those who wanted Einstein's brain or a piece of it. He was summoned to Washington to meet officials of the U.S. Army's pathology unit. But despite their request, he refused to show them his prized possession. Guarding it had become a mission. Harvey decided to have friends at the University of Pennsylvania turn part of it into microscopic slides. And so he put Einstein's brain now chopped into pieces into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his Ford."
"Over the years, in the bizarre process, Harvey would send off slides or chunks of the remaining brain to random researchers who struck his fancy. In the meantime, he quit Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple times and moved around, often leaving no forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein's brain always with him."
"In 1998, after 43 years as the wandering guardian of Einstein's brain, Thomas Harvey, by then 86, decided it was time to pass on the responsibility. So he called the person who currently held his old job as pathologist at Princeton Hospital and went by to drop it off."
Okay. So that was an excerpt from the epilogue of the book that I'm going to talk about today, which is Einstein: His Life and Universe, and it was written by Walter Isaacson. Okay. So before we jump back into the book, I want to tell you how this fits into everything else that we've been talking about. One thing that I read about Steve Jobs that I thought was really interesting was the fact that he would learn from every experience and then bring everything he learned from every experience back to Apple. And he said something about J. Robert Oppenheimer that I thought was really interesting. And I'm going to read directly from -- this is actually another book written by as Isaacson, it's Steve Jobs biography.