Thomas Stoltz Harvey

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Stoltz Harvey was the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on the morning of the 18th of April 1955, when the most famous brain in the world came into his hands. Albert Einstein had died overnight, and Harvey performed the autopsy at 8:00 am. What happened next would define the rest of Harvey's long life. He removed Einstein's brain, preserved it, and held onto it for decades. Whether that made him a dedicated servant of science or something more troubling is a question that has never fully been resolved. Who gave permission? Who had the right? And what, in the end, did the study of that brain actually tell us?

• 2. Yale and Tuberculosis

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  Harvey's education began at Yale University, first as an undergraduate and later as a medical student under a physician named Dr. Harry Zimmerman. In his third year of medical school, Harvey contracted tuberculosis. The disease forced him to spend the next year bedridden in a sanatorium. Harvey later called that year one of the biggest disappointments of his life. It was a formative detour, and he emerged from it to complete his training and eventually land the position at Princeton Hospital that would alter everything.

• 3. The Brain in 170 Pieces

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  Einstein's brain weighed 1,230 grams at the time of autopsy, a figure that placed it squarely within the normal range for a human brain. Harvey carried the organ to a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent three full months sectioning it into 170 pieces. Those pieces were then sliced into microscopic slivers, mounted on glass slides, and stained for study. Twelve complete sets of slides were produced, each containing hundreds of individual preparations. Harvey kept two complete sets for his own research and distributed the remaining sets to pathologists he personally selected. No permission for the removal had been given by Einstein or his family at the time Harvey acted. When the family learned what had happened, they granted permission for the study to continue, but only on the condition that findings be published in scientific journals and not sensationalized.

• 4. Decades on the Road

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  In August 1978, a reporter named Steven Levy published an article in New Jersey Monthly titled "I Found Einstein's Brain," based on an interview with Harvey conducted while Harvey was working at a medical test laboratory in Wichita, Kansas. Harvey retired in 1988 and moved to Lawrence, Kansas, near the writer William Burroughs. By 1996, Harvey had relocated again, this time from Weston, Missouri to Titusville in Hopewell Township, Mercer County, New Jersey. That same decade, the 1994 documentary Relics: Einstein's Brain recorded a visit from Kinki University Professor Sugimoto Kenji, who asked Harvey for a piece of the brain. Harvey agreed, sliced a portion of the brain stem, and handed it over on camera. In 1998, Harvey delivered the remaining uncut portion of the brain to Dr. Elliot Krauss, a pathologist at University Medical Center at Princeton. In 2005, marking the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death, the 92-year-old Harvey gave interviews from his home in New Jersey about the brain's long journey.

• 5. What the Slides Revealed

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  Marian Diamond and her associates at a laboratory that made thin sections of the brain, each 6 micrometers thick, used a microscope to count the cells. Their finding was that Einstein's brain had more glial cells relative to neurons across the areas they studied. Glial cells provide support and nutrition in the brain, form myelin, and participate in signal transmission alongside neurons. Only in one specific location, the left inferior parietal area, was the difference statistically significant. That region belongs to the association cortex, the part of the brain responsible for integrating and synthesizing information from multiple other areas. Diamond's own published study, titled "On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein," noted that a stimulating environment can increase the proportion of glial cells, and she raised the possibility that Einstein's decades of intensive scientific work may have contributed to the elevated ratio. She also acknowledged a fundamental limit: she had only one Einstein to compare against eleven control brains.

• 6. A Study Under Scrutiny

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  Diamond's study attracted serious criticism from within the research community. S. S. Kantha of the Osaka Bioscience Institute challenged its conclusions, as did Terence Hines of Pace University. A recurring objection focused on age: Einstein's brain was 76 years old at the time of study, but the eleven male brains used as controls averaged only 64 years of age, ranging from 47 to 80. Because glial cells continue dividing as a person ages, the higher ratio in Einstein's brain may partly reflect that age gap rather than any meaningful difference in brain organization. Diamond herself acknowledged in print that chronological age is not necessarily a useful indicator when measuring biological systems, and that human specimens do not come from controlled environments. That candid admission did not settle the debate, but it did leave the study's core claim in a complicated position. Harvey died on the 5th of April 2007, of complications of a stroke, at University Medical Center at Princeton, the same institution where he had eventually returned what remained of the brain.

• 7. What Remained

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  In 2010, Harvey's heirs transferred all of his holdings constituting the remains of Einstein's brain to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. That transfer included 14 photographs of the whole brain taken before sectioning, images that had never before been shown to the public. The story of Harvey's autopsy was later reconstructed in an episode of the Science Channel series Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a program focused on the darker side of scientific discovery, which premiered on the 7th of September 2011. That segment, titled "The Secrets of Einstein's Brain," was rebroadcast on the History Channel on the 4th of June 2016. A feature film, The Man Who Stole Einstein's Brain, followed in 2023.