-Tom Harvey has been very much an enigmatic, mysterious character.

-He was a little bit secretive about having Einstein's brain in his apartment.

-I mean, he was no hero, but I don't think he did anything with evil intentions.

-Bottom line, he was to protect that brain, and he did.

-Tom Harvey turned out to be the man who really set in motion the immortal afterlife of Einstein's brain.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ -Tom Harvey is a very mysterious fellow.

And his motivations are not understood.

There was high expectations in Tom's family for high achievement, in professional terms.

He had a great-grandfather who was a doctor and a grandfather who was a judge.

It was sort of a given that he would, you know, do something like that, doctoring or lawyering.

And so he went to Yale for medical school, and he had always hoped to be a pediatrician.

-Einstein, in 1905, he's a patent clerk, second class.

And he rips off five of these just earth-shattering, paradigmatic articles.

You know, the annus mirabilis, where you're finding out e=mc2 and special relativity.

I mean, for a patent clerk in Bern, just rattling off these papers.

And then, ten years later, learning enough mathematics that he could come up with the theory of general relativity.

What was going on in this guy's head that he could think of stuff like that?

-Tom Harvey was partly through medical school at Yale, and he developed tuberculosis.

And in those days, to treat tuberculosis, they thought fresh air was the cure.

So, they had him set up at the Gaylord Sanatorium, which was just this place where young people were living all year-round, no matter the temperature.

And it could get cold.

And he described shivering out there and really having a renegotiation with religion during that time.

[ Laughs ] And it also turned out to be where he met his first wife, Elouise, and she was a nursing student.

When they both recovered, they got married shortly after that.

-Einstein came up with the general theory of relativity, but it was based on many scientists before him who had come up with the building blocks for the theory of relativity.

And then, like a spark of lightning, he finished the equation, and he made it famous, and boom, he's on the cover of The New York Times.

You know, he's Time magazine's person of the century.

[ Air horn blows ] -When he comes to the United States, and he's mobbed at New York, where there was a huge Jewish population.

You know, they were yelling out to him like he was the messiah.

He was a great Jew.

And he thought this was totally ridiculous.

After the seizure of power by Hitler in January 1933, he was removed from his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

So, Einstein moved to the United States.

He said, "I'm never returning."

-The war broke out, and this was difficult for Tom because he was a Quaker.

And Quakers are pacifists.

So, instead of fighting on the battlefield, he signed up to work in an Army pathology lab.

In very quick succession, Elouise and Tom had three sons.

By the time the war was over, it was pretty clear to Tom that he could go back and be a resident and try to become a pediatrician, but it would be pretty hard to house and feed the family on a resident's salary.

Whereas if he went into pathology, which he sort of already had this grounding in during the war, he could get paid fairly well.

-Or how did that happen?

Yeah.

♪♪ -Princeton had its virtues.

My father, he was a pathologist.

It was an unusual kind of upbringing, in that regard, surrounded by organs and, you know, bits and pieces of humanity.

And I guess one of the most dramatic recollections I have of him when I was tiny.

He took me to watch him do an autopsy.

[ Chuckles ] I didn't quite know what to think about that for a long time, but, you know, he seemed so calm about the whole process that I just tried to absorb it and enjoy it.

-At Princeton University lives New Jersey's most famous foreign-born citizen, Professor Albert Einstein.

-Albert Einstein came to Princeton in '33 -- only good stories.

The stories of, you know, helping kids with their homework, they're legit.

They've actually followed up some of those.

Even though he had this statement about, "It's a funny little town with gods on stilts," but I think he liked the town.

[ Dog barks, girl giggles ] -Oh, well, the basement was interesting.

There was an anatomical museum of a sort, you know, with organs and...

Organs that I couldn't identify, you know?

Some of them were clearly brains.

It was very strange, and it was this real source of wonder to friends that we would bring over and take downstairs.

We should've charged money.

I could've been a very... [ Laughs ] very well-off child.

-Einstein was an interesting man of contradictions.

On the one hand, he really didn't care what people thought about him.

He would walk around Princeton in his pajamas.

He had disheveled hair.

He didn't wear socks.

He was a man of very few social graces.

And so, he really didn't care what people thought about him.

And I think that's what made him so popular with people.

It was kind of this, you know, doing the opposite is what made him popular.

Being authentic is what made him popular.

-Tom Harvey was always interested in making some kind of meaningful contribution to science and society.

You know, when the boys were young, he would team up with this cast of characters to conduct these experiments in his yard and his garage.

-An Armenian doctor that had lost his laboratory, he was looking for cures to cancer.

He wanted to use our garage, and my father said, "Sure."

And it turned out he was using chickens for his lab subjects.

It was quite peculiar for a while.

[ Chicken clucking ] -The holy grail for Einstein was the theory of everything, the idea of saying, "Can you reconcile quantum mechanics, electromagnetism with gravity, a theory that explains everything?"

And to his dying day -- and that's not an expression I use loosely.

When he died on April 18th, '55, there were five or six pages of handwritten manuscript where he was still trying to come up with a mathematical synthesis of the theory of everything.

-Dr. Albert Einstein came to America with his wife to escape Nazi persecution.

His mathematical wizardry led to the atomic age.

He received highest honors but lived quietly at Princeton, New Jersey.

There, death came to Albert Einstein.

He was 76.

-So, Einstein died at Princeton Hospital at about 1:00 in the morning on April 18th, 1955, and somewhere in the middle of that night, between that and dawn, a call came to Tom Harvey's house from the hospital, and it was Einstein's doctor, Guy Dean, and he said, basically, "Tom, you should get over here.

"Einstein died last night, and we'd like you to do the autopsy.

You should come in first thing and get to it."

-Well, I remember sitting around the kitchen table, and the subject came up.

And, of course, I had no idea what really, you know, it portended in terms of what was going to happen, in terms of my father's career.

-Tom Harvey got ready for work that morning and walked, as he often did, from his home on Jefferson Street to the hospital.

♪♪ At that point, I think there was a realization on his part that all of his ambitions, which, on many levels had been thwarted for his career, were now leading him to this moment.

He was going to be the pathologist, the one, as the chief pathologist of Princeton Hospital, to perform the autopsy on Albert Einstein, the genius of the modern age.

-He does the autopsy.

In the '50s, they did that, and he would've set to work.

-I mean, what were you thinking?

-And then he did something that was off the script, and he basically takes a saw to remove the skull, reaches in, grabs the brain... -When I asked him in the autopsy suite why he decided to take Albert Einstein's brain, he said, quite unequivocally, you know, that this was the brain of a genius, and he would've felt ashamed if he left it.

So, for Tom, in that moment, this brain represents all of his ambitions to make a meaningful contribution to science.

-I don't know how the media found out about it, but there's a photograph of him.

There's sort of a wrought-iron veranda.

It's on the ground level of Princeton Medical Center, and he's talking to the reporters.

-And the problem came the next day when Einstein's family reads about it in The New York Times that Einstein's brain did not get cremated with the rest of him.

That's when things go sideways.

-I mean, I understand that members of Einstein's family were very concerned about what had happened and whether or not my father should have the brain.

And I don't know all the factors in his decision, but I trusted my father and his judgment.

-Somehow, Harvey had a conversation with Otto Nathan, fellow émigré and Einstein's executor, and Hans Albert, his son, and convinced them that this is a unique specimen.

You know, a genius for the ages, and a man of science.

And I'm told his son went for it, and then pretty much the executor, Otto Nathan, had to go along with it.

He said, "Okay, go ahead and study it."

-Dear Dr. Harvey... -And Tom makes this promise, this oath, which really would outlast every other he made in his life, which was that he would save the brain for scientific study and that it would only be used for scientific research, and that anything about it, any publicity about it would only appear in scientific or medical journals, that it would not become the object of layperson's fascination, or to quote Einstein, who really didn't want people to come and "worship" at his bones.

So, that was Tom Harvey's promise.

♪♪ ♪♪ -This was a violation of Einstein the man, Einstein the body in such a visceral way, and so I find it hard to believe that anyone would say Thomas Harvey was doing the right thing.

Who was he to make that call?

You know, nowadays, hopefully, I would hope that morgues are run in a better fashion, that people can't steal the brain.

♪♪ -The rest of Einstein was cremated.

That's not in the will, but he was cremated.

No one knows where his ashes are.

Some people feel they were scattered near the crematorium in Ewing.

Other people felt that they scattered them on Lake Carnegie, where Einstein liked to sail a bit, but no one really knows.

♪♪ -I think that when Tom first took the brain into his possession, he was reading constantly about normal brains and what they looked like and how best to preserve them.

♪♪ -The first thing was to preserve the tissue, one with formaldehyde put through the great blood vessels of the brain.

And then you put it in a jar full of formaldehyde to -- this is double fixation.

This is what you want to do with specimens to reduce artifacts so you can get the most -- the best slides.

♪♪ And then once they were in the plastic stuff that you put the blocks in, then you could put them in a microtome.

[ Blade whirring ] Think of like how you slice cold cuts, you know, at the grocery store?

Well, you got a fancier one for that, a very special one that only a few people knew how to do it.

♪♪ -After he had sectioned the brain into, you know, 240 pieces or so, and after he had boxes of slides made of the brain tissue, he went about distributing the brain out on a road trip along the highway to different scientists.

♪♪ It was in an effort to try to get somebody interested in actually studying the brain.

But everybody was busy, and Tom didn't have any money.

Who was going to study Einstein's brain for free?

As it turned out, not many people.

[ Chuckles ] I think a lot of the researchers who were interested in getting pieces of the brain from Harvey were interested, not simply because, you know, they were really interested in finding the source of intelligence, but because it was Einstein's brain.

They were, in many ways, you know, seduced by the allure of, you know, the fame of the man himself, the proximity to genius.

[ Both laugh ] -Harvey was invited down to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which was kind of just an incredible aggregation of experts, in terms of any type of pathology.

But brain pathology, they had special experts.

♪♪ -And chief among them was the head of neuropathology for the U.S. Army, a fellow by the name of Webb Haymaker.

-Haymaker was quite a guy.

He was a chain-smoking pathologist, wrote a bunch of books.

He supposedly looked at Mussolini's brain and Robert Ley's brain, who was a Nazi criminal.

He was kind of a hard-bitten guy, and he was trying to get Harvey -- he says, "Well, you are going to leave the brain with us, Dr.

Harvey."

And Harvey, I think, probably had anticipated that, because he didn't bring the brain with him.

-He had never any intention of, you know, turning the brain over to the U.S. military, which is interesting because he really thought, on one hand, it was because he had made the personal promise to Einstein's family, and they had given him the permission to keep it, not to turn it over to anyone else, and also as a pacifist and knowing that also Einstein was a pacifist, he didn't want to see the brain in the hands of the Army.

That was another motivating factor for him to hold on to it.

-I mean, this is a labor of love.

This is off the clock.

This guy's got a full-time job.

"Does my patient have kidney cancer, Dr.

Harvey?"

And he would deal with that, but on the weekends, he would do this.

-He really thought that if he devoted himself to Einstein's brain in this way that it would put him in, at last, the higher annals of science.

The irony was that after taking this brain and making this promise, his personal life sort of started to unravel.

After Tom Harvey took the brain, he became a bit of a local celebrity, right?

The rumor was that Tom ended up having an affair with somebody at the hospital, a lab technician or a nurse.

And, apparently, this word got out, and Tom's wife heard about it.

She was livid.

And so, she went to Jack Kaufmann, who was the president of the hospital.

She told him, "Hey!"

Apparently, lost her temper and said, "What kind of place are you running here?

Do you know this is happening?"

-They broke up.

They got back together.

They broke up again.

I don't know how many times that happened.

I think it might've happened a third time, which was when my mother finally gave him a divorce.

♪♪ -No one really knows why he quit his position at Princeton Medical Center.

You know, maybe his marriage was going south.

He had a number of relationships in his life.

But he quit the job or... did he get pushed a bit because of the Einstein publicity?

No one really knows.

-Was he fired?

Did he quit?

He certainly, sometime late in the '60s, resigned.

And Einstein's brain went with him.

-Oh!

-Well, when he and my mom met and they were just dating, my earliest literal memory was calling him Uncle Tom.

[ Laughs ] But we started calling him "Dad" immediately.

He is the only dad I've ever known -- the only dad I've ever known.

-He had his office in the basement in the very back left corner, and, you know, one of those big, wooden desks, and bookshelves with loads of books, and he had the brain there.

♪♪ -And I happened to see this jar with a brain in it.

And I asked what it was, and he told me, but we weren't allowed to talk about it.

We were not allowed to talk about it.

-Well, yeah, I'm the one who wanted like, "Can I bring it into school?"

And, you know, but it was like, "No."

And any time I had a friend over, "Come on.

Let me show you where the brain is!"

And we'd go down the stairs and into the back room, and there it is!

-Every time Tom moves, Otto Nathan, Einstein's executor, tracks him down, and he keeps writing Tom these impatient letters, basically begging him for an update on what's happening with the study of his great friend's brain.

[ Typewriter clacking, carriage dings ] -Some 23 years passed since Einstein's death, and there was a particular editor who assigned a young reporter by the name of Steven Levy to go in search of Einstein's brain, and this actually would set off what became the recurring pattern.

So, somebody in the media would say, "Hey, whatever happened to Einstein's brain?

We should find out."

-And one day, my editor, he was a pretty new editor who had come from New York, told me, "I want you to find Einstein's brain."

It was a crazy assignment.

Einstein's brain is missing?

I hadn't heard anything about that.

[ Telephone ringing ] And my editor told me, "By the way, I want to use this for the August cover story," which only gave me a few weeks to find Einstein's brain, something no one had done in more than 20 years.

First point of contact was Dr. Otto Nathan, who was the executor of the Einstein estate.

And he gave me no help.

He was aggressively not interested in following up on this.

The New York Times article had said the brain had been removed from the body by Dr. Thomas Harvey.

And, you know, there was no way to Google him back then in 1978, but there were ways to look people up, and, eventually, I realized that since he was a physician, an MD, the American Medical Association might know where he is or who he was.

I want you to find this guy, Dr. Thomas Harvey... And I called them up.

Their office was in Chicago.

And I talked some very nice woman there into telling me, you know, the numbers of any Dr. Thomas Harvey.

There was a Dr. Thomas S. Harvey.

I knew his middle name.

And she said there's one in Wichita, Kansas.

[ Thunder rumbles ] I arrived in Wichita.

By the time I got there, it was a torrential rain, and the taxicab is driving and bumping around and going through giant puddles the size of bomb craters.

And I arrive at this medical lab.

And I had been under the impression that it would be some sort of research lab with sttate-of-the-art equipment and people going around and doing advanced scientific research.

But it was the kind of lab you'd go to get a blood test.

And Dr. Harvey greeted me at the door -- I think we both were a little nervous -- and took me back through the lab to his office, which was sort of a glassed-in enclosure towards the back of the building, and we sat in his office and began to talk.

He was definitely nervous about talking about this and feeling, you know, almost as if there had been some other ear in the room that was listening with a voice saying, "No, no, no, no, you shouldn't be talking about this."

And I'm listening to this and taking it in.

I'm realizing I'm hearing things that hadn't been said for over 20 years, but, on the other hand, I'm wondering, "Where's the brain?"

So, I keep pressing him on this, and finally I get frustrated and say, "Don't you even have like a photograph of Einstein's brain?

Anything I could look at?"

Because I'm thinking my whole mission might be going to naught.

And he said, "Well, I do have some of the gross matter here."

What?

[ Press rumbling ] The story was our August cover.

And it caught fire.

This was pre-Internet, but, at the time, things could get picked up, you know, in a Pony Express kind of way.

And, you know, I spent two days doing one radio interview after another.

-And now, ladies and gentlemen, he-e-e-re's...Johnny!

[ Cheers and applause ] -The apex was Johnny Carson made a joke about it.

[ Cheers and applause continue ] -Now, here's an unusual item.

I hope it doesn't turn you off because it's kind of a scientific item, but portions of Albert Einstein's brain have turned up in a laboratory in Wichita, Kansas.

Remains were found in a jar there... [ Applause ] [ Laughter ] What really convinced the scientists in Wichita, Kansas, that it was Einstein's brain -- one morning, they came into the lab, and they saw the brain checking the Greyhound schedule bus leaving Wichita.

So, they figured it was Einstein.

-I was watching the Johnny Carson show.

And he made reference to Einstein's brain getting off a Greyhound bus in Wichita, Kansas.

And, of course, you know, it was just like... "Oh, my gosh, they followed us here."

♪♪ -Now, I shared the story with him, on the eve of publication.

I sent him the advance copy, as well.

He was okay with the story.

He felt it was fine.

But then, the story came out, the news hit, the Einstein estate was unhappy, and there were people camped out on his lawn wanting interviews.

And his life was changed... dramatically, because of that story, because the secret being public.

He wasn't too happy.

And from that moment on, he was the person who had Einstein's brain.

Even worse, he was the person who had Einstein's brain who had a lot of questions to answer about it.

[ Typewriter carriage dings ] It's like this homework assignment, one of those nightmares you have.

You have this long-standing, important assignment that you haven't completed.

For decades, this poor man had not been able to complete his assignment.

-So, Steven Levy writes his article, and it makes a big splash.

And, you know, it seemed like the whole world had forgotten about Einstein's brain.

And Science, which is one of the leading science journals in the world, actually, and based in the United States, they actually feature a picture from Levy's article of the brain in the cider box.

And someone in the lab of Marian Diamond at Berkeley cuts it out and pins it up on the bulletin board in the lab.

And Marian Diamond is this, you know, dynamo maverick brain researcher, at the time, who was really ahead of her time.

She was doing all kinds of studies, proving that we are born with a brain but that the brain can change, depending on our environment.

She was showing that there was a kind of brain cell called the glial cell, which is like a nursemaid to neurons, and the more of them you have, the better your neurons work.

So, this is how a brain could grow.

So, she's doing this kind of work, and it's in this environment that she looks over at her bulletin board, and she sees this picture from the magazine of Einstein's brain in a cider box.

And she thinks, "Hmm, I wonder how many glial cells he had."

-As the story goes, that's when Otto Nathan writes Harvey an indignant letter saying, "You've had the brain for quite some time.

Why are you not publishing?"

So, clearly, the expectation was Harvey should keep the brain for scholarly study, and, if anything, he was getting berated for not doing enough.

-Tom Harvey's getting a lot of pressure from Otto Nathan in the letters, saying, "Hey!

I've seen this article in New Jersey Monthly.

I'm really not so happy that the brain is in a Costa Cider box, and it's being compared to some kind of candy chews.

And what the heck?!"

Like, "Where's the study already?"

And so, what happens is Tom's, like, so delighted to hear from Marian Diamond, who's, you know, this maverick researcher that he immediately goes to his jars and fishes out four pieces of Einstein's brain, and puts them in a mayonnaise jar.

And they arrive at Berkeley.

Then, she begins this really, really tedious study of counting the glial cells Einstein had per neuron, compared to average brains.

And she concludes that Einstein had more of these glial cells, generally, than other people.

-So, we had hypothesized that if we were dealing with one of the greatest brains that's ever lived that we should find more glial cells per neuron.

And that's essentially what we did find.

-In fact, Dr. Diamond found 73% more glial cells than average.

-Of course, you know, she's not got a lot of genius brains for comparison, and she publishes this in a friend's journal because she's wanting to give her friend a boost, and it was called Experimental Neurology.

So, it comes out in the 1980s.

And, you know, she's really hopeful that it will be, you know, something that will help bring more attention to her work and that it would boost the journal and so on.

And instead, it's met with some pretty fierce criticism.

And, in fact, a lot of people used her study as an example of not good science, of bad science.

There was one researcher who even used to post a slide in his PowerPoint as a kind of joke to break the ice.

So came the very first sort of public suggestions that scientists who were interested in studying this brain were more seduced by the idea of celebrity, less by the idea of doing serious science.

-A couple years later, there was a documentary that some guy did.

-Dr. Harvey's house is just on the other side of the creek.

-This physicist from Japan who was really very interested in Einstein, and Harvey clearly liked him and was in Kansas.

♪♪ -Oh!

Wow!

Yeah?

-[ Laughs ] Yeah.

-Oh!

-His brain has been sectioned.

-Oh!

-Cut into many pieces, as you see.

-[ Speaking Japanese ] If possible, if possible, please give me... from photo, one piece of Einstein's brain?

[ Both laugh ] -And he says, "Could I have a piece of the brain?"

And Harvey... [ Laughs ] Harvey grabs his mayonnaise jars and cuts off a little bit of the cerebellum with a kitchen knife.

No, he had a better knife -- I think he had a pathology knife -- and gave him a bit.

-Let me get this knife and... cutting board.

Okay.

-And slowly, it took on some circus-like aspects that were exactly the nightmare... -This is brain stem and cerebellum.

-Oh.

-...that the Einstein estate, and Einstein himself, I guess, would never want to see.

-Oh, thank you for this, sir.

Oh, thank you.

-You're welcome.

-Ahh!

-Later on, it took on, you know, kind of crazy aspects, maybe culminating in this one trip.

Some guy wrote a book about going cross-country with Einstein's brain.

-♪ They've taken Albert's brain ♪ ♪ They've filled up a jug ♪ ♪ They've taken Albert's brain ♪ -I think it's "Driving Mr. Albert" by Paterniti, which was a great read.

But it really didn't do anything great for Thomas Harvey.

-♪ They've taken Albert's brain ♪ -Paterniti, you know, went cross-country with the brain with Harvey and sort of portrayed him as, I don't even know how he portrayed him.

He got down to Wichita, and he introduced him to William Burroughs of "Naked Lunch" fame.

And William Burroughs... Harvey, who was this very, to me, scholarly Quaker, quiet guy, and Burroughs is saying, "And what's your addiction, Doctor?"

So, that's in the book, and...

I mean, those kind of things, which make for a very diverting reading, I don't think the family was terribly thrilled with it.

-♪ Taken Albert's brain ♪ -And Dr. Harvey, at that point, didn't seem really in possession of his own story but was just going with it.

-♪ Taken Albert's brain ♪ -Maybe at that point he just should've given it to a research institution and passed it on instead of having the brain loose out there and not under, you know, the protection of a scientific institute and, you know, less of a spectacle.

-Yeah, right.

-I got the impression that he was profoundly embarrassed that he had not produced the study.

He had sent it to many, many people.

And one could argue that at a certain point he owed it to the Einstein family, to the public, maybe to Einstein himself, to come up with what he had at that moment.

And then, maybe throw it open for other scientists.

-There was a Canadian researcher, Sandra Witelson, who had a very large collection of normal brains, which is, you know, highly unusual and very precious in brain research.

And so, one day, she received a one-page fax that came out of the blue into her office that simply said, "Would you like to study the brain of Albert Einstein?"

♪♪ Tom told me this story of having packed the brain into the trunk of his Dodge and driving up to Canada and crossing at Niagara Falls at midnight... ...and trying to declare the brain of Albert Einstein at customs.

And the customs officers had said, you know, "Do you have anything to declare?"

He tells them what he has.

I suspect they did not believe him because he said they didn't ask to see it or anything.

So...[ Laughs ] He just drove straight through, and he delivered a certain portion of the brain to Sandra Witelson in Hamilton.

♪♪ You know, she describes holding it in her hands and feeling a sense of awe.

You know, you think scientists are somehow immune to the kind of mystical hocus-pocus that goes around when we think about the body parts of famous people, but they're not.

And I think that that's one of the interesting things about science is that it tries to be objective.

It tries to transcend all of the other foibles that mark the human condition.

But it can never because it's driven by people.

And we are all flawed.

[ Typewriter clacking ] -She wrote this paper about the exceptional brain of Albert Einstein.

And I'm gonna do her a disservice but say that she really focused on the parietal lobe, Albert Einstein's parietal lobe, which, when she studied the photographs, she found anatomical anomalies.

-Neuroscientist Sandra Witelson has just finished peering into one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

-The width of the brain, from left to right, was larger by 15% in Einstein's brain, compared to the control group.

-I remember her describing it at the time and saying, to her, it was as obvious as seeing eyebrows misplaced on the face.

And that's how different this one particular fissure in Einstein's brain was.

And it so happens that the regions of the brain that this fissure separates generally in people are involved in mathematical and visual, spatial reasoning, which, you know, really correlates to the way Einstein used to think, or describe his thinking, which he said was, you know, he didn't think in terms of numbers.

It wasn't math that he envisioned when he conducted his thought experiments, but rather he would actually see himself, be able to imagine himself riding on a beam of light.

So, you know, when Sandra Witelson completed her study, she said, you know, maybe this explains why he thought in images, why he had such a fertile lab for a mind.

She felt that she had located, to some extent, the source of what made his mind so extraordinary.

♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] -I mean, he was no hero.

But I don't think he did anything with evil intentions.

-I'm sure he had regrets.

We all have regrets.

But he was always about doing the right thing.

-He didn't want to use the brain for fame's sake.

But he did hope that by doing right by the brain, it would make him famous in a scientific sense.

He did not leave this Earth a wealthy man.

But he left this Earth with his integrity and knowing he always did the best he could for people.

-I think it cost him a lot.

Would that same sequence of events, would he have had marriages that go south without Einstein's brain?

Would they have been kindly inclined to him as a part of the medical center of Princeton?

We're never gonna know.

-I got interested in Albert Einstein because I was in college reading a book that was like, "Oh, my God, somebody stole Einstein's brain."

And that story itself, if that story gets people interested in Albert Einstein, there's something positive to be said about that.

-Do we know where the brain is now?

-No.

No, you don't.

And you're not gonna find out.

♪♪ If you call Medical Center in Princeton, they say, "Well, that's under the care of Dr.

'X.'"

♪♪ I don't blame Dr. X about being concerned about publicity.

♪♪ ♪♪ -These are the original jars that Dr. Harvey placed all the brain parts in back in 1955, when he did the autopsy and dissected the brain.

It is a heavy responsibility.

Dr. Harvey understood that.

He carried it with him for most of his adult life.

And after he ceded the brain, I think he was somewhat relieved not to have to worry about it anymore, that someone else was taking over the helm, that the person who was taking it over had sufficient respect for this material.

It was never meant to be a museum piece.

It was never meant to sit on a shelf for people to gawk at.

It was to be used for scientific purposes.

And I think that, at least as far as we have been able to go with the science, we've kept true to that spirit.

Hopefully, in the future, we'll be able to do more with it.

It sounds silly to have a heavy responsibility, but it is Einstein's brain.

It's not nothing.

It is Einstein's brain.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪