G: Relative Genius

SPEAKER_23: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Imagine you have a disease. You know you have the disease. You know how you got it. You can see very clear and painful signs of the disease on your body. It's a disease that will take your life if left untreated, but you can't get any medical help because your symptoms do not officially count as part of the disease according to some bureaucratic checklist somewhere. This was the situation for over thousands of women in the 1990s, over a decade into the AIDS epidemic, because the official symptoms of AIDS were based exclusively on male patients, meaning that very clear signs of their bodies being immunocompromised, things like cervical cancer, yeast infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, those were completely ignored and discounted because men didn't get them. So what the heck were these women supposed to do? Today, before we dive into our Radiolab episode, I want to play you an excerpt from a new show that tells the story of a small group of women who tried to do something, who tried to pull off this seemingly impossible existential feat to unerase themselves. The show is called Blind Spot. It's a collaboration between the History Channel and our colleagues at WNYC. And this season sort of lives at just the same nexus of science and humanity that our show does. And we thought some of you might really like it. So to just get a feel for the show, I'm going to play an excerpt. It's just a little over five minutes, and then we'll be on with today's Radiolab. To set up what you're going to hear, it's the early 1990s, and we are zooming into one of the key places where the movement to fight for women with HIV really began, in a maximum security prison in New York State. And what I think is so special about this tape is that you get to sort of peer inside the oyster shell and do you see the factors, the coincidences, the intimacies, these sort of actual tactile grains around which the whole pearl of the movement is spun. So here we go. I'm going to hand it off now to Blind Spot host Lizzie Ratner. One name kept coming up at the center of this SPEAKER_22: story. Katrina. Katrina. I kind of became obsessed with who is Katrina SPEAKER_29: Haslip. Katrina was an inspiration to all. SPEAKER_22: Katrina Haslip. She was young. She was only in her 20s when she arrived at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She grew up in Niagara Falls, one of 11 kids. In her late teens, she found Islam and married a religious man and moved to Brooklyn. But by the age of 21, she'd moved back to Niagara Falls and fallen pretty deep into an addiction to heroin. She could stay out on the streets all night and still somehow managed to go to college in the morning. She soon started doing sex work and stealing. And the word was that she could lift a wallet off of anyone. She ended up getting arrested for pulling a knife on a client. And that is how in 1985, she ended up in a maximum security prison for women in upstate New York. Katrina was very fiery and she had a real temper. SPEAKER_22: Judith Clark. She met Katrina in solitary confinement, the prison's prison at Bedford Hills. I think she got into a scuffle with an officer is my memory of what led her there. SPEAKER_24: And I remember saying, you know, saying something like, oh, God, it was worth it. Oh, my God. With this great big smile on her face. Judy was also in prison at Bedford and the SPEAKER_22: crime that got her there, it was a big deal. Good evening. Echoes of the violent radical SPEAKER_28: underground of the 1960s rolled over the New York suburb of Nanuet today in the botched ambush of an armored car that left one guard and two policemen dead among the four suspects. SPEAKER_22: The Brinks robbery. It was a crime committed by an offshoot of the far left weather underground. Three people were killed. Judy was driving the getaway car and she and Kathy Boudin were among the four people arrested. Judy was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. SPEAKER_24: Our cells were very bare, you know, cinder block walls and a solid door and then a small window on the other side that had a lot of mesh on it. SPEAKER_22: I mean, it sounds kind of terrifying. It was. In solitary confinement, they were allowed SPEAKER_22: just one hour a day outside and most days Judy would walk laps around the track alone. And then after a few months, suddenly this woman appears. SPEAKER_24: She's beautiful and very elegant. She wore a head wrap. She wore a long dress and was incredibly stylish. There are people who managed to be stylish in prison and Katrina was one of them. SPEAKER_22: And something between the two women clicked. This was a moment of transformation for both of them. They were both grappling with their lives before prison, what they had done. And so every day they would walk and just talk. You know, she told me a little bit about her SPEAKER_24: life and about her own struggle toward recovery, having gone through a period of addiction. On the one hand, she's incredibly intelligent. She was a practicing Muslim, but she had this fire and it could get her in trouble. SPEAKER_22: And that is what drew them together and got them to start organizing in prison. SPEAKER_12: Let's take a look at the issue of AIDS in prison. SPEAKER_22: This is Dr. Sheldon Landesman, and he's speaking at a forum in 1987. A huge percentage of the persons in the prison system, and I can't get a good handle on the SPEAKER_12: number for anywhere from 70 to 80 percent, have used drugs prior to coming to prison. We know from a variety of studies that at a minimum, 50 percent of the intravenous drug users in the New York City and surrounding area are infected with the AIDS virus, taking the most conservative estimates. SPEAKER_22: AIDS was becoming a huge problem in the prison system and not just among injection drug users. The New York Department of Health tested women as they were entering the prison system in 1988. It found that fully 18.8 percent of women tested positive for HIV. That is almost one in five women higher than the rate for men. And these numbers, they were probably an undercount. In Bedford, so many women had fallen sick and disappeared that rumors were running wild. SPEAKER_29: Nobody know what the hell was going on. Meet Awilda Gonzalez. SPEAKER_22: Everybody calls me Wendy. Wendy got to Bedford around the same time as Katrina in 1985. She was in for possessing and selling drugs. And when she arrived, she found everyone on edge. SPEAKER_29: Well, many women bully other women, harass them, beat them, shame them, blame them. Their own fear because at one point we all looking at these women and saying, wait a minute, how many times did I share a needle? See? But how many times did you make love to somebody and they didn't tell you or they didn't know? SPEAKER_22: There was still a lot of confusion around how you got HIV, but there was one thing that everybody knew. If you got infected, you died. SPEAKER_24: I mean, no one wants her to be seen going to the medical department for anything because they were afraid that people would say, oh, she's an AIDS bitch. SPEAKER_22: Wendy worked as a hairdresser in the prison hair salon, and she was starting to get lots and lots of questions. SPEAKER_29: My scissors, the knife that I used to do certain, you know, styles in the hair, and woman question to me, what are you doing to disinfect this? And I say, you know what? I need to educate myself. SPEAKER_24: Either people were going to turn against each other as was happening or people were going to be able to seek each other. SPEAKER_22: The women started organizing to put together a meeting. You didn't have to be HIV positive to join. SPEAKER_24: Well, you know, we wanted women among the druggies. We wanted women among the good old Christians. We wanted white women. We wanted Hispanic women. We wanted black women. We wanted religious. We wanted non-religious. We wanted hippies. SPEAKER_22: Katrina was part of that initial organizing group. She worked in the law library, and so she began spreading the word to other women. Soon, they had 30 people who were interested. Here's how she described that first meeting in a documentary a few years later. SPEAKER_00: So we like went around introducing ourselves and about the third woman, she said, my name is Sonia and I have AIDS, you know, and I had never heard anybody say that before out loud. And I don't think anybody else in the room had heard anybody say that out loud. And the room went like silent. And then people like engulfed her. And it made me cry because it was like there was so much support in the room for this person who was able to say, I have AIDS, you know, and I thought to myself, I can never say that. SPEAKER_23: All right, I'm going to stop the excerpt there. Again, the show is called Blind Spot. This season is called The Plague in the Shadows. Go check it out wherever you get podcasts to find out if this group of women will topple a Goliath. And in the process, they have hundreds of thousands of lives. Spoiler alert, they do. But keep listening to find out how. All right, now I'm switching gears big time in tone and vibe. We are heading over to hear a Radiolab from a few years back that is very near and dear to my heart. It comes from the series we did on intelligence called G, which was hosted by Pat Walters, who is now our managing editor, making sure all our stories sound good. A few years back, he put together this series that's all about intelligence, how we measure intelligence and how the concept of intelligence can cause incredible harm, but maybe sometimes help. And anyway, the episode we're about to hear is about the most bizarre treasure hunt I've ever heard about. It's a treasure hunt for a tiny chunk of human flesh that absolutely changed the world in huge ways. And it went missing for a long time until an intrepid treasure hunter of sorts went off to find it. That's all I'm going to say. The episode is called Relative Genius and again, it's hosted by Pat Walters and co-reported by Rachel Cusick. Here we go. SPEAKER_12: Hey, this is G. SPEAKER_10: Radiolab miniseries. I'm Pat Walters. And I'm Rachel Cusick. And today we're going to go looking for intelligence in what might seem like one of the more obvious places. And the story starts SPEAKER_04: with this guy. My name is Steven Levy. I'm an editor-at-large at Wired magazine. SPEAKER_09: Thank you so much for coming in. Basically, I guess, where did this all start for you? SPEAKER_04: So in 1978, I was working for a magazine called New Jersey Monthly. SPEAKER_09: Steve was young, fresh out of school. SPEAKER_04: It was my first real job in journalism. Offices were in a suburb outside Princeton, New Jersey. Sort of an office park, a very bland set of offices with cubicles and, you know, really Dunder Mifflin-ish. SPEAKER_10: Steve says it was a typical, boring, entry-level job until this one day. We had a new editor. It got interesting. SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I went to Einstein's office and said, I want you to find Einstein's brain. SPEAKER_10: And I thought, what? Yeah. Were you like, that sounds exciting or were you like, I don't know. SPEAKER_04: I thought that sounds pretty cool. Yeah. That sounds pretty cool. You know, I've been working on a piece about the psychology of the New Jersey driver, right? Right. SPEAKER_17: I mean, I literally did a service piece about racquetball, which was a big trend then. SPEAKER_04: This is better. SPEAKER_10: Now, the reason the editor assigned him this story is there had been these rumors going back years that when Einstein died back in 1955, moments after his death, someone had literally stolen his brain and run off with it. SPEAKER_04: Sort of an urban legend. Einstein's brain is somewhere and, you know, there's, you know, the Russians have it and SPEAKER_04: they're trying to clone Einstein. Steve's editor just wanted him to get to the bottom of it. He literally said to me, I want you to find Einstein's brain. SPEAKER_09: What did you know about Einstein at that point in his brain? Well, you know, what I knew about Einstein is what anyone on the street would know about SPEAKER_04: Einstein essentially. You know, there's this guy with the funny hair, relativity, right? Whatever that was. SPEAKER_09: What he would quickly learn, something to do with the atom bomb, after a little bit SPEAKER_09: of reading, is that in the early 20th century, Einstein pretty much rewrote the way that we thought the universe worked. SPEAKER_19: Einstein, brilliant physicist and theoretical mathematician. A scientific giant. SPEAKER_09: He said that mass is equivalent to energy. SPEAKER_19: E equals MC squared. Which led to the atomic bomb. SPEAKER_19: The all-shattering devastation in which was born the atomic age. He also said time and space could both bend, which led to the discovery of black holes SPEAKER_10: and like a million other things. He enabled man to embark at last on the total adventure. SPEAKER_09: And it didn't take long before Einstein just became a symbol. SPEAKER_04: Do you think you're smarter than Einstein? SPEAKER_09: For? SPEAKER_04: I said, no ma'am. Intelligence. SPEAKER_14: Space and time. SPEAKER_17: Einstein. SPEAKER_26: For? SPEAKER_26: Energy and motion. Genius. SPEAKER_10: I am not a genius. SPEAKER_26: I'm not Einstein. You don't have to be an Einstein to know it's me. SPEAKER_26: Little Einstein. What am I supposed to do? SPEAKER_18: SPEAKER_10: So that was Steve's assignment. Find the brain of the guy whose name basically means genius. SPEAKER_04: And he said, by the way, this is going to be our cover in August. A few weeks, six weeks away or something. Didn't have a lot of time. SPEAKER_09: How do you even begin looking for the brain of a guy that died decades ago? SPEAKER_04: There was this thing called the library. SPEAKER_09: So Steve knew that Einstein lived in Princeton and died in Princeton. SPEAKER_04: April 1955. SPEAKER_09: So he headed over to the local public library, pulls up the newspaper archive. SPEAKER_09: And he finds this article. Written a couple days after Einstein died. SPEAKER_04: And it said Einstein's brain to be preserved for study. And it talked about, yeah, there's going to be a study of Einstein's brain and, you know, they're going to have a press conference about it. SPEAKER_09: So he pulls up the next day's paper thinking there'll be a big front page story about this press conference. SPEAKER_04: And nothing. SPEAKER_09: Crickets. SPEAKER_04: Nothing. There was no press conference. Oh, it didn't happen. No. So then he thinks, OK. That's 23 years ago. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the brain studied. Like by scientists. I went through all sorts of scientific periodical guides. No papers. I mean, I really looked hard. And eventually he realizes that little newspaper article. That was literally, that was the last thing written about Einstein's brain. SPEAKER_10: But there was one clue in that little newspaper article. A name. The name of the guy who was supposed to hold that press conference that never happened. Dr. Thomas Harvey. Who, it seemed, in addition to being the guy who didn't hold that press conference, was also the pathologist who would have done the autopsy on Einstein. SPEAKER_09: So the next stop on Steve's search. SPEAKER_04: The Princeton Hospital. The place Einstein died and where supposedly this Harvey guy worked at. SPEAKER_04: And I went there. I talked to the vice president. And I asked him about the pathologist, this guy, Dr. Thomas Harvey. Where's Dr. Harvey? Hospital guy says. He left here a long time ago. SPEAKER_10: And then Steve's like, what about the brain? I heard the brain got taken. Is it here at the hospital? He didn't know anything. I had to talk to Dr. Harvey. SPEAKER_09: So what do you do to find Harvey? SPEAKER_04: So you know, so looking for a person in 1978, there's no Google. There's no Facebook. There's no LinkedIn. And there's a lot of places, a lot of cities. Every city had a phone book. SPEAKER_04: But you couldn't look at every phone book. SPEAKER_17: I eventually figured one place I might go is the American Medical Association. SPEAKER_10: Figures this guy Harvey was a doctor. Maybe they have his contact info. SPEAKER_04: So I called them up. You know, said, I'm really trying to find this Dr. Thomas Harvey. Thomas S. Harvey. I knew his middle name. And this very kindly woman, you know, looked up stuff and then told me there is a Thomas S. Harvey in Wichita, Kansas. SPEAKER_10: So he calls directory assistants in Wichita. It says, do you guys have a number for a Thomas Harvey? They said yes. He asked, is that number listed? And they said yes. They gave me his phone number. SPEAKER_04: And I took a deep breath and dialed the phone number. Back then if someone wasn't there, it would just ring and ring and you'd hang up and that would be it. It was a pre-answering machine. But he picked up the phone. SPEAKER_04: And I said, is this Dr. Harvey? And he said yes. And I said, is this the Dr. Harvey who worked at Princeton Hospital in 1955? And there was this pause. And I figured, you know, wait, it's sort of a yes or no question, right? There's a pause. Like he was almost debating whether to own up to this. SPEAKER_04: And finally, he said yes. In retrospect, maybe it was a little of the jig is up. And he said, I don't know if I could help you. And I said, well, I'd just like to talk to you. And he said, well, and he was sort of not saying yes or no. SPEAKER_04: And I said, you know what, I'm coming out there to talk to you. So I booked a ticket for Wichita, Kansas. SPEAKER_09: Steve hops on a plane to Kansas. He spends the night. And then the next morning he wakes up, gets a cab and goes over to Harvey's lab. SPEAKER_04: I rang the bell or whatever. Dr. Harvey came to open the door for me. SPEAKER_09: What did he look like? SPEAKER_04: He looked like the guy who would be your pediatrician. You know, this kindly looking guy in his 60s, I guess. He's wearing a lab coat. And I remember very clearly he had in his pocket one of those pens that could write in three colors, red, green, blue. And he took me back to the back of the facility. So his office was basically a glassed-in cubicle and with a desk and a chair, SPEAKER_04: some shelves and some cardboard boxes behind the chair. And I sat down and we talked. SPEAKER_10: Now, at this point, Harvey hadn't admitted to anything, but Steve had a feeling, a definite feeling. Yeah, you could tell he's very cautious, very guarded. SPEAKER_04: And I'm asking every way to try to figure out where's the brain. And I asked him a few times, you know, where's the brain? And he really didn't want to answer that. And then finally I just said, well, do we even need pictures of it? And then he sort of broke down. When I asked, you know, maybe because he says I was so frustrated. He goes, you know, I was saying, no pictures even? And he sort of like sagged a little. SPEAKER_26: SPEAKER_04: So he gets up and he walks behind me. And there was sort of like a beer cooler near where he was. And I'm thinking, is it the beer cooler? SPEAKER_04: No, he keeps walking past there. SPEAKER_04: And he goes behind me to where one of the cardboard boxes is. And he pulls out these two jars. SPEAKER_04: And in one of the jars, there are these pieces of biomass floating in there that are clearly brain stuff. SPEAKER_04: And I'm like staring at this thing. And I'm like thunderstruck. I mean, it was like a jolt, you know? This was amazing. I mean, you know, you could hear, you know, the chorus of angels singing, oh, Einstein's brain. I'm taking this in and I'm like, oh, I'm going to die. And then like this is the brain that changed the world. And to see that brain was a moving experience, actually, I have to say. I had gotten this glimpse of something. SPEAKER_09: Of what, though? SPEAKER_04: Of something big, of something, you know, of a mystery. SPEAKER_30: In this episode, we're going to try to untangle that mystery. SPEAKER_10: What can the brain of one of the greatest geniuses that humanity has ever produced, SPEAKER_30: like, what can that brain tell us? SPEAKER_10: This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the political battle in Washington over immigration SPEAKER_03: and the chaos at the southern border. You have a number of people that no governmental system can process doing all of that processing SPEAKER_01: in the worst possible place, right at the border. I'll talk with Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. SPEAKER_03: That's The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is the Radio Lab miniseries G. I'm Pat Walters. SPEAKER_10: And today we're talking about Einstein's brain, like the actual physical thing of it, and whether or not it can tell us anything about the nature of genius. Well, I'm just going to say for the record, I think that's silly. SPEAKER_16: And I think that brain is a whole is just invited you. You just come in here with your eggs sandwiched. SPEAKER_16: Don't bring my egg sandwich to this. I would just like to declare my bias that I don't think there's anything special about his brain. Anything? Not even, I mean, he was clearly a genius. There's something about the idea that his genius is tied to the physical structure of his brain that makes me itchy. SPEAKER_16: Literally, that's the physical sensation I have. I start to itch. SPEAKER_10: I think you're dismissing it too soon. I think there's more to it than you suspect. SPEAKER_16: All right, well, let me ask you a more basic question. What's the fellow's name again? Thomas Harvey. How did he end up with that brain to begin with? SPEAKER_13: Well, to answer your question, this is Dr. Fred Lepore. SPEAKER_10: He's a neurologist, also wrote a book about Einstein. He's one of the people we talked to to answer that very question. And he says you got to go back to the winter of 1955. Einstein was living on borrowed time. SPEAKER_10: He's 76 years old, retired, living in Princeton, and he gets sick. Starts to feel this pain in his abdomen. It was so much, it almost felt like a gallbladder attack. SPEAKER_13: Turned out to be way worse than that. Ultimately, he had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Frank Glenn, who was a neurosurgeon, not a neurosurgeon, a surgeon at Cornell came down. Ready to operate. But Einstein basically said, look, I, you know, my time is up. I will die. I think he's I will die elegantly. He knew he was. And that was a brave thing to say because he was in pain. SPEAKER_09: And eventually in the spring of 1955. SPEAKER_19: Einstein into the hospital Friday died this morning after refusing surgery, which it turned out would not have helped him recover from a ruptured artery. SPEAKER_13: As the story goes, in the early morning hours of April 18th, he muttered a couple of incomprehensible words, incomprehensible to his nurse, who didn't speak German. And then in the early morning hours, he was found dead. SPEAKER_10: Now, Tom Harvey, our guy, was the chief pathologist at Princeton Hospital. His job was to do autopsies. And that night, April 18th, 1955, he's at home sleeping and he gets a call. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I think the phone call came sometime before dawn. And it was Einstein's personal physician who called him to let him know that Einstein's son had given permission for an autopsy to be performed on his father. This is Carolyn Abraham, science journalist, author of Possessing Genius, the story of SPEAKER_08: the bizarre odyssey of Einstein's brain. SPEAKER_10: Harvey actually died in 2007. But before he did, Carolyn spent some time with him and got his take on that day. SPEAKER_08: He gets himself ready and he remembered it was a really nice morning. Spring was in the air and things were turning green. And he was walking towards what he realized was going to be a major opportunity in his professional life. He got to that hospital and he got to his pathology lab and someone that morning had already placed Einstein on the autopsy table. SPEAKER_10: She says he walked into the room. Einstein's laying there flat on the table. And he picks up a scalpel. And, you know, he opened the abdomen and he saw it was full of blood from the aneurysm. SPEAKER_13: So he established his cause of death. Did a routine examination of the heart. But then he did something that was not in the script. He removed the top of the skull, cut a bunch of cranial nerves and arteries, and he took SPEAKER_10: the brain out. And then he put the brain in a jar and walked out. SPEAKER_16: So he literally just stole the brain out of Einstein's skull? Just stole it? Yeah, which is pretty gross. Isn't that a crime? SPEAKER_13: Probably. History has not been kind to Thomas S. Harvey. But in Tom Harvey's estimation, and he actually put it this way in our conversations once SPEAKER_08: as that he would have felt ashamed if he didn't take it. SPEAKER_08: He was ashamed because here was this opportunity to learn something about sort of the biological SPEAKER_08: underpinnings of intelligence, of genius, you know, from arguably, you know, certainly one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century. And to not study it would have been negligent. SPEAKER_10: According to Carolyn, however misguided it might seem, Harvey says he wasn't taking the brain for himself. He was taking it for all of us, like for humanity, for science. SPEAKER_13: But the family at this point read on the front page of the April 19th New York, 55 New York SPEAKER_13: Times read that the brain was preserved for science and they were flabbergasted. SPEAKER_09: Well, that was like the first time they heard of it. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. In the paper. Oh my God. SPEAKER_09: They're like having their Cheerios and that's how they find out? SPEAKER_08: Yeah. The family didn't know and didn't give permission. SPEAKER_13: The understanding, although you'll find none of this in the will, but the understanding was Einstein would be cremated. And his ashes scattered in a secret location so that quote unquote, no one could come and SPEAKER_08: worship at my bones. SPEAKER_18: He was the first scientist to become a public figure, a legend in our time. Einstein was always very uncomfortable with the attention that celebrity brought with SPEAKER_09: it. SPEAKER_18: He was really afraid that people were going to start to see him as something superhuman. SPEAKER_09: The realities of 20th century science, its power are linked with Einstein's image. SPEAKER_18: SPEAKER_08: It speaks to the fact that in the 20th century, science sort of displaced religion as what people put their faith in. And he was, you know, sort of its high priest. SPEAKER_09: And so he didn't want his grave site to become a shrine. SPEAKER_09: That's why he wanted to be cremated. As he was on April 18th. SPEAKER_13: But Harvey kept the brain. SPEAKER_09: So the family, when they saw that headline, do they knock on Harvey's door? Yeah, what did they do? What the hell? SPEAKER_08: No, they phone the hospital. SPEAKER_08: They phone Princeton Hospital and they're very upset. SPEAKER_10: And eventually, Hans Albert, Einstein's eldest son, gets on the phone with Tom Harvey. Now, we don't know exactly what they said to each other. You can probably imagine Hans Albert was upset, probably yelled at Tom Harvey. Tom Harvey apparently apologized for taking it without permission. And finally, Harvey makes the pitch of his life. SPEAKER_13: He says, you know, this is a, you know, the mind for all the ages. We're never going to get this opportunity again. And I pledge that I will do a scholarly study. He made this very solemn vow to take care of this brain, to not allow it to become sort SPEAKER_08: of an object of fascination. SPEAKER_10: Tom Harvey told Hans Albert he'd never let the brain become a spectacle. He'd honor Einstein's wishes. But if he could just study this brain, it might reveal something. SPEAKER_13: The secret of human genius and creativity, you can't pass it up. And the son, Hans Albert said, yes, you can study it. SPEAKER_10: But only as long as it's serious science, no spectacle. SPEAKER_13: So the next step that Harvey has, he's trying to craft a kind of a do-it-yourself approach to studying a famous brain. Even though he's a doctor. Harvey's not trained in this kind of neuropathology. He learned some, but not to the degree that a specialist would. He spends evenings taking photographs. SPEAKER_08: He weighs it. He measures it. He hits some standard textbooks. Different reference guides. One of the really interesting things he did during this period, he brought this artist in to paint a portrait of Einstein's brain. Oh, really? When it was whole. He said he just wanted to have it. And he never did hang that painting. Really? What an interesting thing to do. I think partly it was because he knew what had to happen next. Or in his estimation, what he was going to do next. He's going to cut the brain into 240 sections. SPEAKER_13: And after that? He goes across the Delaware. I love that. Like he's George Washington or something. To the University of Pennsylvania, where there's a technician who he had worked with. He gave her some of those chunks of brain and she slices them really thinly. SPEAKER_13: Into microscope slides. And they made 12 sets. So when the smoke clears, and I'm sorry I'm dragging this out on you. No, no, this is great. The smoke clears, he's got, I'm told, 12 sets of at least 200 slides per set. SPEAKER_13: And his job for the next few years is to try to take it individually to various neuropathologists who might be able to study this brain. SPEAKER_10: So Harvey sends out slides and photos and samples of Einstein's brain. He was trying to collaborate with experts in the field. SPEAKER_13: Specialist after specialist. We don't exactly know how many photographs he gave out, how many slides, who he gave them to. But it was a lot. SPEAKER_08: Despite all that effort, though, there's no record of them ever getting back to him or doing anything of importance. From the few scientists I was able to contact at that time who received those pieces who were still alive, they said they didn't really know what they should be looking for. Which of course was true. This is where Tom Harvey ran into the reality of neuroscience at that time. Everything we human beings ever do, no matter how ordinary it seems, has a complex beginning SPEAKER_20: in our brains. At that point, scientists had just started to figure out neurons, what neurons do, how SPEAKER_09: they communicate back and forth. SPEAKER_09: Brain alone has 10,000 million of them. SPEAKER_11: They hadn't even scratched the surface of neuropathology. SPEAKER_08: They hadn't, you know, scratched the surface of sort of the understanding of a normal brain, let alone trying to solve the mystery of genius in Einstein's brain. So years and years go by and nothing. SPEAKER_13: But, you know, he wouldn't give up. He knew it was of significance. He thought there was something that could be learned and he never abandoned that. And I think at this point, Harvey began to see himself as kind of a living time capsule. SPEAKER_08: He was going to take this brain with him into the future when science would be equipped to study it properly. SPEAKER_09: But in the meantime, Harvey's life sort of falls apart. He has an affair, he gets divorced, and he loses his job at Princeton. And then he kind of just disappears. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, he does. SPEAKER_10: That is until 1978, when a young reporter from New Jersey knocked on his door asking about a brain. I got an airplane home. SPEAKER_04: Wait, did you call your editor or something on your way? SPEAKER_09: Well, the first thing I did, I went straight to my editor's house and he was like watching SPEAKER_04: a basketball game. And he watched a little of the basketball game without saying anything. SPEAKER_04: And finally he said, well, did you find the brain? And I said, yep. SPEAKER_09: That's how you tell him? That's like you like hold it for halftime? Why would you just like bust open the door? SPEAKER_04: It was this moment. SPEAKER_04: That was it. And then I had to write it. We got a great image for the cover. The cover line was My Search for Einstein's Brain. And then one of the people who got the press release was the AP. So when the story came out, the AP ran a thing about it. And it was in every newspaper in the country. Johnny Carson made a joke about the brain. Oh, really? What was the joke? SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Do you remember? It's all about the brain. You know, if it was really Einstein's brain would have been smart enough to get out of Wichita or something like that. SPEAKER_17: SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And Dr. Harvey had people camped out in his lawn. SPEAKER_04: Really? Right. Everyone wanted to see the brain. SPEAKER_04: It was, you know, a lot of attention. The Einstein estate went bonkers. SPEAKER_10: I mean, this is exactly what they didn't want to happen. SPEAKER_08: People came calling. There were cash offers for the brain. People all over the place started to write to him to volunteer to become its next keeper. And they offered him money. SPEAKER_10: So not only did Harvey fail to come up with any science about the brain, but he also broke that promise he made to the family. SPEAKER_09: But because of all the attention, at least on the science side, his luck kind of changed. One place that picked up the story was Science magazine. SPEAKER_09: By the late 70s, neuroscience had picked up. The human brain. SPEAKER_28: A report of a woman who had electrodes implanted in the brain. Two new techniques for exploring brains have been developed. SPEAKER_09: For example, we figured out there were opioid receptors in the brain. Millions of these sensory receptors. And had developed a treatment for Parkinson's. So scientists at this point were just slightly more equipped. And when Steve's story came out, SPEAKER_04: It actually kicked off real research into Einstein's brain that directly flowed from my making it public. SPEAKER_10: So what happens? So the first thing that happens is he gets a call from this scientist named SPEAKER_05: My name is Marion Diamond. Marion Diamond. SPEAKER_10: That's a good name. Great name. She was a professor of anatomy at Berkeley. And I've been teaching here for many decades. SPEAKER_05: She was sort of famous on campus for carrying around a hat box. SPEAKER_10: You get excited coming to class? SPEAKER_05: And she would SPEAKER_05: How many have never seen a human brain before? SPEAKER_10: Begin her freshman anatomy lecture in front of all these kids by bringing her hat box onto the table and open and it was like a flower print hat box. Open it up and pull out this brain. This mass only weighs three pounds. SPEAKER_05: And yet it has the capacity to conceive of a universe a billion light years across. SPEAKER_10: Some people call her one of the founders of modern neuroscience. SPEAKER_05: Isn't that phenomenal? A massive protoplasm could do that. SPEAKER_10: So she did these studies on rats, which became very famous, where she figured out that if you like put a rat in an enriched environment, so a cage with like a lot of toys, things to climb around on, and lots of other rat friends to hang out with, instead of just putting them in like the boring old normal cage, what you'll find is that their brains actually change. They'll have more of these little cells called glial cells, which for a long time people thought glial cells were just like the scaffolding of the brain, like neurons were where the action was, that's where all the thinking happened, and glial cells were just like, you know, the studs and mortar of the house, just kind of holding everything together. But around this time when Marion Diamond was doing these studies, they were starting to realize that the glial cells also had neurotransmitters flowing through them, like that they might be more important than we thought. SPEAKER_10: But shortly after she publishes her rat studies, she hears about Harvey. She saw, you know, a little piece about it in the journal Science, SPEAKER_08: and so she started to track down Harvey and she called him. And in 1984, Harvey sends her four chunks of brain. SPEAKER_10: She went looking in Einstein's brain to see if there was, SPEAKER_08: you know, something similar to what she had been recording in her animal experiments. And she finds that compared to the average brain, SPEAKER_10: Einstein had a lot of glial cells. What's a lot? Like twice as many? Three times as many? Well, about 70% more than the control group. But what does that even mean, though? I don't really know how to describe that, which is part of the problem. And on top of that, after she published this research, some other scientists raised questions that maybe the experimental methods weren't valid. So... Not convinced. Yeah, me neither. So that's Diamond. Diamond. So after Diamond, then this guy, Britt Anderson, comes along, SPEAKER_09: and his whole thing, he studied five other adult male dead brains. So he looked at their prefrontal cortexes, and that's like where higher cognitive abilities are located. So like if you're going to take a test, that's the part of your brain that's going to be activated. SPEAKER_17: And he found that compared to the other brains that he had, SPEAKER_09: the neurons in Einstein's brain were more tightly packed there. Huh. SPEAKER_16: So his neurons were more tightly packed in a certain part of his brain. SPEAKER_16: Did he have more neurons in that part or less neurons? Same number, roughly. SPEAKER_09: They were just more crowded together. SPEAKER_16: What does that say? I kind of take that as like, Einstein's problem-solving abilities SPEAKER_09: could go much more quickly and efficiently. Nyeh. Yeah, actually Britt Anderson, the guy who found this, he dismisses himself in a way. He found a difference, but he also was quick to say like, we just have one of these brains. He said, listen, you know, this was always going to be an N of 1 in any experiment. He's kind of like the middle child of all these researchers. He made like the smallest splash. But it is through Britt Anderson that Tom Harvey hears about Sandra Whittleson in Canada. SPEAKER_08: And that was like the biggest splash of them all. SPEAKER_09: Really? SPEAKER_16: Yes. SPEAKER_09: So Sandra Whittleson in the fall of 1995, she ends up getting this fax. A one-page fax from a man by the name of Thomas Harvey. SPEAKER_08: And the fax basically says, hey, I heard about your research. SPEAKER_09: Would you like to study the brain of Albert Einstein? SPEAKER_08: It almost seems like you would suspect it to be a prank. SPEAKER_10: Yeah. SPEAKER_08: I picture it just being that sentence on a fax page. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_08: But you know, obviously, she faxed back yes. SPEAKER_09: And so Harvey hops in the car with the brain, brain's in the trunk actually, and drives north. To bring the brain to Canada. And the reason he was so excited to have her look at the brain, what had really SPEAKER_08: caught his attention was the fact that she had this collection of normal brains. SPEAKER_09: She'd been doing this long-term before and after study. So years before she had gotten this group together, basically, like they signed up, they like took IQ tests, they did all these things while they were still alive. She knew their health history. And then when they died, she got to study their brains to see like a before and after picture of these people's brains. Were these all smart people? SPEAKER_16: So she had a mix, but the ones that she compared Einstein's brain to were all high IQ men. SPEAKER_16: Hmm. SPEAKER_09: So she makes this comparison, Einstein's brain versus these other brains in her collection. And she writes this article. And the gist of the article was that he had unusual parietal lobes. SPEAKER_13: Unusual parietal lobes. The parietal lobes of Einstein's brain were anatomically exceptional, if you will. Where is the parietal lobes again? SPEAKER_09: It's kind of like where your baseball cap is like mainly. Is it sort of like top of your head, but back? SPEAKER_10: Or if you had a yarmulke. Yes, exactly. A yarmulke. Yes. SPEAKER_09: And this area of your brain, this is where all of your sensory information comes in. And because of that, it's also where your visual spatial awareness is located. So like the way that you orient yourself in the world is like mostly located in that part of your brain. Like if you were to close your eyes right now and you think, where are my hands? Where are my knees or my feet? SPEAKER_09: Well, you have an internal mental map that's telling you where those things are. And that's your parietal lobe doing that. Anyhow. So what was different about this part of Einstein's brain is that if you imagine the brain to look like a walnut, which is kind of the only way that I imagine the brain, there are like all these grooves and crevices. And there's this one groove, like a groovy groove, like a deeper crevice called the Sylvian fissure. In Einstein's brain, it was shorter than the rest of ours. And apparently that's very strange. When she described it to me, she said it was, you know, to see this unique pattern in SPEAKER_08: Einstein's brain was as striking as seeing a face with the eyebrows beneath the eyes. SPEAKER_09: And Sandra Whittleson proposed that maybe because this crevice was a little bit shorter, the electricity in this part of his brain could go much more quickly. Oh, because they didn't have to travel around the valley. Yeah, it didn't have to take like a detour over a ditch. It could just go, phew. So that was- This is her speculation. SPEAKER_16: This was her speculation. SPEAKER_09: Yes. And so she was saying like the parietal lobe, like this is where his genius might be. And if you think about Einstein, like everybody says, like one of his greatest talents is like the way that he could manipulate shapes in his mind and like orient objects in his head. SPEAKER_13: I mean, just the idea that space-time is curved, you know, so he has this kind of great SPEAKER_13: visual spatial sense. And if you had to pick a part of your brain that could underlie mathematical abilities or visual spatial abilities, that's parietal lobes. I was looking up these papers, you see Thomas Harvey's name as like the co-author. SPEAKER_09: Oh, he was a co-author. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he's like cited in the paper and it just made my heart happy. SPEAKER_09: Like he made it, he got it. SPEAKER_09: Especially for Sandra Whittleson because he, all these years had been like shepherding this forward. And when that paper came out, I think Tom Harvey felt then that his work was over. SPEAKER_08: Because he felt at that point that they had pointed to something that was real and true. SPEAKER_16: He felt like finally the work that he promised to do in the very beginning was finally done. SPEAKER_09: And at that point, he actually decided to give the brain back to Princeton Hospital SPEAKER_08: in the care of Elliot Krauss, basically the pathologist who holds the same job he did when he first took that brain in 1955. Wow, it came full circle. SPEAKER_09: You know, it's kind of uncanny that it's back where it was. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. SPEAKER_16: I'm just going to rain on this parade for a second. I'm happy for Mr. Harvey. But in terms of the science, maybe you convinced me a little bit, like a medium bit, but it still kind of smells like phrenology to me. I mean, it's like, listening to it, the experience I have is like, oh, a Sylvian fissure. His was smaller. SPEAKER_16: And then I think to myself, what the f*** is a Sylvian fissure? I don't even know what that is. And like the fact that we so clearly default to this fascination with a thing that I can't even explain, it just kind of seemed absurd. SPEAKER_17: And we know that he said that he didn't think he was a particularly special guy. SPEAKER_10: He said various, there's lots of quotes from him where he talks about saying, like, I was just in the right place at the right time. He does say that, really. Yeah. You know, when he's talking about his fame, he has some quote about worrying that the packaging of him is better than the meat inside or something like he's a sausage. SPEAKER_17: I mean, this is part of the myth of him. SPEAKER_10: It's like, I mean, he was very humble. There's another one where he talks about, like, he sometimes talks about what made him SPEAKER_10: special was his stubbornness, that he was really obstinate and he wouldn't let things go. That's one of the only things I feel like you hear him talking about as some innate characteristic of him that made him different than other people. But he never talks about being smart. He never talks about his brain. I mean, I haven't read every Einstein quote, but I feel like we've been swimming around in it for a while the last few months, and I haven't seen him say anything about his brain ever. SPEAKER_16: But it is interesting that he says he was in the right place at the right time, SPEAKER_16: which can sound kind of like humble, but also maybe it's like, if you take it seriously, maybe there is something to it. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I mean, like, we've been talking about the neural connections inside his head, but you can also think about it a little more broadly, like, about the connections outside his head, almost as if the neurons didn't stop inside his skull, but like continued outward into the world around him. And that's what we're going to do after a quick break. This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the political battle in Washington over immigration SPEAKER_03: and the chaos at the southern border. You have a number of people that no governmental system can process doing all of that processing SPEAKER_01: in the worst possible place, right at the border. I'll talk with Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. SPEAKER_03: That's The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. This is G, and we are, we are, what are we doing here? SPEAKER_16: What are we doing here, Pat? We are back from our break. Just to reset, I was intrigued by the thing you said at the end of the last chapter that, you know, there are the circuits in his head, but then what about the circuits outside his head? Maybe he just got lucky. SPEAKER_16: What were you thinking of when you said that? Yeah, I mean, a lot of, there's sort of the obvious things that must be said. SPEAKER_10: Einstein was building on the work of lots of other physicists like Poincare and Lorentz, who had been chipping away at these same questions that puzzled him. So there's that. But if you widen the lens a little bit and you start to think more broadly, you start to see some really interesting kind of bigger forces that were at work on Einstein when he was coming up with these ideas. Like, just take special relativity, which most people would say is one of his most revolutionary ideas. Special relativity is? Special relativity, to put it like very basically, is the idea that time is relative and that time slows down as you go faster. So if you're going a million miles an hour versus 10 miles an hour, time will literally slow down for you. It won't just seem slower, it will actually be slower. SPEAKER_16: I feel like this is the moment when science and common sense just parted ways. It's such a weird idea. Totally. SPEAKER_10: Well, that idea came from Einstein, but also kind of came from the world around him. Okay, so I'm going to give you a couple of really interesting examples that we came across as we were researching this. Okay. SPEAKER_06: Number one. I'm not at all an expert on the brain story. I mean, I've got some of the same things that you have, but... Comes from this guy. Could you introduce yourself? I'm Peter Gallison. I'm a professor at Harvard University where I work on the history and philosophy of science and on physics. SPEAKER_10: And what Peter told us is if you look at when Einstein came up with the idea of special relativity, this was 1905. The story that's often told is Einstein was working in the patent office, just sitting around all by himself, thinking big thoughts. But if you look at what was actually happening at that moment, like outside... This was a transformative moment in the technological history of the world. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, what were some of the big, like, hot inventions happening? Well, if you looked out the window of any Central European or Western European city, SPEAKER_06: you would see new kinds of trams being installed, electric motors. You would see networks of clocks that were established. You would see all sorts of new devices that were being invented that could send signals, the extension of the telegraph network, everything in motion, everything in change. And... As a consequence, he says... SPEAKER_10: Time has suddenly become a topic of immense interest. SPEAKER_10: Not just because the world seemed to be moving faster, but because for the first time in human history, you could be in several different times at once. As you ran trains, say you leave Chicago at 3 p.m., when you get to a distant city, what SPEAKER_06: time is it there? Do you use the time that you started with in Chicago? Do you use the time that you're arriving at in Philadelphia? Who sets... SPEAKER_10: What are the times? You know, before the railroad, time was local. Every town had, like, its own time. Set in each town by the local jeweler who repaired and made clocks and watches. SPEAKER_06: But then with the railroad, you needed central time, and there were literally skirmishes SPEAKER_10: over whose time would become the time. We actually did a show about this, like, a million years ago. It was a big, big struggle. SPEAKER_06: There were people who didn't like that at all. But suddenly, the ability to traverse at a fairly high speed, hundreds, even thousands of miles, created the demand to think about what time was and how to coordinate it. SPEAKER_10: So that was sort of the mood of the moment, like, just outside the window of the patent office where Einstein was sitting there thinking big thoughts. And one of the specific questions he was wrestling with was the one Peter just threw out. Like, how would you coordinate two different clocks in two different cities? A lot of people at the time thought the way you do it is you send an electrical signal, like through a telegraph wire, from one clock to the other. Calculate the amount of time it would take that signal to get from the first clock to the second clock. Then you take that miniscule amount of time and subtract it from one of the clocks, or add it to one of the clocks. And then you'd have the same time in two places. And that sort of solved the problem. But then the next thought Einstein had was, what if that signal you were using was traveling at the speed of light? And what if those two clocks, like, what if one of them was moving? And if it was moving, and the light was sort of chasing it, wouldn't it take the light longer to get there? And wouldn't that, like, screw up your whole ability to coordinate time? Why am I telling you this? Because these kinds of questions, they sort of infiltrated Einstein's dreams. SPEAKER_26: Einstein wrote about this in his autobiography, so we have a very good idea. SPEAKER_10: That's Jimena Canales. I'm a historian of science. SPEAKER_10: At the University of Illinois. And she says Einstein wrote about these very particular daydreams he had. He said that he imagined himself being propelled through space chasing after a light beam. SPEAKER_26: And that historians of science, biographers of Einstein, often agree that it was that thought of experiment of seeing, you know, what actually happens if I pursue a light beam that had provided the origin of his thought, the theory of relativity. SPEAKER_10: And I'll explain why that light beam was such a big deal in a minute. But the main thing Jimena wanted to tell me about it was that it often gets explained as something that just emerged from Einstein's brain. Like that was purely an original idea of his. SPEAKER_26: But it was not his idea at all. SPEAKER_10: According to Jimena, a story he read sort of led him to it. She says Einstein loved science fiction as a kid. SPEAKER_26: And he said he was particularly taken by one author, the name is Aaron Bernstein, who wrote quite a few volumes. And Einstein says that he read them with, quote, breathless attention. SPEAKER_10: And Jimena says the story that got Einstein thinking about chasing light beams was about SPEAKER_26: a faster than light traveler. And what happens if we travel faster than the speed of light? SPEAKER_10: The story sort of imagines that you could have a guy who shoots off into space and perches himself on a star where he looks back at Earth. And what he sees isn't the same Earth he left. A different world, a different universe. SPEAKER_10: But an earlier Earth. Because, as Bernstein explains, when we look out at anything in space, we're not seeing it exactly as it is, but rather as it was. For example, when you look at the sun, you're really seeing the sun eight minutes in the SPEAKER_26: past because the light waves take time to reach you. And because this traveler could travel faster than light. SPEAKER_10: All you needed to do, you know, if you wanted to look at the Earth eight minutes in the SPEAKER_26: past, all you needed to do was to go to the sun. And if you jump into farther and farther planets and stars, then you can choose whatever time in history you want to see. SPEAKER_10: So in the story, this traveler could bounce from that first star to a planet to another star and another and another. SPEAKER_26: Quote, in one point in space, the light of the scenes of the French Revolution is just coming into view. And even farther away, the invasion of the barbarians has just become the order of the day. Alexander the Great is still conquering the world. Historical events that have long been dead for us will just be coming to life. SPEAKER_10: By the way, this was one of the first time travel stories in history. Which is crazy to think about. 3,000 years of human writings, and almost nobody to that point had imagined someone going back in time or going into the future. These stories that today are so much a part of movies and culture, they all basically started at the time Einstein was growing up. He just happened to be alive at that time. And Jimenez says they opened his mind. SPEAKER_10: He said that these stories really prompted him to imagine himself being propelled through SPEAKER_26: space chasing after a light beam. SPEAKER_10: And the reason that mental image was so pivotal for Einstein was that right around the time it popped into his head, other physicists were noticing this weird thing about the speed of light. Unlike everything else in the known world, light always moved at the same speed, no matter how fast you were moving relative to it. And in picturing himself riding along beside this light beam, Einstein realized that if light always moved at the same speed, if light was constant, then time must be relative. Which sort of, you know, eventually would turn our understanding of the universe upside down. So you're saying that if he hadn't been alive at a time when there were railroads SPEAKER_16: which created time problems, all the while there are people writing time travel fiction for the first time in history. All that hadn't been happening, he might not have thought the thoughts that he thunk. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah. Like I still think there was something about his brain that explains part of it. But all this other stuff, the time travel, the railroads, the stories, I would say that that adds like another 25%. SPEAKER_16: So the brain is what, like 20? Yeah, give the brain maybe 20. I would say 12, but that's okay. Let's go with 20. 20 plus 25, 4, so we're like roughly half, I don't know, a half. Let's say it's half. Yeah, we're like halfway there. SPEAKER_10: In this precise math that we're doing. SPEAKER_09: I'm going to see if I can push us a little bit further. SPEAKER_16: Okay, give another explanation. Oh yeah. Bring it, what are you at? SPEAKER_09: I got two. I'm going to start small. SPEAKER_16: Okay. And the first one, I spoke to this guy, Alberto Martinez. SPEAKER_09: He's a historian of science. And he told me that one of the other things Einstein was reading that really blew his mind was David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who had these pretty radical ideas, including that the laws of nature kind of start in our heads. That the fundamental concepts of science are a free creations, free inventions of the human SPEAKER_11: mind. SPEAKER_09: Alberto says that those ideas gave Einstein permission to think his own crazy thoughts. There's a letter from 1915 in which Einstein writes, this line of thought was of great SPEAKER_11: influence in my efforts. Very probably, I wouldn't have reached the solution without those philosophical studies. SPEAKER_09: And Einstein was kind of obsessed with him, so much so, and there's a little bit of a digression that just a couple of months before he was about to publish the theory of relativity. March of 1905. SPEAKER_09: Einstein was supposed to meet with a group of his friends to discuss some of Hume's writings, kind of like a study group. But one of the guys. This guy, Maurice Solovin, he wanted to skip a meeting of their discussion group. SPEAKER_11: Said he wanted to go see a violin concert or something. When Einstein and his mathematician friend Conrad Habich arrived. SPEAKER_11: And find that their buddy isn't there. SPEAKER_09: They are pissed off. SPEAKER_11: So they're so upset that they take out their cigars and they start smoking and smoking and smoking because they know Solovin hates smoking. And then they take the ashes of every cigar and smear them on his teapot. Oh my God, what a jerk. Yeah, his table, his pillow. His pillow? SPEAKER_09: They totally trashed his place. SPEAKER_09: Such was Einstein's love of Hume. SPEAKER_16: I'm going to give that like a seven. I'm going to give that a seven percent. SPEAKER_09: OK, fine. But in terms of non-brain explanations of his genius, I'm about to give you my favorite. SPEAKER_11: All right, here we go. SPEAKER_09: So we're going to rewind a couple of years back before the apartment trashing. Einstein's working for the government. A third class employee in the Swiss Pan office. SPEAKER_11: Not a great job. He's just a bureaucrat. He calls himself a federal ink shitter. He was in his mid-twenties. SPEAKER_09: He wanted to be a physicist so badly, but no one wanted to hire him. Again and again, they rejected him. Yet. There was one person who thought he had something special. So Mileva Maric was Serbian. This is writer Andrea Gabor. And she says Mileva and Einstein met in college. SPEAKER_07: At Etihad in Zurich, the big university in Zurich. One of the few places where you could attend university as a woman. Mileva was actually the only woman in their class. They're both in the same program for preparing future science and math teachers. SPEAKER_11: They become study buddies and pretty soon she becomes his girlfriend. SPEAKER_02: I long terribly for a letter from my beloved witch. I can hardly grasp that we'll be separated for so much longer. Only now do I see how frightfully much I love you. SPEAKER_09: Do you know anything about the early days of them as a couple? Were they, I can, I have this version of my head where it's like they were lovey-dovey, but also speaking like they were on the big bang theory. Just like ridiculously scientific conversations. SPEAKER_07: Well, I think it was, I think it was both of those things. They go on these hikes in the Alps, enjoy music together. SPEAKER_07: It's a very romantic relationship. But it's also one that is very much based on this shared love of science. They're studying physics. They're reading great works in physics that Einstein... He would skip class and then she would stay in class and like update him. SPEAKER_11: Oh, she would take notes for him? SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And they would like write these letters to each other about like these new ideas that he was reading about. I'm very curious what Kleiner will say about the two papers. He'd better pull himself together and say something reasonable. This is the first time I've ever heard of Kleiner. SPEAKER_23: This is the stuff from which his work on relativity is born. SPEAKER_11: So she becomes the first person that analyzes and thinks about these things with him. She was like the first person from what I can tell to like really engage with him as SPEAKER_09: like this like weird off the beaten path kind of guy and like support that and like love that about him. Okay. So they get married, they have kids, she leaves the science community. SPEAKER_09: He continues to do his thing, not very successfully. Just because of who? Just because she's a scientist. Just because she's a woman and not all this happens. Just because she's a woman. It's just one of them had to do it. SPEAKER_09: And for a long time, historians didn't think much about her. But then, you know, then these love letters, I mean, they really were a big news item. In 1986, a pile of letters between Mileva and Einstein turned up. And there was one letter and there was one line from Einstein that kind of like rocked the world. SPEAKER_11: There's a letter from 1901 in which Einstein says, How proud will I be when we both together bring our work on the relative motion victoriously to its end? That's what he literally says in his penmanship. Our work, like our theory. SPEAKER_09: Whoa. And everyone was like, what? Like, could that like, was she helping him on the side? It was a collaboration? Yeah, that's what I was all about. SPEAKER_07: I was like, what? The sort of surprise at the idea that this iconic genius had had a wife who maybe was There's a couple of other letters in which Einstein again refers to our work, our theory. SPEAKER_11: When you put them all together, it's enough to give anyone the impression, relative motion, our theory that Einstein is literally saying that Mileva was his secret coworker. SPEAKER_11: Wow, I'm giving that a 20. SPEAKER_09: But before we get too excited about this, and by we, I mostly mean me, I need to throw in a few big buts. SPEAKER_11: The replies that we have from her do not engage the science. The letters in which he writes these to her, he doesn't specify what she herself did. Alberto says, when you read the letters, you realize what he believed at the time when SPEAKER_09: he wrote that letter wasn't that special. That relative motion idea that he talked about in the letter, that's not relativity. And in fact, that's kind of something everybody knew about at the time. SPEAKER_11: Did Einstein have the theory of relativity when he's writing them? And then the answer is no. He has nothing. We have multiple sources in which he says, I have nothing. SPEAKER_11: So she probably wasn't his co-conspirator, but she did support him at this time when SPEAKER_09: everybody else was kind of rejecting him. And for that, I would like to give her some points. I'm going to say 15. SPEAKER_16: Based on what? Just because it makes you feel good to give her 15? Yeah, just arbitrarily, I like to pick numbers out of the sky. SPEAKER_09: Seems like that's what we're doing here. SPEAKER_10: True. I'm with Rachel here. I support the 15. No, I do too. I do too. OK, so where does that leave us? SPEAKER_16: That leaves us some percent for the physicist who came before, 25-ish percent for time and place, 7 percent Hume, 15 percent Mileva. Yeah, that doesn't get us all the way there. SPEAKER_10: No, I know. So we decided to call one other person to see if we get a fifth thing, because why not? SPEAKER_14: Well, I have an answer. And I think there are many. This is Brian Greene, physicist, professor at Columbia. SPEAKER_10: He has written so much about Einstein. He's written about Einstein in his best-selling books. He's talked about him on television specials. He has a play about Einstein. He has written about all the ways Einstein has impacted the world and all the ways the world impacted Einstein. But surprisingly, when we asked him about this, he brought it back to the brain. I have to say, if I was in the shoes of the pathologist at the time, I may have absconded SPEAKER_15: with his brain as well. His basic point is, yeah, there was the railroads and the time travel fiction and there was SPEAKER_10: Hume. ...the confluence of so many different features. But those things were around for everybody. SPEAKER_10: Somehow, all of them came together in this one brain in a way that was different. SPEAKER_14: Somewhere in the collection of atoms and molecules in the brain that we call Albert Einstein, is the answer to why Albert Einstein was Albert Einstein. Whether you think there's something innate about it, like Einstein was born with some SPEAKER_10: special mental equipment, or you think it had more to do with his environment, Brian says in the end, it doesn't really matter. Because everything you experience rewrites your biology. It etches itself into you. And so when you look at a brain, you're not just looking at a structure. You are, according to Brian, in some fundamental way, looking at the life that person lived. Yeah, every genius thought, every deep insight, every pattern recognized happened inside that SPEAKER_14: gloppy gray three or four pound structure. That's all there is. Whatever set him apart, Brian says, is in there somewhere. And if we had the capacity to lay out every single circuit and every single influence that could cascade through that brain, if we were able to fully understand all the electrical signals and crackles that would go through that brain, yes, I believe that we would fully understand Einstein's process and understand how it was that he was able to do what he did. We can't do that. Yet. SPEAKER_13: Well, um, there's a lot of interest in this concept that the structure of the brain is going to tell you something about the function. That's neurologist Fred Lepore, who we heard from earlier. SPEAKER_10: And he says people are trying, not so much with Einstein's brain anymore, but he says there's this whole exploding area of neuroscience where researchers are trying to describe the brain at the level of detail Brian's describing. That's funded to the tune of 4.5 billion. SPEAKER_13: He told us about one guy who's doing this just about a mile from where Einstein lived. SPEAKER_13: There's a Princeton University professor, Sebastian Sung, and what he does is he takes a cubic millimeter, a cubic millimeter of mouse retina. That's neural tissue. It's not brain, but it's neural tissue. And he slices this into these vanishingly thin sections. And then he tries to trace the axons, the dendrites, the neurons, the astrocytes, the oligodendroglia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It can take months. It can take months to do a cubic millimeter. And then you've got to have some kind of software that can analyze to see if the structure can lead you to some kind of conclusion about circuitry, which might get you to function, might get you to function. SPEAKER_13: Like, why not definitely? SPEAKER_10: Like, if that doesn't get you to function, then what would? What would be left out if we could map perfectly the structure of all the connections? SPEAKER_13: Well, you're talking like me. You're talking like a neuro. See, I'm by default, I'm a neurologist. I'm a materialist. They call me a materialist because I'm saying, well, the left side of the brain has something to do with the right arm and speech. That's called materialism. But there's another school of thought, and that's called dualism, which is somehow mind, consciousness, spirit, soul. You pick out the noun you want there is separate from the physical substrate of the brain. SPEAKER_10: How would that be science, though? Because I mean, I can imagine a school of thought which allows for that. But it feels like you're very quickly stepping out of science if you go that way. SPEAKER_13: Well, yes. Yes. OK. See, we're all brought up on this thing. When you read anything in the popular press about the brain, they'll show you functional neuroimaging. When someone talks, the Broca's area, the speech area on the left side of the brain lights up. And you go, well, there's your answer. That's the structure. It lights up. That's what's creating language. Except when you deal with the neurophilosophers, they say, well, we got one problem with that. It's called the hard problem. If you look at that chunk of brain that you're calling Broca's area that lights up when you talk, what exactly is happening there? How does that create a word? Or if you're looking at the occipital lobe and you're looking at the color red, how do you create that qualia, which is a fancy way of saying the sensation of color? We can show you where it is happening. We just can't show you how. We're all looking at the same thing. We're saying somehow if we could get a better handle on the anatomy, maybe we can explain a thought. But we can't explain a thought. I mean, forget, forget relativity. We can't explain a thought yet. SPEAKER_30: It follows from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are food, are both different manifestations of the same thing. A somewhat unfamiliar conception was the average mind. SPEAKER_25: Thank you. Hi, this is Jeremiah Barba and I'm calling from San Francisco, California. SPEAKER_27: Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Simon's Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_21: New York City in the early 1980s was a great place for Valerie Jimenez. I grew up right on Avenue C. I'm a Nuyorican through and through. SPEAKER_21: Until change came to her street. People just started like disappearing. Like one day they were there and the next day they were gone. HIV and AIDS had arrived and it wasn't just gay men who were getting sick. Join us for Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows, a series from the History Channel and WNYC. Listen wherever you get podcasts.