0:00

This is Radiolab, I'm Lulu Miller. Imagine

0:03

you have a disease. You

0:05

know you have the disease. You know how

0:07

you got it. You can see very clear

0:09

and painful signs of the disease on your

0:11

body. It's a

0:14

disease that will take your life

0:16

if left untreated, but you can't

0:18

get any medical help because your

0:20

symptoms do not officially count as

0:22

part of the disease according to

0:24

some bureaucratic checklist

0:27

somewhere. This

0:29

was the situation for over thousands of women in

0:32

the 1990s, over a decade into the

0:34

AIDS epidemic, because the official

0:36

symptoms of AIDS were based

0:38

exclusively on male patients, meaning

0:40

that very clear signs of their bodies being

0:43

immunocompromised, things like cervical cancer,

0:46

yeast infections, pelvic inflammatory disease,

0:49

those were completely

0:51

ignored and discounted because

0:54

men didn't get them. So

0:57

what the heck were these women supposed to do? Today, before we

0:59

dive into our Radiolab episode, I

1:01

want to play you an excerpt from a new show

1:03

that tells the story of a small group of women

1:06

who tried to do something, who tried to pull

1:08

off this

1:11

seemingly impossible existential feat

1:13

to unerase themselves. The

1:18

show is called Blindspot. It's a collaboration between the History

1:20

Channel and our colleagues at WNYC. And

1:24

this season sort of lives at just the same nexus of

1:26

science and humanity that our show does, and

1:29

we thought some of you might really like it. So

1:32

to just get a feel for

1:35

the show, I'm going to play an excerpt. It's

1:37

just a little over five minutes, and then we'll

1:40

be on with today's Radiolab. To set

1:42

up what you're going to hear, it's the early 1990s, and we

1:44

are zooming into one of the

1:46

key places where the movement to

1:48

fight for women with HIV really began. In

1:53

a maximum security prison in New York State. And

1:55

what I think is so special about this tape

1:57

is that it's a very, very important piece. that

2:00

you get to sort of peer

2:02

inside the oyster shell. And

2:05

do you see the factors,

2:07

the coincidences, the intimacies, these

2:10

sort of actual tactile grains

2:12

around which the whole pearl of the movement

2:15

is spun. So here

2:17

we go. I'm gonna hand it

2:19

off now to blind spot host Lizzie

2:21

Ratner. One

2:23

name kept coming up at the center of this

2:25

story. Katrina. Katrina. When it

2:28

became obsessed with who is Katrina

2:30

Hasseliff? Katrina was

2:32

an inspiration to all. Katrina

2:38

Hasseliff, she was young. She

2:41

was only in her 20s when she arrived

2:43

at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She

2:46

grew up in Niagara Falls, one of 11 kids. In

2:49

her late teens, she found Islam and

2:51

married a religious man and moved to

2:53

Brooklyn. But by

2:55

the age of 21, she'd moved back

2:57

to Niagara Falls and fallen pretty deep

2:59

into an addiction to heroin. She

3:02

could stay out on the streets all night and

3:05

still somehow managed to go to

3:07

college in the morning. She

3:09

soon started doing sex work and stealing.

3:12

And the word was that she could lift a

3:14

wallet off of anyone. She

3:16

ended up getting arrested for pulling a knife on a

3:18

client and that is how in 1985, she

3:21

ended up in a maximum security prison

3:23

for women in upstate New York. Katrina

3:30

was very fiery and she had

3:32

a real temper. A fiery

3:34

temper. Judith Clark, she met

3:36

Katrina in solitary confinement. At

3:39

prison, this prison, at Bedford Hills.

3:42

I think she got into a scuffle with

3:44

an officer is my memory of what

3:46

led her there. I

3:48

remember her saying something like, oh

3:51

God, it was worth it. Oh

3:53

my God. It was this great

3:55

big smile on her face. Judy

3:58

was also in prison at Bedford. And

4:01

the crime that got her there, it was

4:03

a big deal. Good

4:06

evening. Echos of the violent

4:08

radical underground of the 1960s rolled over

4:11

the New York suburb of Manuet today

4:13

in the botched ambush of an armored

4:16

car that left one guard and two

4:18

policemen dead. The

4:21

Brinks robbery. It was a

4:24

crime committed by an offshoot of the

4:26

far-left weather underground. Three people were killed.

4:29

Judy was driving the getaway car and she and

4:31

Kathy Boudin were among the four people

4:34

arrested. Judy was sentenced to 75

4:36

years to life in prison. Our

4:42

cells were very bare, you know,

4:45

cinder block walls and

4:47

a solid door and then a

4:49

small window on the other

4:51

side that had a lot of mesh on it.

4:54

I mean,

4:56

it sounds kind of terrifying. It was.

5:00

In solitary confinement, they were allowed

5:02

just one hour a day outside.

5:04

And most days, Judy would walk laps

5:07

around the track alone. And

5:09

then after a few months,

5:12

suddenly this woman

5:14

appears. She's beautiful

5:17

and very elegant. She wore

5:19

a head wrap. She wore a long

5:22

dress and was incredibly

5:24

stylish. There are

5:26

people who managed to be stylish in prison

5:29

and Katrina was one of them. And

5:34

something between the two women clicked.

5:37

This was a moment of transformation for

5:39

both of them. They were both grappling

5:41

with their lives before prison, what they

5:43

had done. And so every day, they

5:45

would walk and just talk. You know,

5:47

she told me a little bit about

5:49

her life and about her

5:51

own struggle toward recovery, having gone

5:53

through a period of addiction.

5:56

On the one hand, she's incredibly intelligent. She's a very, very talented woman.

5:58

She's a very, very talented woman. She's a very, She was

6:01

a practicing Muslim, but

6:03

she had this fire, and

6:05

it could get her in trouble. And

6:09

that is what drew them together and got

6:11

them to start organizing in prison. Let's

6:15

take a look at the issue of AIDS in

6:17

prisons. This is Dr. Sheldon Landesman, and he's

6:19

speaking at a forum in 1987. A

6:22

huge percentage of the persons in the prison system,

6:24

and I can't get a good handle on the

6:26

number anywhere from 70 to 80%, have

6:29

used drugs prior to coming to

6:32

prison. We know from a variety

6:34

of studies that at a minimum, 50%

6:36

of the intravenous drug users in the New

6:38

York City and surrounding area are infected with

6:40

the AIDS virus, taking

6:42

the most conservative estimates. AIDS

6:45

was becoming a huge problem in the prison

6:47

system, and not just among injection drug

6:49

users. The New York Department

6:51

of Health tested women as they were entering the

6:53

prison system in 1988. It

6:56

found that fully 18.8% of women tested positive for

6:58

HIV. That

7:02

is almost one in five women,

7:04

higher than the rate for men. And

7:07

these numbers, they were probably an undercount.

7:09

In Bedford, so many women had fallen

7:11

sick and disappeared that rumors

7:13

were running wild. Nobody know

7:15

what the hell was going on. Meet

7:19

Awilda Gonzalez. Everybody calls

7:21

me Wendy. Wendy

7:23

got to Bedford around the same time as Katrina in

7:25

1985. She

7:27

was in for possessing and selling drugs. And

7:30

when she arrived, she found everyone

7:32

on edge. Well, the many

7:34

women bullied all the women harassed

7:37

them, beat them, shame them, blame

7:40

them. Their

7:43

own fear, because at one point, we all

7:45

looking at this woman and saying, wait

7:48

a minute, how many times

7:50

did I share a needle? See? For

7:53

how many times did you make love

7:56

to somebody and they didn't tell you

7:58

or they didn't know? There

8:00

was still a lot of confusion around how

8:02

you got HIV, but there was one thing

8:04

that everybody knew. If you

8:07

got infected, you died. No

8:10

one wants it to be seen going to

8:12

the medical department for anything because they were

8:14

afraid that people would say, oh, she's an

8:16

AIDS bitch. Wendy

8:19

worked as a hairdresser in the prison hair

8:21

salon, and she was starting to

8:24

get lots and lots of questions. My

8:26

sister is the knife that

8:28

I use to do certain styles in

8:30

the hair, and women

8:32

question me, what are you doing to

8:34

disinfect this? And I say, you know

8:36

what? I need to educate

8:38

myself. Either

8:41

people were going to turn against each

8:43

other, as was happening, or

8:46

people were going to be able to seek

8:49

each other. The women started

8:51

organizing to put together a meeting. You didn't

8:53

have to be HIV positive to join. We

8:56

wanted women among the druggies. We wanted

8:59

women among the good old Christians. We

9:01

wanted white women. We wanted Hispanic women.

9:03

We wanted black women. We wanted religious.

9:05

We wanted non-religious. We wanted

9:08

hippies. Katrina was part

9:10

of that initial organizing group. She

9:12

worked in the law library, and so she began

9:15

spreading the word to other women. Soon,

9:17

they had 30 people who were

9:19

interested. Here's how she described

9:22

that first meeting in a documentary a few

9:24

years later. We

9:26

went around introducing ourselves, and about the third

9:28

woman, she said, my name is Sonya, and

9:31

I have AIDS. I

9:33

had never heard anybody say that before out loud.

9:35

I don't think anybody else in the room had

9:37

heard anybody say that out loud. The

9:39

room went silent. People

9:43

engulfed her. It made me

9:45

cry, because there was so much

9:47

support in the room for this person who

9:49

was able to say, I have AIDS. I

9:52

thought to myself, I can never say that. All

10:01

right, I'm going to stop the excerpt there.

10:04

Again, the show is called Blind Spot. This

10:06

season is called The Plague in the Shadows.

10:09

Go check it out wherever you get

10:11

podcasts to find out if this group

10:13

of women will topple a

10:15

Goliath. And in the

10:17

process, they have hundreds of thousands of lives. Spoiler alert,

10:19

they do. But

10:22

keep listening to find out how. All

10:24

right. Now, I'm switching gears big

10:26

time in tone and vibe. We are heading

10:28

over to hear a radio lab from a

10:31

few years back that is very

10:33

near and dear to my heart. It comes from

10:35

the series we did on intelligence called G,

10:38

which was hosted by Pat Walters, who

10:40

is now our managing editor, making sure

10:42

all our stories sound good. A

10:45

few years back, he put together this series

10:47

that's all about intelligence, how we measure intelligence

10:49

and how the concept of intelligence can cause

10:51

incredible harm, but maybe sometimes help. But

10:54

anyway, the episode we're about to hear is about

10:57

the most bizarre treasure

10:59

hunt I've ever heard

11:01

about. It's a treasure hunt for a

11:03

tiny chunk of human flesh that absolutely

11:06

changed the world in huge ways. And

11:09

it went missing for a long time until

11:11

an intrepid treasure

11:14

hunter of sorts went off to find it.

11:16

That's all I'm going to say. The episode

11:18

is called Relative Genius. And again, it's hosted

11:20

by Pat Walters and co-reported by Rachel Kucic.

11:54

And today, we're going to go looking

11:56

for intelligence in what might seem like

11:59

one of the more obvious

12:01

places. And

12:08

the story starts with this guy. My

12:10

name is Stephen Levy. I'm an editor-at-large

12:13

at Wired magazine. Thank you so much

12:15

for coming in. Basically, I guess,

12:17

where did this all start for

12:19

you? So in 1978, I

12:22

was working for a magazine called New

12:24

Jersey Monthly. Steve was young, fresh out

12:26

of school. It was my first real

12:29

job in journalism. Offices were

12:31

in a suburb outside Princeton, New

12:33

Jersey. Sort of an office park,

12:35

a very bland set of offices

12:37

with cubicles and, you know, really

12:39

dunder mifflin-ish. Steve says

12:41

it was a typical, boring, entry-level job.

12:44

Until this one day, we had a new editor.

12:46

It got interesting. Yeah. He called me in his office

12:48

and said, I want you to find

12:50

Einstein's brain. And

12:55

I thought, what? Were you like, that

12:57

sounds exciting? Or were you like, I

12:59

don't know. I thought that sounds pretty

13:01

cool. That sounds pretty cool. You know,

13:03

I've been working on a piece about

13:05

the psychology of the New Jersey driver,

13:07

right? Right, right. That really

13:09

just comes out. I mean, I literally did

13:11

a service piece about racquetball, which was a

13:13

big trend then. This

13:16

is better. Now,

13:19

the reason the editor assigned him this

13:21

story is

13:24

there had been these rumors going back years

13:27

that when Einstein died back in 1955,

13:30

moments after his death, someone

13:32

had literally stolen his brain

13:36

and run off with it. Sort of an urban legend.

13:39

Einstein's brain is somewhere. You

13:43

know, the Russians have it and

13:45

they're trying to clone Einstein. Steve's

13:49

editor just wanted him to get to the bottom of

13:51

it. He literally said to me, I want you to

13:53

find Einstein's brain. What did you know about Einstein at

13:55

that point in his brain? Well,

13:57

what I knew about Einstein is what the...

13:59

Anyone on the street would know about Einstein

14:02

essentially, you know, this guy with the funny

14:04

hair, the relativity, right?

14:07

Whatever that was. What

14:09

he would quickly learn, after

14:12

a little bit of reading, is that in

14:15

the early 20th century, Einstein

14:17

pretty much rewrote the way that we thought the

14:19

universe would. Einstein,

14:23

brilliant physicist and theoretical mathematician.

14:26

A scientific giant. He

14:28

said that mass is equivalent to energy. E

14:30

equals mc squared. Which led to

14:32

the atomic bomb. The

14:34

all-shattering devastation in which was born the

14:36

atomic age. He also said time and

14:38

space could both bend, which led to

14:40

the discovery of black holes and like

14:42

a million other things. He enabled man

14:44

to embark at last on this total

14:46

adventure. And it didn't take long

14:49

before Einstein just became

14:51

a symbol. Do you think you're smarter than

14:53

Einstein? For? As

14:55

a total bomb. Intelligence. Space.

14:58

That's Einstein. Einstein. For?

15:01

Energy and motion. Genius. I

15:03

am not a genius. I'm not Einstein. You don't

15:05

have to be an Einstein. It's a little Einstein.

15:07

So how was Steve the scientist? Find

15:18

the brain of the guy whose

15:21

name basically means genius. Then

15:24

he said, by the way, this is going to

15:26

be our cover in August. A few weeks, six

15:28

weeks away or something? Didn't have a lot of

15:30

time. How do you even

15:32

begin looking for the brain of a

15:35

guy that died decades ago? Yeah, there

15:37

was this thing called the library. So

15:41

Steve knew that Einstein lived in

15:43

Princeton and died in Princeton. April

15:46

1955. So he headed

15:48

over to the local public library, pulls up

15:50

the newspaper archive. And look at the

15:52

microfilm. And he finds this

15:55

article. Written a couple days after Einstein

15:57

died. And it said,

15:59

Einstein's brain... The be preserved for study.

16:04

And. It talked about, yeah, there's gonna be

16:06

a study of Einstein's brain and the, oh,

16:08

yeah, they're gonna have a press conference about.

16:11

So. Evil that the next is a very thinking

16:13

they'll be a big. Front page story about

16:15

this press conference and nothing. Gets

16:18

nothing. There. Was no press conference?

16:20

oh didn't happen know. So. Many

16:23

Thanks. Okay, As twenty three

16:25

years ago, the have a brain

16:27

studied something's gotta be published like

16:29

by scientists. I went through all

16:31

sorts of scientific periodical guards. Know

16:33

papers am I really would hard

16:36

and eventually he realizes that little

16:38

newspaper article that was literally that

16:40

was the last thing written. About

16:43

Einstein's brain. But.

16:45

There was one clue in that little

16:47

newspaper article. A

16:50

name. The. Name of

16:53

the guy who was supposed to hold that

16:55

press conference that never happened. Doctor Thomas Harvey.

16:59

Who it seemed in addition to being

17:01

the guy who didn't hold that press

17:03

conference was also the pathologist who would

17:06

have during the autopsy on those days.

17:14

So and expends desserts The prince's asked the

17:17

play science and died and were supposedly this

17:19

Harvey I work that and I went

17:21

there I found I thought the Vice president

17:23

am I asked them about the pathologist the

17:25

Sky Doctor Thomas Harvey where's doctor Rv Hospital

17:28

guy says he loves you're a long time

17:30

ago when seems like what about the

17:32

brain I heard the brain got taken as

17:34

it here at the hospital needed know anything.

17:37

I've talked to Doctor Harvey. So.

17:39

What do you do to find Harvey? So.

17:41

Wheels are looking for a person in on

17:43

his of the A. There's no Google and

17:46

others though face but there's no linked them.

17:49

so and there's a lot of

17:51

places lot of cities here in

17:54

every city sad of yeah i

17:56

have a phone book by even

17:58

look at every phone book. I

18:01

eventually figured one place

18:03

I might go is the American Medical

18:05

Association. Figures this guy Harvey was

18:07

a doctor, maybe they have his contact info. So

18:09

I called them up, said I'm

18:11

really trying to find this Dr. Thomas Harvey, Thomas

18:14

S. Harvey, I knew his middle name, and

18:17

this very kindly woman looked

18:20

up stuff and then

18:22

told me there is a Thomas S.

18:24

Harvey in Wichita, Kansas. So

18:27

he calls directory assistant in Wichita, says do

18:29

you guys have a number for a Thomas

18:31

Harvey? They said yes. He

18:34

asked is that number listed? And they

18:36

said yes. They gave me his phone

18:38

number and I took a

18:40

deep breath and dialed the phone number. Back

18:43

then if someone wasn't there, it would

18:46

just ring and ring and you'd hang up and that would

18:48

be it because it was a pre-answering machine. But

18:50

he picked up the phone and I

18:53

said is this Dr.

18:55

Harvey, and he said yes. And I said is

18:57

this Dr. Harvey who

18:59

worked at Princeton Hospital in

19:02

1955? And

19:05

there was this pause. I

19:13

figured, you know, wait, it's a sort of yes

19:15

or no question. There

19:17

was a pause. Like he was almost debating whether

19:21

to own up to this. And

19:25

finally he said yes. In

19:30

retrospect, maybe it was a

19:32

little bit jig as op.

19:34

And he said, well, I don't know if I could help you. And

19:39

I said, well, I'd just like to talk to you. And he

19:41

said, well, and he

19:43

was sort of not saying

19:45

yes or no. And I said,

19:48

you know, I'm coming out there to talk to

19:50

you. So

19:55

I booked a ticket for Wichita, Kansas.

19:58

Steve hops on a plane to Kansas. He spends

20:01

the night, and then the next morning he wakes

20:03

up, gets a cab, and goes over to Harvey's lab.

20:05

I rang the bell or

20:07

whatever, and Dr. Harvey came

20:10

to open the door for me. What

20:12

did he look like? He looked like,

20:14

you know, the guy who would be

20:16

your pediatrician. You know, this kindly looking

20:19

guy in his 60s, I guess. He's

20:22

wearing a lab coat, and I remember

20:24

very clearly he had in his pocket

20:26

one of those pens that could write

20:28

in three colors, you know, red, green,

20:30

blue. He

20:33

took me back to the back of the

20:35

facility. So his office

20:38

was basically a glassed-in

20:40

cubicle, and with a desk

20:43

and a chair, some shelves and

20:45

some cardboard boxes behind the chair.

20:48

And I sat down, and we talked. Now,

20:50

at this point, Harvey hadn't admitted to anything,

20:53

but Steve had a feeling, a

20:56

definite feeling. Yeah, you could tell

20:58

he was very cautious, very guarded. You know, I'm

21:00

asking every way to try to figure out where

21:02

the brain is. I

21:04

asked him a few times, you know, where's the brain? And

21:07

he really didn't want to answer that. And then

21:09

finally I'd say, well, don't even need pictures of

21:11

it. And then he sort of

21:13

broke down. When I asked, you know, maybe

21:15

because he says I was so frustrated, because,

21:17

you know, I was like, no pictures even?

21:21

And he sort of like sagged a little.

21:24

So he gets up, and he walks

21:27

behind me, and there was sort of like a beer cooler near

21:29

where he was. And I'm thinking, is it in the beer cooler?

21:31

No, he keeps walking past there. And

21:35

he goes behind me to where one

21:37

of the cardboard boxes is. And

21:40

he pulls out these two jars. And

21:43

in one of the jars, there

21:45

are these pieces of biomass

21:47

floating in there that

21:50

are clearly brain stuff.

21:57

And I'm like staring at this thing. Have

22:06

you been living like a joke? You

22:08

know this was amazing. I mean here

22:11

come here. You can hear you know

22:13

that the chorus of Angels the new

22:15

I have owned by the brain. That.

22:20

I'm taking as an and

22:23

like this is the brain

22:25

that changed the world and

22:27

to see a plane was.

22:30

A Movie Experience Episode.

22:34

I I I I give i

22:37

got miss glimpse. Of

22:39

some. Of what

22:41

their a something big the something. Of

22:45

A Mr. It

22:50

for has the authority of

22:53

philosophy. In

22:55

this episode math and Nfc

22:57

app thought were gonna try to

22:59

untangle fatness have for thirty seven

23:02

manifestation of the seen. What

23:04

can the brain of one

23:06

of the greens geniuses that humanity

23:08

has ever produced? A somewhat

23:10

unfair media on Fox? has

23:12

ever? It's Nine O'clock in the

23:15

Brain tell us. Free.

23:20

Allowed is supported by Better Help. Relationships.

23:23

Have any time. Take worth

23:25

putting in that were

23:27

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betterhelp, help.com/Radiolab. After

24:20

Lives is a new podcast about

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the life and legacy of Leilene

24:25

Polanco, a transgender Afro Latina who

24:27

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24:29

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24:32

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24:43

It should have never happened. Listen to

24:45

After Lives on the iHeart Radio app

24:48

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey,

24:55

this is the Radiolab miniseries G. I'm

24:57

Pat Walters and today we're talking about

24:59

Einstein's brain, like the actual

25:01

physical thing of it and whether

25:03

or not it can tell us anything about the

25:06

nature of genius. Well, I'm just gonna say for

25:08

the record that I think that's silly and

25:11

I think that brain is just a whole,

25:13

it is just a, who invited you? I

25:17

do not think, but I am, go bring

25:19

my ex-sangman into this. I would just like

25:21

to declare my

25:25

bias that I don't think there's anything special about

25:27

his brain. Anything, not even,

25:30

I mean, he was clearly a genius. So

25:32

what is that? There's something about the idea

25:34

that his genius is tied to the physical

25:36

structure of his brain that makes me itchy.

25:40

Literally, that's the physical sensation I have. I start

25:43

to itch. Yeah, I think you're dismissing it too

25:45

soon. I think there's more to it than

25:47

you suspect. Hmm.

25:50

All right, well, let me ask you a more basic question. What's

25:53

the fellow's name again? Thomas Harvey.

25:55

How did he end up with that brain to begin

25:57

with? You

26:00

know, to answer your

26:02

question, this is Dr. Fred Lepore. He's a

26:04

neurologist, also wrote a book about Einstein. He's

26:07

one of the people we talked to to

26:09

answer that very question. And he says, you

26:11

got to go back to the winter of

26:13

1955. Einstein was

26:15

living on borrowed time. 76

26:18

years old, retired, living in Princeton, and

26:20

he gets sick. He starts to feel

26:22

this pain in his abdomen. It was so

26:24

much, it almost felt like a gallbladder attack.

26:26

It turned out to be way worse than

26:28

that. Ultimately, he had an abdominal

26:30

aortic aneurysm. Frank Glenn, who was a

26:33

neurosurgeon, not a nurse, a surgeon at

26:35

Cornell came down. Ready to operate. But

26:37

Einstein basically said, look, you

26:40

know, my time is

26:42

up. I will die. I think he's, I will

26:44

die elegantly. He knew he was, and that was

26:46

a brave thing to say because he was in

26:48

pain. And eventually, in the spring of 1955, Einstein,

26:52

under the hospital Friday, died this morning after

26:54

refusing surgery, which it turned out would not

26:56

have helped him recover from a ruptured artery.

26:58

As the story goes, in the early morning

27:00

hours of April 18th, he

27:02

muttered a couple of incomprehensible words,

27:05

incomprehensible to his nurse, who didn't speak German.

27:08

And then in the early morning hours, he was found

27:11

dead. Now,

27:15

Tom Harvey, our guy, was the chief

27:17

pathologist at Princeton Hospital. His job was

27:19

to do autopsies. And that night, April

27:21

18th, 1955, he's at home sleeping. And

27:26

he gets a call. Yeah, I think the

27:29

phone call came sometime before dawn. And

27:31

it was Einstein's personal

27:33

physician who called him

27:35

to let him know that Einstein's son

27:37

had given permission for an autopsy

27:40

to be performed on his father.

27:42

This is Carolyn Abraham, science journalist,

27:44

author of Possessing Genius, the

27:47

story of the bizarre odyssey of

27:49

Einstein's brain. Harvey actually died in

27:51

2007. But

27:53

before he did, Carolyn spent some

27:55

time with him and got his take

27:57

on that day. He, you know, gets himself ready.

28:00

and he remembered it was a really

28:02

nice morning. Spring

28:04

was in the air and things were

28:06

turning green and

28:08

he was walking towards what he

28:11

realized was going to be a

28:13

major opportunity in his professional life.

28:17

He got to that hospital and he

28:19

got to his pathology lab and

28:21

someone that morning had

28:24

already placed Einstein on

28:26

the autopsy table. She

28:29

says he walked into the room, Einstein's

28:32

lying there, flat on the table and he

28:34

picks up a scalpel and you know he

28:36

opened the abdomen and he saw it was

28:38

full of blood from the aneurysm so he

28:40

established his cause of death. Did a routine

28:42

examination of the heart but then he did

28:44

something that was not in the script. He

28:47

removed the top of the skull, cut a

28:49

bunch of cranial nerves and arteries and he

28:51

took the brain out and then

28:53

he put the brain in a jar and

28:58

walked out. So he

29:00

literally just stole the brain out of

29:02

Einstein's skull, just stole it? Yeah,

29:05

which is pretty gross. Isn't

29:07

that a crime? Probably. History

29:09

has not been kind to Thomas S. Harvey.

29:12

But in Tom Harvey's estimation

29:14

and he actually put it this way

29:16

in our conversations once as that he

29:18

would have felt ashamed if

29:20

he didn't take it. Here was

29:23

ashamed because here was this opportunity

29:25

to learn something

29:28

about sort of the biological

29:30

underpinnings of intelligence, of

29:32

genius, you know from arguably you know

29:35

certainly one of the greatest scientific minds of the

29:37

20th century and

29:39

to not study it would have been

29:42

negligent. According to Carolyn, however

29:44

misguided it might seem, Harvey says

29:46

he wasn't taking the brain for

29:48

himself. He was taking it for

29:50

all of us, like for humanity,

29:53

for science. But best words the

29:55

next day, the family at this point, they read on the

29:58

front page of the April 19th New York Times. New

30:01

York Times read that the

30:03

brain was preserved for science and

30:05

they were flabbergasted. Well, that was

30:07

like the first time they heard of

30:10

it. Yeah. In the paper. Oh

30:12

my God. They're like having their Cheerios

30:14

and that's how they find out? Yeah.

30:16

The family didn't know and didn't give permission. The

30:18

understanding, although you'll find none of this in the will,

30:21

but the understanding was Einstein

30:24

would be cremated. And his ashes

30:26

scattered in a secret location so

30:28

that, quote unquote, no one could

30:30

come and worship at my bones. He

30:34

was the first scientist to become a public

30:36

figure, a legend in our

30:38

time. Einstein was always very

30:41

uncomfortable with the

30:43

attention that celebrity brought with it.

30:46

He was really afraid that people were going to start to

30:48

see him as something superhuman. The

30:50

realities of 20th century science.

30:54

It speaks

30:57

to the fact that in the

30:59

20th century, science sort of displaced

31:01

religion as what people

31:03

put their faith in. And

31:06

he was sort of its high priest. And

31:08

so he didn't want his grave site to become

31:10

a shrine. That's

31:13

why he wanted to be cremated. As he was on

31:16

April 18th, but

31:18

Harvey kept the brain. So the

31:20

family, when they saw that headline, do they

31:22

knock on Harvey's door? Yeah, what do they do?

31:26

No, they phone the hospital. They phone Princeton Hospital

31:28

and they're very upset. And

31:30

eventually Hans Albert, Einstein's

31:32

eldest son, gets on

31:34

the phone with Tom Harvey. Now,

31:38

we don't know exactly what they said

31:40

to each other. You can probably imagine

31:43

Hans Albert was upset, probably yelled at

31:45

Tom Harvey. Tom Harvey apparently

31:47

apologized for taking it without permission.

31:49

And finally, Harvey

31:52

makes the pitch of his life. He

31:55

says, you know, this is the mind for

31:57

all the ages. We're never going to get

31:59

this opportunity. I pledge that

32:01

I will do a scholarly study. He made

32:03

this very solemn vow to take

32:05

care of this brain, to not

32:08

allow it to become sort of

32:10

an object of fascination. Tom

32:12

Harvey told Hans Albert he'd never let the

32:14

brain become a spectacle. He'd honor Einstein's wishes.

32:17

But if he could just study this brain, it might

32:21

reveal something. The secret of human

32:23

genius and creativity, you

32:25

can't pass it up. And

32:29

the son, Hans Albert said yes,

32:33

you can study it. But

32:35

only as long as it's serious science, no

32:37

spectacle. So the next step that

32:40

Harvey has, he's trying to craft a

32:43

kind of a do-it-yourself approach

32:45

to studying a famous brain. Even though

32:47

he's a doctor. Harvey's not trained in

32:50

this kind of neuropathology. He learned some,

32:53

but not to the degree that a

32:55

specialist would. He spends evenings

32:57

taking photographs. He weighs it.

32:59

He measures it. He hits some standard

33:01

textbooks. Different reference guides. One

33:03

of the really interesting things he did

33:06

during this period, he brought this artist

33:08

in to paint a portrait

33:10

of Einstein's brain. Oh, really? When

33:13

it was whole. He said he just wanted

33:15

to have it, and he never did hang

33:17

that painting. Really? What an interesting thing to

33:19

do. I think partly it was because he

33:22

knew what had to happen next, or in

33:24

his estimation, what he was going to do

33:26

next. He's going to cut the brain

33:28

into 240 sections. And

33:35

after that. He goes across the Delaware.

33:37

I love that. Like he's George Washington or

33:40

something. To University of Pennsylvania, where there's a

33:42

technician who he had worked with. He gave

33:44

her some of those chunks of brain, and

33:46

she slices them really thinly. And

33:49

then he takes them into microscope slides, and they made

33:51

12 sets. So when the smoke clears, and I'm

33:54

sorry I'm dragging this out on you. No, no,

33:56

no. That looks great. The smoke clears. He's

33:58

got, I'm told, 12 sets of it. least 200 slides

34:01

per set. And his

34:03

job for the next few years is

34:05

to try to take it individually

34:07

to various neuropathologists who might be

34:09

able to study this brain. So,

34:16

Harvey sends out slides and photos

34:19

of samples of Einstein's brain. He

34:21

was trying to collaborate with experts

34:23

in the field. Specialist after specialist.

34:25

We don't exactly know how many

34:27

photographs he gave out, how many slides he

34:29

gave them to, but it was a

34:31

lot. Despite

34:34

all that effort, though, there's no record of

34:36

them ever getting back to him or doing

34:38

anything of importance.

34:43

From the few scientists I was able to contact

34:45

at that time who received those pieces who were

34:48

still alive, they said they didn't really know what

34:50

they should be looking for, which

34:52

of course was true. This

34:58

is where Tom Harvey ran into the

35:00

reality of neuroscience at

35:02

that time. Everything we human beings

35:04

ever do, no matter how ordinary it

35:07

seems, has a complex beginning

35:09

in our brains. At that

35:11

point, scientists had just started to figure

35:13

out...urine. What neurons do, how they communicate

35:15

back and forth. Brain alone has

35:18

10,000 million up. They

35:21

hadn't even scratched the

35:23

surface of the understanding

35:26

of a normal brain, let alone

35:28

trying to solve the mystery of

35:30

genius in Einstein's brain. So

35:33

years and years go by and

35:36

nothing, but he wouldn't give up. He

35:38

knew it was of significance. He thought there was something

35:41

that could be learned and he never abandoned that. I

35:43

think at this point Harvey began to

35:46

see himself as kind of a living

35:48

time capsule. He

35:53

was going to take this brain with him

35:55

into the future when science would be equipped

35:58

to study it properly. But

36:03

in the meantime, Harvey's

36:05

life sort of falls apart. He

36:10

has an affair, he gets divorced, and he

36:12

loses his job at Princeton. And

36:16

then he kind of just disappears. Yeah,

36:18

he does. That

36:24

is until 1978, when

36:26

a young reporter from New Jersey knocked

36:29

on his door, asking about a brain.

36:31

Got an airplane home. Wait, did you call your

36:33

editor or something on your way? Well, it was

36:35

the first thing I did when I got home.

36:37

I went straight to my editor's house, and

36:40

he was like watching a basketball

36:42

game. When he watched a little

36:44

of a basketball game, without saying

36:46

anything. And finally

36:48

he said, well, did you find the brain? And

36:51

I said, yep. That's how you tell him?

36:54

That's like you hold it for half time? I

36:56

was just like, it's so extort. It was a

36:58

moment, yeah. That

37:01

was it. I had to write it. We

37:03

got a great image for the cover. The cover

37:06

line was my search for Einstein's brain. And

37:09

then one of the people who got the

37:11

press release was the AP. So

37:14

when the story came out, the

37:16

AP ran a thing about it. And

37:19

it was in every newspaper in

37:22

the country. Johnny

37:27

Carson made a joke about the brain. Oh,

37:29

really? It was a joke. Do you remember? It

37:32

was really Einstein's brain. It

37:35

was more enough to get out of the witch's heart. It

37:37

looked like that. And

37:42

Dr. Harvey had people camped

37:44

out in his lawn. Really? Everyone wanted

37:46

to see the brain. It was a

37:49

lot of attention. The Einstein

37:51

estate went bonkers. I

37:54

mean, this is exactly what they didn't want

37:56

to happen. People came calling.

37:58

There were cash off. for the

38:00

brain. People all over the place started

38:02

to write to him to volunteer to

38:05

become its next keeper and they offered him

38:07

money. So not only did

38:09

Harvey fail to come up with any

38:11

science about the brain, but

38:13

he also broke that promise he made to the family. Because

38:28

of all the attention, at least on the

38:30

science side, his look kind of

38:32

changed. One place to pick up the story

38:34

was Psilos medicine. By

38:37

the late 70s, neuroscience had picked up

38:39

the human brain, a report of a

38:42

woman who had electrodes implanted in the

38:44

brain. Two new techniques

38:46

for exploring brains have been developed.

38:48

For example, we figured out there

38:50

were opioid receptors in the brain.

38:54

Millions of these sensory receptors. And

38:56

had developed a treatment for Parkinson's.

38:59

So scientists at this point were just slightly

39:01

more equipped. And when Steve

39:03

Story came out, It actually kicked

39:05

off real research into Einstein's brain

39:08

that directly flowed from my

39:10

making it public. So

39:12

what happens? The

39:14

first thing that happens is he gets a

39:16

call from this scientist

39:19

named... My name is Marion Diamond.

39:23

That's a good name. She

39:25

was a professor of anatomy at Berkeley. She

39:30

was sort of famous on campus for carrying around a hat

39:32

box. How

39:36

many have never seen a human brain before? We

39:38

begin her freshman anatomy lecture in front of

39:40

all these kids by bringing her hat box

39:43

onto the table and open it. And it

39:45

was like a flower print hat box. Open

39:48

it up and pull out this brain. This

39:51

mass only weighs three pounds. And

39:54

yet it has the capacity to

39:56

conceive of a universe.

40:00

a billion light years across.

40:02

Some people call her one of the founders

40:04

of modern neuroscience. Isn't that phenomenal? A

40:07

mass of protoplasms can do that. So

40:09

she did these studies on rats, which became

40:12

very famous, where she figured

40:14

out that if you put a rat

40:16

in an enriched environment, so a cage

40:18

with a lot of toys, things to

40:21

climb around on, and lots of other

40:23

rat friends to hang out with, instead

40:25

of just putting them in the boring

40:27

old normal cage, what you'll find is

40:30

that their brains actually change. They'll have

40:32

more of these little cells called glial

40:34

cells, which for a long time, people

40:36

thought glial cells were just the

40:39

scaffolding of the brain. Neurons were where the

40:41

action was. That's where all the thinking happened.

40:44

And glial cells were just the

40:48

studs and mortar of the house, just kind

40:50

of holding everything together. But

40:53

around this time when Mary and Diamond was doing these

40:55

studies, they were starting to realize that the glial

40:58

cells also had neurotransmitters flowing

41:00

through them, like that they

41:02

might be more important than we thought. But shortly

41:05

after she publishes her rat studies, she

41:08

hears about Harvey. She saw a

41:11

little piece about it in the journal Science.

41:13

And so she started to track down Harvey,

41:15

and she called him. And in 1984,

41:17

Harvey sends her four chunks of brain.

41:19

She went looking in Einstein's brain to

41:22

see if there was something

41:24

similar to what she had been recording

41:26

in her animal experiments. And she finds

41:28

that compared to the average brain, Einstein

41:30

had a lot of glial cells. What's

41:32

a lot, like twice as many, three

41:34

times as many? Well, about 70% more

41:37

than the control group. But what does that even mean,

41:39

though? I don't really know how to

41:42

describe that, which is part of the problem. And

41:44

on top of that, after she published

41:46

this research, some other scientists

41:49

raised questions that maybe the

41:51

experimental methods weren't valid. So

41:54

not convinced. Yeah, me neither.

41:57

So that's diamond. Diamond. So after.

42:00

diamond than this guy Britt Anderson comes

42:02

along and his whole thing he studied

42:04

five other adult male dead brains. So

42:06

he looked at their prefrontal cortexes and

42:08

that's like where higher cognitive abilities are

42:11

located so like if you're gonna take

42:13

a test that's the part of your

42:15

brain that's gonna be activated and

42:17

he found that compared to the other

42:20

brains that he had the neurons in

42:22

Einstein's brain were more tightly packed there.

42:24

Huh. So his neurons were more

42:26

tightly packed in a certain part of

42:28

his brain. Yeah. Did he have more

42:30

neurons at that part or less neurons?

42:32

Same number, roughly. They were just more

42:34

crowded together. What does that say?

42:37

I kind of take that as like

42:39

Einstein's problem-solving abilities could go much more

42:41

quickly and efficiently. Nnnnnn.

42:44

Yeah, actually Britt Anderson, the guy who

42:46

found this, he dismisses himself in a

42:48

way. He found a difference but he

42:50

also was quick to say like we

42:52

just have one of these brains. He said,

42:54

listen, you know, this was always

42:56

going to be an N of one in

42:59

any experiment. He's kind of like the middle

43:01

child of all these researchers. He made like

43:03

the smallest splash. But it is

43:05

through Britt Anderson that Tom Harvey

43:07

hears about Sandra Whittleson in Canada. And that

43:09

was like the biggest splash of them all.

43:12

Really? Yes. So Sandra Whittleson in

43:14

the fall of 1995, she ends up getting this fax.

43:18

A one-page fax from

43:20

a man by the name of Thomas Harvey.

43:22

And the fax basically says, hey, I heard

43:24

about your research. Would you like to study

43:26

the brain of Albert Einstein? It almost seems

43:28

like you would suspect it to be a prank.

43:31

Yeah. I picture it just being that simple on

43:33

a fax page. Yeah, exactly.

43:35

But you know, obviously she

43:38

faxed back yes. And so Harvey hops

43:40

in the car with the brain, brains

43:42

on the trunk actually, and drives north

43:45

to bring the brain to Canada. And

43:48

the reason he was so excited to have her

43:50

look at the brain, what had really caught his

43:52

attention was the fact that she had this collection

43:54

of normal brains. She'd been doing

43:56

this long term before and after study.

43:58

So years before. she had gotten this

44:00

group together. Basically, like they signed up, they took IQ

44:03

tests, they did all these things while they were still

44:05

alive. Oh. You knew their health

44:07

history. And then when they died, she got to study

44:09

their brains to see a before and after

44:11

picture of these people's brains. Were these all

44:13

smart people? So, she had a mix,

44:16

but the ones that she compared Einstein's brain to

44:18

were all high IQ men. So,

44:21

she makes this comparison. Einstein's brain versus

44:23

these other brains in her collection, and

44:26

she writes this article. And then the gist of

44:28

the article was that

44:30

he had unusual parietal lobes.

44:32

Unusual parietal lobes. The parietal

44:34

lobes of Einstein's brain were

44:36

anatomically exceptional, if you

44:38

will. Where is the parietal lobes again? It's

44:41

kind of like where your baseball cap is like

44:43

mainly. Is it sort of like top of your

44:45

head, the back? Or if you had a yarmulke. Yeah, exactly.

44:47

A yarmulke. Okay. Yes, and

44:49

this area of your brain, this is where all of

44:51

your sensory information comes in. And

44:54

because of that, it's also where

44:56

your visio-spatial awareness is located. So,

44:59

the way that you orient yourself in the world

45:01

is mostly located in that part

45:03

of your brain. If you were to close

45:05

your eyes right now and you think, where are my

45:07

hands? Where are my knees? Where

45:09

are my feet? Well, you have an internal

45:11

mental map that's telling you where those things are.

45:13

And that's your parietal lobe doing that. Anyhow,

45:16

so what was different about this part of Einstein's

45:18

brain is that if you imagine the brain to

45:21

look like a walnut, which is kind of the

45:23

only way that I imagine the

45:25

brain, there are like all these grooves and crevices,

45:27

and there's this one groove, like a

45:30

groovy groove, like a deeper crevice called the

45:32

silvian fissure. In Einstein's

45:34

brain, it was shorter than the rest of

45:36

ours. And apparently, that's very strange. When she

45:38

described it to me, she said it was,

45:41

to see this unique pattern in Einstein's brain

45:44

was as striking as seeing a

45:46

face with the

45:48

eyebrows beneath the eyes. And

45:51

Sandra Woodlson proposed that maybe because this crevice

45:53

was a little bit shorter, the electricity in

45:55

this part of his brain could go much more quickly

45:57

across the brain. Oh, because he needs to travel around the... They

45:59

didn't have, yeah. It didn't have to take a

46:01

detour over a ditch. It could just go pew. This

46:05

is her speculation. This is her speculation,

46:07

yes. And so she was saying the

46:09

parietal lobe, this is where his genius

46:11

might be. And if

46:14

you think about Einstein, everybody says one of

46:16

his greatest talents is the way that

46:18

he could manipulate shapes in his

46:20

mind and orient objects in his

46:23

head. I mean, just the idea

46:25

that space-time is curved. So

46:28

he has this kind of great visual-spatial

46:30

sense. And if you had to pick

46:32

a part of your brain that could

46:35

underlie mathematical abilities or visual-spatial abilities, that's

46:37

parietal lobes. When I was looking

46:39

up these papers, you see Thomas Harvey's name as the

46:42

co-author. He was a co-author. Yeah.

46:45

He's cited in the paper. And it just made

46:47

my heart happy. He made it. He got it. And

46:50

it was really for Sandra Whittleson because he,

46:52

all these years, had been shepherding this forward.

46:54

And when that paper came out... I think Tom

46:57

Harvey felt then that his

46:59

work was over. Because

47:02

he felt at that point that they had pointed

47:04

to something that was real and true. Yeah.

47:06

He felt like finally the work that he

47:08

promised to do in the very beginning was

47:11

finally done. And at that

47:13

point... ...he actually decided to give the

47:15

brain back to

47:18

Princeton Hospital in the care of

47:20

Elliot Krause, basically the pathologist who

47:22

holds the same job he did

47:24

when he first took that brain in 1955. Wow.

47:28

It came full of gold. You know, it's

47:31

kind of uncanny that it's back where it was. Yeah.

47:35

I'm just going to rain on this parade for a second. I'm

47:38

happy for Mr. Harvey. But in

47:41

terms of the science, maybe

47:43

you convinced me a little bit, like

47:45

a medium bit, but it still kind

47:47

of smells like phrenology to me. I mean,

47:49

it's like listening to it, the

47:51

experience I have is like, whoa, a

47:54

Silvian fissure. His was smaller.

47:57

And then I think to myself, what the f*** is a

47:59

Silvian fissure? Fisher. I don't even know what that is. And

48:02

like the fact that like we so clearly

48:04

default to this fascination with a thing that

48:06

I can't even explain, it just kind of

48:08

seemed absurd. Yeah. And we know that he

48:10

said that like he didn't think he was

48:12

a particularly special guy. I

48:14

think he said various, there's

48:16

lots of quotes from him where he talks about saying

48:18

like I was just in the

48:20

right place at the right time. Or I'm

48:22

just saying that really. Yeah. Or you know,

48:24

when he's talking about his fame, he has

48:26

some quote about worrying that the packaging of

48:29

him is better

48:31

than the meat inside or something like he's

48:33

a sausage. I mean, this is part of

48:35

the myth of

48:38

him. It's like, I mean, he was very humble. Yeah.

48:40

There's another one where he talks about like, he

48:43

sometimes talks about what made him special with his

48:45

stubbornness, that he was really obstinate

48:47

and he wouldn't let things go. That's one

48:50

of the only things I feel like you

48:52

hear him talking about as some innate characteristic

48:54

of him that made him different than other

48:56

people. But he never talks about

48:58

being smart. He never talks about his brain.

49:01

I mean, I haven't read every Einstein quote, but I

49:03

feel like we've been swimming around in it for a while

49:05

the last few months and I haven't seen him say

49:07

anything about his brain. Yeah. Ever. But it

49:09

is interesting that he says he was

49:11

in the right place at the right time. Which

49:14

can sound kind of like humble, but also maybe it's

49:16

like, if you take it seriously, maybe there is something

49:18

to it. Yeah. I mean,

49:20

like we've been talking about the

49:22

neural connections inside his head, but

49:25

you can also think about it a little

49:27

more broadly, like about the connections outside

49:30

his head. Almost as if

49:32

the neurons didn't stop inside his skull,

49:34

but like continued outward into the world

49:37

around him. And

49:40

that's what we're going to do after

49:43

a quick break. After

49:47

lives is a new podcast about

49:49

the life and legacy of Lelene

49:51

Polanco, a transgender Afro Latina who

49:53

died tragically on Rikers Island jail

49:55

complex. a

50:00

cause of her death? Yes,

50:02

it absolutely was. Stepping foot on

50:05

Rikers Island has been widely acknowledged, a

50:07

potential death sentence. There will never be

50:09

any explanation. It should have never

50:11

happened. Listen to Afterlife on the

50:13

iHeartRadio app or wherever you get

50:15

your podcasts. This

50:22

is Gee and we are... what are

50:24

we doing here? We're...

50:29

what are we doing here, Pat? We are back from

50:31

our break. Just

50:34

a reset. I was intrigued by

50:36

the thing you said at the end of the last chapter that you

50:39

know there are the circuits in his head, but

50:42

then what about the circuits outside his head? Maybe

50:44

he just got lucky. What

50:46

were you thinking of when you said that? Yeah, I

50:48

mean a lot of there's sort of the obvious things

50:50

that must be said. Einstein was

50:52

building on the work of lots of

50:54

other physicists like Poincare and Lorentz who

50:56

had been chipping away at these same

50:59

questions that puzzled him. So

51:01

there's that. But if you widen the lens

51:03

a little bit and you start to think more broadly,

51:06

you start to see some really

51:09

interesting kind of bigger forces

51:12

that were at work on Einstein when he was

51:14

coming up with these ideas. Like just

51:16

take special relativity, which most people would

51:18

say is one of his most revolutionary

51:20

ideas. Special relativity is... Special relativity to

51:22

put it like very basically is the

51:24

idea that time

51:27

is relative and that time slows

51:29

down as you go faster. So if

51:32

you're going a million miles an hour versus

51:34

10 miles an hour, time will literally slow

51:36

down for you. It won't just

51:38

seem slower, it will actually be slower.

51:40

I feel like this is the moment

51:43

when science

51:45

in common sense just parted ways. It's

51:48

such a weird idea. Totally. Well that

51:50

idea like came from Einstein but also

51:52

kind of came from the world

51:55

around him. Okay, so I'm going

51:57

to give you a couple of really interesting examples. that

52:00

we came across as we were researching this.

52:02

Okay, number one. I'm not at

52:04

all an expert on the brain story. I mean, I've

52:06

got some of the same things that you have, but...

52:09

Comes from this guy. Could you introduce

52:11

yourself? I'm Peter Galison. I'm a professor

52:13

at Harvard University, where I work on

52:15

the history and philosophy of science and

52:18

on physics. And what Peter told us

52:20

is if you look at when Einstein

52:22

came up with the idea of special

52:24

relativity, this was 1905. The

52:27

story that's often told is Einstein was

52:29

working in the patent office, just sitting

52:31

around all by himself thinking big thoughts.

52:34

But if you look at what was actually

52:36

happening at that moment, like outside... This was

52:38

a transformative moment in the technological history of

52:40

the world. Yeah,

52:43

what were some of the big, like, hot

52:45

inventions happening? Well, if you looked out

52:47

the window of any

52:49

Central European or Western European city,

52:51

you would see new

52:55

kinds of trams being installed,

52:57

electric motors. You

53:00

would see... Networks

53:04

of clocks that were established. You

53:07

would see also

53:09

new devices that were being invented

53:12

that could send signals, the extension

53:14

of the telegraph network, everything

53:17

in motion, everything in change. And...

53:21

As a consequence, he says.

53:23

Time has suddenly become a

53:28

topic of immense interest. Not

53:30

just because the world seemed to be moving faster, but

53:33

because for the first time in human history, you

53:37

could be in several different

53:39

times at once. As

53:41

you ran trains, say

53:44

you leave Chicago at 3 p.m., when

53:48

you get to a distant city, what time is

53:51

it there? Do you

53:53

use the time that you started with

53:55

in Chicago? Do you use the time

53:57

that you're arriving at in Philadelphia? Who

54:00

sets, what are the times? You know,

54:02

before the railroad, time was local. Every

54:05

town had its own time. Set in

54:07

each town by the local jeweler who

54:09

repaired and made clocks and watches. But

54:12

then with the railroad, you needed central

54:14

time. And there were literally skirmishes over

54:16

whose time would become the time. We

54:19

actually did a show about this like a

54:21

million years ago. It was a big, big

54:23

struggle. There were people who didn't like that

54:26

at all. But suddenly the ability to traverse

54:28

at a fairly high speed, hundreds even thousands

54:30

of miles, created the demand to

54:33

think about what time was and

54:35

how to coordinate it. So that

54:37

was sort of the mood of the moment. Like

54:40

just outside the window of the patent

54:42

office where Einstein was sitting there thinking

54:44

big thoughts. And

54:48

one of the specific questions he was wrestling with

54:50

was the one Peter just threw out. Like

54:52

how would you coordinate two different clocks in

54:54

two different cities? A

54:57

lot of people at the time thought, the way

54:59

you do it is you send an electrical signal,

55:01

like through a telegraph wire from one clock to

55:03

the other. Calculate the amount of time it would

55:05

take that signal to get from the first clock

55:07

to the second clock. Then you take that minuscule

55:09

amount of time and subtract it from one in the

55:11

clock or add it to one in the clock. And

55:14

then you'd have the same time in two places. And

55:17

that sort of solved the problem. But

55:20

then the next thought Einstein had was, what

55:23

if that signal you were using was traveling at the speed

55:25

of light? And what if those two

55:27

clocks? Like what if one of them

55:29

was moving? And if it was moving and

55:32

the light was sort of chasing it, wouldn't

55:35

it take the light longer to get

55:37

there? And wouldn't that

55:39

like screw up your whole

55:41

ability to coordinate time? Why

55:45

am I telling you this? Because these

55:47

kinds of questions, they sort

55:49

of infiltrated Einstein's dreams. Einstein

55:52

wrote about this and his thought of biography.

55:54

So we have a very good idea. That's

55:57

him and Canales. I'm a historian of science. At the

55:59

University of New York. Illinois and she

56:01

says Einstein wrote about these very particular

56:03

daydreams he had. He said that

56:05

he imagined himself being propelled

56:07

through space chasing after a

56:10

light beam and

56:13

that historians of science, biographers of

56:15

Einstein often agree that it was

56:17

that sort of experiment of seeing

56:19

you know what actually happens if

56:22

I pursue a light beam that

56:25

had the provided

56:27

the origin of his god, the theory

56:29

of relativity. And I'll

56:31

explain why that light beam was such a big

56:34

deal in a minute, but the main thing Jimena

56:36

wanted to tell me about it was that it

56:38

often gets explained as something that just emerged from

56:40

Einstein's brain, like that was purely

56:42

an original idea of his. But

56:44

it was not his idea at all. In

56:49

Jimena, a story he read sort

56:52

of led him to it. She

56:55

says Einstein loved science fiction as a kid.

56:57

And he said he was particularly

56:59

taken by one

57:01

author, the name is

57:04

Aaron Bernstein, who wrote

57:06

quite a few volumes. And Einstein

57:08

says that he read them with

57:10

quote, breathless attention. And

57:13

Jimena says the story that got Einstein

57:15

thinking about chasing light beams was about

57:17

a faster than light traveler. And

57:20

what happens if we travel faster than the speed

57:22

of light? The story sort of

57:24

imagines that you could have a guy who shoots

57:26

off into space and purchased

57:29

himself on the star where

57:31

he looks back at Earth. And what

57:33

he sees isn't the same

57:35

Earth you have. A different world, a different

57:38

universe. But an earlier

57:40

Earth, because, as Bernstein explains, when

57:42

we look out at anything in

57:44

space, we're not seeing it exactly

57:47

as it is, but rather

57:49

as it was. For example, when

57:51

you look at the sun, you're really

57:53

seeing the sun eight minutes in the

57:55

past, because the light

57:57

wipes take time to reach you. because

58:00

this traveler could travel faster than

58:02

light. All you needed to do, you

58:04

know, if you wanted to look at the Earth eight

58:06

minutes in the past, all you needed to do was

58:08

to go to the Sun. And

58:11

if you jump into farther and

58:13

farther planets and stars, then

58:15

you can choose whatever time in history you want

58:17

to see. So in this story,

58:19

this traveler could bounce from that first

58:22

star to a planet to another star

58:24

and another and another. Quote,

58:27

in one point in space, the light of

58:29

the scenes of the French Revolution is just

58:31

coming into view. And even

58:33

farther away, the invasion of the barbarians

58:35

has just become the order of the

58:37

day. Alexander the Great is

58:39

still conquering the world. Historical

58:42

events that have long been dead for

58:44

us will just be coming to life.

58:48

By the way, this was one of the first

58:50

time travel stories in history,

58:54

which is crazy to think about. 3,000

58:57

years of human writings and almost nobody

58:59

to that point had

59:01

imagined someone going back in time

59:03

or going into the future. These

59:06

stories that today are so much a

59:09

part of movies and culture, they

59:11

all basically started at the time

59:13

Einstein was growing up. He

59:15

just happened to be alive at

59:17

that time. And Jimenez says,

59:19

they opened his mind. He

59:22

said that these stories really prompted

59:24

him to imagine himself being propelled

59:26

through space, chasing after a light

59:29

beam. And

59:33

the reason that mental image was so pivotal

59:35

for Einstein was that right around the time

59:37

it popped into his head, other

59:39

physicists were noticing this weird thing about

59:41

the speed of light. Unlike

59:44

everything else in the known world,

59:46

light always moved at the same

59:48

speed, no matter how fast you were

59:51

moving relative to it. And

59:53

in picturing himself riding along beside this

59:55

light beam, Einstein realized

59:58

that if light always moved at the same speed. But

1:00:00

if light was constant, then

1:00:03

time must be relative, which

1:00:07

sort of, you know, eventually would turn our

1:00:09

understanding of the universe upside down. So

1:00:12

you're saying that if he

1:00:15

hadn't been alive at a time when there were

1:00:17

railroads which created time problems all the while, there

1:00:19

are people writing time travel fiction for the first

1:00:22

time in history, all

1:00:24

that hadn't been happening, he might not have thought

1:00:26

the thoughts that he thunk. Yeah,

1:00:29

yeah, like I still think there

1:00:31

was something about his brain that

1:00:33

explains part of it. Okay. But

1:00:36

all this other stuff, the time travel, the

1:00:38

railroads, the stories, I would say

1:00:40

that that adds like another 25%. So

1:00:44

the brain is what, like 20? Yeah, give the brain maybe

1:00:46

20. I would say 12, but that's okay. Well, let's go

1:00:48

with 20. Okay. 20

1:00:50

plus 25 for sort of like roughly half.

1:00:52

I don't know, a half, let's say it's half. Yeah, I

1:00:54

like halfway there. Precise

1:00:56

math that we're doing. I'm

1:00:59

going to see if I can push us a little

1:01:01

bit further. Okay, give another explanation.

1:01:03

Oh yeah. Bring it, what do you

1:01:05

have? There's a certain creative conceptual. I got two. I'm

1:01:07

going to start small. Okay. And

1:01:09

the first one, I spoke to

1:01:11

this guy, Alberto Martinez. He's a historian

1:01:13

of science. And he told

1:01:16

me that one of the other things Einstein

1:01:18

was reading that really blew his mind was

1:01:20

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who

1:01:22

had these pretty radical ideas, including

1:01:24

that the laws of nature kind of start in our

1:01:27

heads. That the fundamental concepts

1:01:29

of science are free creations,

1:01:31

free inventions of the human

1:01:33

mind. Alberto says that those

1:01:35

ideas gave Einstein permission to think

1:01:38

his own crazy thoughts. There's a

1:01:40

letter from 1915 in which Einstein

1:01:42

writes, this line of thought was

1:01:44

of great influence in my efforts.

1:01:46

Very probably I wouldn't have reached

1:01:48

the solution without those philosophical studies.

1:01:51

And Einstein was kind of obsessed with them. So

1:01:54

much so. And there's a little bit of a

1:01:56

digression that just a couple of months before he

1:01:58

was about to publish the theory. March

1:02:00

of 1905. Einstein was supposed to meet

1:02:02

with a group of his friends to discuss them

1:02:05

a few his writings, kind of like a study group,

1:02:07

but one of the guys. This guy, Maurice

1:02:09

Solovin, he wanted to skip a meeting of

1:02:11

their discussion group. Said he wanted to go

1:02:13

see a violin concert or something. When Einstein

1:02:16

and his mathematician friend Conrad Habesch

1:02:18

arrived and find that their buddy

1:02:20

isn't there, they are pissed off. So

1:02:22

they're so upset that they take out their

1:02:25

cigars and they start smoking and smoking and

1:02:27

smoking. Because they know Solovin hates smoking.

1:02:29

And then they take the ashes of

1:02:31

every cigar and smear them on his

1:02:33

pea poth. Yeah, his table, his pillow.

1:02:39

His pillow? They totally trash his place.

1:02:42

Such was Einstein's love of Hume.

1:02:45

I'm gonna give that like a seven. I'm gonna give that a seven

1:02:47

percent. Okay, fine. But in

1:02:50

terms of non-brain explanations of his

1:02:52

genius, I'm about to give you

1:02:54

my favorite. All right, here we go. So

1:02:56

we're gonna rewind a couple of years back

1:02:58

before the apartment trashing. Einstein's working for

1:03:00

the government. A third class employee in

1:03:03

the Swiss pant office. Not a great

1:03:05

job. He's just a bureaucrat. He calls

1:03:07

himself a federal ink shitter. He was in

1:03:09

his mid-20s. He wanted to be a physicist

1:03:11

so badly, but no one wanted to hire him. Again

1:03:13

and again, they rejected him. Yet

1:03:15

there was one person who thought he had

1:03:18

something special. So,

1:03:22

Mileva Maric was Serbian.

1:03:25

This is writer Andrei Gabor. And she says

1:03:27

Mileva and Einstein met in college

1:03:29

at Etya in Zurich, the big

1:03:31

university in Zurich, one of the

1:03:33

few places where you could attend

1:03:35

university as a woman. Mileva was

1:03:38

actually the only woman in their

1:03:40

class. They're both in the same

1:03:42

program for preparing future science

1:03:44

and math teachers. They become study buddies

1:03:47

and pretty soon she becomes his

1:03:49

girlfriend. do

1:04:00

I see how frightfully much I love you.

1:04:03

Do you know anything about the early days of them as

1:04:05

a couple? Were they, I have this

1:04:07

version in my head where it's like they were lovey-dovey,

1:04:09

but also speaking like they were on the Big Bang

1:04:11

Theory. This is like ridiculously

1:04:13

scientific conversation. Well, you

1:04:16

know, I think it was both of those things. They

1:04:19

go on these hikes and

1:04:21

the Alps, enjoy music

1:04:23

together. It's a very

1:04:25

romantic relationship. But

1:04:31

it's also one that is very much

1:04:33

based on this shared love of science.

1:04:36

They're studying physics, they're reading great

1:04:38

works in physics that I... He would skip

1:04:40

class and then she would stay in class and

1:04:42

like update him. Oh, she would take

1:04:44

notes for him? Yeah, then they would like write these letters

1:04:46

to each other about like these new ideas that

1:04:48

he was reading about. I'm very curious what

1:04:51

Kleiner will say about the two papers. He

1:04:53

better pull himself together and say something

1:04:55

reasonable. This is the stuff

1:04:57

from which his work on relativity

1:05:00

is born. So she becomes the

1:05:02

first person that, you know,

1:05:04

analyzes and thinks about these things with him.

1:05:06

She was like the first person from what

1:05:09

I can tell to like really engage with him as like

1:05:11

this like weird off the beaten path kind of

1:05:13

guy and like support that and like

1:05:15

love that about him. So they

1:05:17

get married, they have kids, she leaves the

1:05:19

science community. He continues to do

1:05:21

his thing, not very successfully. Just because she's

1:05:23

a woman and not what happened. One

1:05:26

of them had to do it. And for a

1:05:29

long time, historians didn't think much about her. But

1:05:31

then, you know, then these love letters,

1:05:33

I mean, they really were a big

1:05:36

news item. In 1986, a

1:05:38

pile of letters between Malieva and Einstein

1:05:40

turned up. And there was one letter

1:05:42

and there was one line from Einstein that kind

1:05:44

of like rocked the world. There's

1:05:47

a letter from 1901 in which Einstein

1:05:49

says, how proud will

1:05:51

I be when we both together bring

1:05:53

our work on the relative motion

1:05:56

victoriously to its end? That's what he

1:05:58

literally says in his own penmanship. Our

1:06:00

work like our theory. Whoa

1:06:02

And everyone's like what like

1:06:05

could that like was she helping him on

1:06:07

my dad? It was a collaboration. Yeah, that's

1:06:09

what I was all about. I was like

1:06:11

what the sort of surprise at the idea

1:06:14

that This iconic

1:06:17

genius had had a wife

1:06:19

who maybe was his equal There's a couple of

1:06:21

other letters in which Einstein again refers to

1:06:23

our work our theory when he put them

1:06:25

all together It's enough to give anyone the

1:06:27

impression relative motion our theory that Einstein is

1:06:30

literally saying that Malayva

1:06:32

was his secret co-worker Wow,

1:06:36

I'm giving that a 20 but Before

1:06:40

we get too excited about this and by

1:06:42

we I mostly mean me I need

1:06:44

to throw in a few big but

1:06:48

the replies that we have from her do not

1:06:50

engage the science the letters in which he Writes

1:06:53

these to her. He doesn't specify what

1:06:55

she herself did Alberto says when you

1:06:57

read the letters You realize what he

1:06:59

believed at the time when he wrote

1:07:01

that letter wasn't that special that relative

1:07:03

motion idea They talked about in the

1:07:05

letter. That's not relativity. And in fact,

1:07:07

that's kind of something everybody knew about

1:07:09

at the time. Did Einstein have The

1:07:12

theory of relativity when he's writing them and then the

1:07:14

answer is no He has nothing

1:07:17

and we have multiple sources in which he says I

1:07:20

have nothing So she probably wasn't

1:07:22

his co-conspirator But she did support him

1:07:24

at this time when everybody else was

1:07:26

kind of rejecting him and for that

1:07:29

I would like to give her some points I'm gonna say 15

1:07:31

based on based on what just because just because it makes

1:07:33

you feel good to give her 15 or you know Arbitrarily,

1:07:36

I like to pick numbers out of the sky I'm

1:07:42

with Rachel here. I'm I support the system. No,

1:07:44

I do. I do too. Okay. So where does

1:07:46

that leave us that leaves us? Some

1:07:49

percent for the physicist who came before

1:07:53

25 ish percent for time and

1:07:55

place 7% Hume 15%

1:07:57

Malayva Yeah,

1:08:01

that doesn't get us all the way there. No,

1:08:03

I know. So we decided to

1:08:05

call one other person to see if we

1:08:07

get like a fifth thing, because why

1:08:09

not? Well, I have an answer, and

1:08:11

I think there are many... This

1:08:14

is Brian Green, physicist, professor at

1:08:16

Columbia. He has written so much

1:08:18

about Einstein. He's written about

1:08:21

Einstein in his best-selling books. He's talked

1:08:23

about him on television specials. He has

1:08:25

a play about Einstein. He has written

1:08:27

about all the ways Einstein has impacted

1:08:29

the world, and all the

1:08:31

ways the world impacted Einstein. But

1:08:34

surprisingly, when we asked him about this, he

1:08:37

brought it back to the brain. I have to say, if

1:08:39

I was in the shoes of the pathologist

1:08:41

at the time, I may have absconded

1:08:43

with his brain as well. His

1:08:46

basic point is, yeah, there was

1:08:48

the railroads and the time travel

1:08:50

fiction, and there was a huge

1:08:52

confluence of so many different features.

1:08:54

But those things were around for

1:08:56

everybody. Somehow, all of

1:08:58

them came together in this

1:09:00

one brain in a

1:09:02

way that was different. Somewhere in the collection

1:09:04

of atoms and molecules in the brain that

1:09:06

we call Albert Einstein is the

1:09:08

answer to why Albert Einstein was Albert

1:09:11

Einstein. What do you think there was

1:09:13

something innate about it, like Einstein was

1:09:15

born with some special mental equipment, or

1:09:17

you think it had more to do

1:09:19

with his environment? Brian

1:09:21

says, in the end, it

1:09:23

doesn't really matter, because everything

1:09:25

you experience rewrites your biology.

1:09:28

It etches itself into you.

1:09:30

And so when you look at a brain, you're

1:09:32

not just looking at a structure. You

1:09:35

are, according to Brian, in some

1:09:37

fundamental way, looking at the life

1:09:40

that person lived. Yeah, every

1:09:42

genius thought, every deep

1:09:44

insight, every pattern recognized

1:09:47

happened inside that gloppy

1:09:49

gray three or four

1:09:51

pound structure. That's all

1:09:53

there is. Whatever set him apart,

1:09:56

Brian says, is in there somewhere. had

1:10:00

the capacity to lay out every

1:10:02

single circuit and every single

1:10:05

influence that could cascade through

1:10:07

that brain. If we were

1:10:09

able to fully understand all

1:10:11

the electrical signals and crackles

1:10:14

that would go through

1:10:16

that brain, yes, I believe

1:10:18

that we would fully understand

1:10:20

Einstein's process and understand

1:10:22

how it was that he was able to do

1:10:24

what he did. We can't do that. Yeah.

1:10:29

Well, there's a lot

1:10:31

of interest in this concept that

1:10:33

the structure of the brain is going to tell

1:10:35

you something about the function. That's

1:10:37

neurologist Fred Lepore, who we heard from

1:10:39

earlier, and he says people are trying,

1:10:41

not so much with Einstein's brain anymore,

1:10:44

but he says there's this whole exploding

1:10:46

area of neuroscience where researchers are trying

1:10:48

to describe the brain at the level

1:10:50

of detail Brian's describing. That's funded to

1:10:52

the tune of 4.5 billion. He

1:10:55

told us about one guy who's doing

1:10:57

this, just about a mile from where

1:11:00

Einstein lived. There's a Princeton University professor,

1:11:02

Sebastian Sung, and what he does is

1:11:04

he takes a cubic millimeter, a cubic

1:11:06

millimeter of mouse retina. That's

1:11:09

neural tissue. It's not brain, but it's neural

1:11:11

tissue, and he slices

1:11:13

this into these vanishingly thin sections,

1:11:16

and then he tries to trace

1:11:18

the axons, the dendrites, the neurons,

1:11:20

the astrocytes, the oligodendroglia, et cetera,

1:11:22

et cetera. It can take months.

1:11:25

It can take months to do a

1:11:27

cubic millimeter. And

1:11:33

then you've got to have some kind of software

1:11:35

that can analyze to see if the

1:11:38

structure can lead you to some kind

1:11:40

of conclusion about circuitry, which might get

1:11:42

you to function, might get you to

1:11:44

function. Why not definitely? If

1:11:46

that doesn't get you to function, then what

1:11:48

would? What would be left

1:11:51

out if we could map perfectly the structure

1:11:54

of all the connections? Well, you're

1:11:56

talking like me. You're talking like a neural. I

1:11:58

see I'm not by default. I'm a neurologist,

1:12:00

I'm a materialist. They call me a materialist

1:12:02

because I'm saying, well, the left

1:12:05

side of the brain has something to do

1:12:07

with the right arm and speech. That's called

1:12:09

materialism, but there's another school of

1:12:11

thought and that's called dualism, which

1:12:14

is somehow mind,

1:12:17

consciousness, spirit, soul, you

1:12:20

pick out the noun you want there, is

1:12:22

separate from the physical substrate of the

1:12:24

brain. Huh, how would that be science

1:12:26

though? I mean, I can imagine a

1:12:29

school of thought, which allows for

1:12:31

that, but it feels like you're very

1:12:33

quickly stepping out of science if you

1:12:35

go that way. Well, yes, yes, okay.

1:12:38

Probably, you know, see, we're

1:12:41

all brought up on this thing. When you read

1:12:43

anything in the popular press about the brain, they'll

1:12:45

show you functional neuroimaging. So

1:12:48

when someone talks, the

1:12:51

Broca's area, the speech area on the left

1:12:53

side of the brain lights up and

1:12:56

you go, well, there's your answer. That's

1:12:59

the structure, it lights up. That's what's

1:13:01

creating language. Except when

1:13:03

you deal with the neurophilosophers, they say, well,

1:13:05

we got one problem with that. It's called

1:13:07

the hard problem. If you look at that

1:13:09

chunk of brain that you're calling Broca's area

1:13:11

that lights up when you talk, what exactly

1:13:13

is happening there? How does that create a

1:13:16

word? Or if

1:13:18

you're looking at the occipital lobe and you're looking at the

1:13:20

color red, how do you create

1:13:22

that qualia, which is a fancy way of saying

1:13:24

the sensation of color? We

1:13:27

can show you where it is happening. We

1:13:29

just can't show you how. We're

1:13:34

all looking at the same thing. We're saying

1:13:36

somehow if we could get a better handle

1:13:38

on the anatomy, maybe we can explain a

1:13:40

thought. But we can't explain

1:13:42

a thought. I

1:13:45

mean, forget relativity. We

1:13:47

can't explain a thought yet. It

1:14:25

follows from the special theory of

1:14:27

relativity. That

1:14:30

mass and energy are food,

1:14:36

are participant manifestations

1:14:38

of the same thing. A

1:14:45

somewhat unfamiliar conception for

1:14:47

the average man. This

1:15:06

episode was reported by Rachel Cusick

1:15:08

and me, and produced by Bethel

1:15:10

Hobte, Rachel and me, and Jad

1:15:12

Abumrad. Music by Alex

1:15:15

Overington, fact checking by Michelle Harris.

1:15:18

Special thanks to Dustin O'Halloran,

1:15:20

Tim Houston, Simon Adler, and

1:15:22

Minit Sivak. Hi, I'm Sivak,

1:15:24

and I'm

1:15:26

from Silver Spring. Radio

1:15:29

Lab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is

1:15:31

edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu

1:15:34

Miller and Ratchet Master are a co-host. Dylan

1:15:37

Keith is our director

1:15:39

of public affairs. and

1:16:01

Molly Webster, our fine troopers are Diane Kelly

1:16:03

and Lily Kramer in not only Middleton. Thank

1:16:06

you. Hi,

1:16:10

this is Jeremiah Barba and I'm calling

1:16:12

from San Francisco, California. Leadership

1:16:15

support for Radiolab science programming is

1:16:17

provided by the Gordon and Betty

1:16:20

Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox,

1:16:22

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1:16:24

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1:16:27

Foundational support for Radiolab was provided

1:16:29

by the Enford P. Sloan Foundation.

1:16:41

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York City in the early 1980s

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Until change came to her street. People

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