Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's brain
By Michael Paterniti
Delta Trade Paperbacks, $10.95, Pages 211

On April 18 1955, as Albert Einstein lay dead in a Princeton hospital, A 44 year old pathologist with impeccable Ivy League background, Dr. Thomas Harvey was called in to perform the autopsy. He did so, and in the process also removed the brain of the great physicist. Not only that, he decided not to hand over the prize to anyone, including the hospital and state agencies. A few years later, he was fired from his job on apparently flimsy grounds.

Harvey spent the rest of his life hiding the brain in his house, moving from one job to another, losing his medical license along the way and ending up working as an extruder operator in a plastics factory, doing a measly eight dollar an hour job. In 1995, the author accidentally discovered him as the latter chatted with his landlord in New Mexico. It lead to his developing a kind of friendship with the doctor, further leading him to act as his chauffeur as Harvey expressed his desire to visit, and ostensibly hand over the relic brain, to Einstein's granddaughter, Evelyn, living in Berkeley, California.

The book is an outcome of the journey- part travelogue, part autobiography and part a biography of Harvey. Einstein stands mostly on the sidelines, as his brain resides in a Tupperware container in the back of the Buick Skylark car- popping out of its trunkly abode once in a while to serve as an anchor to the driver and the irascible Mr. Harvey, sometimes providing a beacon of enlightenment and sometimes as an introspective voice. The result is an eclectic, sometimes funny but a downright original and immensely readable travelogue.

On the road, driving from New Jersey to California across the vast mid- western states of Ohio, Indiana and further on in Idaho and Arizona, the writer struggles to strike conversation with his uncommunicatively eccentric passenger ("a man of silence after silence")- who drops in unannounced to see one of his three former wives and a host of children and grandchildren. Nearly half a century separates the driver and the passenger, the author and the 84 year old Harvey, just about the time that separated Harvey from Einstein. Einstein, the genius and eccentric, Harvey, the eccentric and a talented doctor.

This kind of a journey can be expected in America, where the weird and the whacky can be your next door neighbors, existing as much in flesh and blood as in fantasy. "Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrouses of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins", the writer remarks somewhat out of place but piquantly as he drives out of Ohio.

Later, in Lawrence city, he observes, "As will happen in this single day, we will live through four seasons. Which can occur when one drives long enough with Einstein's brain in the trunk. Time bends, accelerates, overlaps; it moves backward, vertically, then loops; simultaneity rules". Such flights of fancy to see America through the eyes of Einstein are not unusual in the book- indeed it is not without its flaws. Bathos dominates at places.

Elsewhere, Paterniti brings alive a good- humoured, skeptical look at Einstein and his adoptive country, often quoting Einstein or picking up anecdotes from his life. "The last 30 years of his life, he might as well have gone fishing", he remarks referring to the relativity theorist's unfruitful attempts at formulating the unified field theory, on which he continued to work hours before his death- as if the three decades of hard labour may culminate in a triumphal breakthrough in his final moments.

After his initial success in theoretical physics, Paterniti observes, Einstein towered more for his moral opinion than scientific success.

Einstein condemned war. "I appeal to all men and women to declare that they will refuse to give any further assistance to war or to preparation of war", he wrote in a 1931 statement to the War Resisters International. Later, he wrote, "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me, because the murder of people is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."

In 1952, responding to questions about the atomic bomb, he said: "You are mistaken in regarding me as a kind of chieftain of those scientists who abuse science for military purposes. I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military. I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do. Indeed, I have been a pacifist all of my life and regard Gandhi as the only truly great figure of our age."

His left- leaning views made him an object of suspicion. His closeness to Charlie Chaplin lead to at least one FBI agent swearing that Einstein was at the center of a communist plot to take over Hollywood. Because of such suspicions, Einstein was not associated with the Manhattan project leading to the making of the atomic bomb.

The preservation of the physical brain of Einstein, doggedly saving and hiding it from powers of all sorts including the government- at tremendous cost and suffering to him, makes Thomas Harvey an anarchist hero of sorts. Who knows that the brain which may have been otherwise lost forever, may still lead to some discoveries. Maybe, one day, posterity may even clone it.

Others may differ- and consider it at best undignified and at worst unethical, to treat the mind of any man, let alone Einstein’s, as if it were a floppy disk or a wax- tablet (Plato likened the human mind to a ‘wax- tablet’, even as Freud compared it to a ‘mystic writing- pad’– made out of wax paper and celluloid). In other words, to dissociate it from the flesh and blood of the living man.

However, as of now, like in much of the journey described in the book, Einstein- the great mind of science, reason and morality, is cast away in the back of the car, at least metaphorically. It rides, silently floating in formaldehyde, as a baseball aficionado and a cantankerous octogenarian drive across America, trying to find a home for something that is forever in danger from predators of all sorts.

Bhupinder
bhupi@bigfoot.com
July 10, 2001

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This page was last updated on: 02 January 2002