Two men, a four-thousand mile journey, and the most celebrated brain of the twentieth century.
As the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on 17 April 1955, it was Thomas Harvey's job to carry out the autopsy on Albert Einstein. In an instance that was to shape his life forever, he cut the brain out of Einstein's head and removed it for himself.
Harvey chopped the brain into two hundred pieces, and kept it hidden in glass jars, floating in murky formaldehyde. Until 1997 when, aged eighty-four, he decided the brain should be taken to Berkley, to Albert Einstein's grand daughter Evelyn. It fell to the writer Michael Paterniti to drive him across America on the strangest road trip of them all . . .
