Studying brain of Einstein led to breakthrough
Scientist found link to enriched learning
Marian Diamond, who has died aged 90, was an Ameri can neuroscientist who examined the brain of Albert Einstein and claimed to have spotted a difference in its cell structure compared with 11 others.
Einstein had wished to be cremated, saying he wanted no one to “worship at my bones.” But after his death from an aneurysm in 1955, Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton Hospital, carried out a post mortem, not because there was any question over cause of death, but because “his family being of German origin — most everyone in Germany has an autopsy when they die.” Unknown to Einstein’s family, Harvey then sliced off the top of Einstein’s head and removed the brain, which he pickled in formaldehyde. The rest of Einstein’s body was cremated.
When Harvey was forced to defend his act of plunder to the family, who had learned about it from newspapers, he explained that he wanted the brain for research. They agreed to his request to keep the brain, on condition that he never exploit it commercially, and that he publish his findings only in a scientific journal.
Subsequently, however, Harvey left Princeton hospital under a cloud of scandal, following accusations of sexual misconduct. Lacking the resources or expertise to carry out the research himself, he sent chunks by post to neuroscientists around the world. ( There are bits of Einstein’s brain in Japan, China and Germany, as well as in the U.S.) Most, however, concluded that it was just a normal brain.
Marian Diamond was sent four chunks — looking like sugar lumps she recalled — in a mayonnaise jar in 1984. The following year she wrote in Experimental Neurology that Einstein had an above-average number of glial cells in those areas of the left hemisphere thought to control mathematical and linguistic skills.
At the time, no one knew what to make of the discovery. “Many idiots have big brains loaded with glial cells,” one expert observed. In 1990, however, a researcher at Stanford published a paper showing that glial cells play a role in helping to build connections between neurons and promoting more- complex brain structure.
Diamond described seeing Einstein’s brain as “a total body experience,” but she had done more important research two decades earlier when, as a member of a team at Berkeley led by Mark Rosenzweig, she studied the brains of rats, some of which had been raised in “enriched” environments, in cages filled with toys, and in the company of other rats, and some of which had been raised alone in bare cages.
She found that the stimulated rats all had thicker cerebral cortices than their less fortunate counterparts. As she observed in Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child’s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions From Birth Through Adolescence ( 1998, with Janet Hopson): “This was the first time anyone had ever seen a structural change in an animal’s brain based on different kinds of early life experiences.”
The results, published in 1964, changed scientific understanding of the brain, which had been thought a static organ that simply degenerated with age. “Use it or lose it,” as she put it.
She was born Marian Cleeves on Nov. 11, 1926, in Glendale, Calif. Her father, Montague, was a doctor originally from Yorkshire.
After taking a degree in biology at Berkeley and a master’s degree in anatomy, she took a doctorate in 1953 on the hypothalamus.
She went on to research and teach at Harvard, Cornell and the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Berkeley, retiring as professor of integrated biology, aged 87.
Her marriage to Richard Diamond was dissolved and in 1982 she married Arnold Scheibel, who died in April. She is survived by two sons and two daughters.
THEY MIGHT BE A DIFFERENT RACE, THEY MIGHT BE A DIFFERENT COLOUR. BUT GOD DAMN IT, I’M GONNA SIT DOWN AND I’M GONNA LEARN THEIR WAY OF LIFE. LITTLE BY LITTLE, I CAME TO UNDERSTAND THE KOREAN PEOPLE. — JOE DRESNOK, U. S. DEFECTOR TO NORTH KOREA