Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein's brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion--the very foundations of physical reality--not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein's brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist's skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range--no bigger or heavier than anyone else...
...analysis of Einstein's brain by Canadian scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning--two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best--was significantly larger than average and may also have had more interconnections among its cells, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., "it's a fascinating discovery...
...curious tale of how the brain got to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., is equally fascinating. When Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm in 1955, at the age of 76, the pathologist who did the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, Dr. Thomas Harvey, removed the brain, pickled it in formaldehyde--and kept it. Harvey had no credentials in neuroscience, and his unauthorized appropriation of Einstein's brain appalled and outraged many scientists. Possession was evidently a point in his favor, though. At the pathologist's request, the family agreed he could keep the organ for scientific study. But over...
...Witelson, a neuroscientist who maintains a "brain bank" at McMaster for comparative studies of brain structure and function. These normal, undiseased brains, willed to science by people whose intelligence had been carefully measured before death, gave Witelson a solid set of benchmarks against which to measure the seat of Einstein's brilliant thoughts. To make the comparison as valid as possible, Witelson and her team compared Einstein's tissues with those of men close...
...Baekeland, plastics pioneer --Tim Berners-Lee, Internet designer --Rachel Carson, environmentalist --Albert Einstein, physicist --Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television --Enrico Fermi, atomic physicist --Alexander Fleming, bacteriologist --Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst --Robert Goddard, rocket scientist --Kurt Godel, mathematician --Edwin Hubble, astronomer --John Maynard Keynes, economist --The Leakey Family, anthropologists --Jean Piaget, child psychologist --Jonas Salk, virologist --William Shockley, solid-state physicist --Alan Turing, computer scientist --James Watson & Francis Crick, molecular biologists --Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher --The Wright Brothers, visionary aviators...