Story Highlights
- Historical event
- 18 April 1955
- The pathologist who conducted the postmortem took Albert Einstein's brain without the permission of the family.
Nobel laureate Albert Einstein died on this day at the age of 76 years at the Princeton Hospital in the U.S. (technically the same hospital where Dr.House of the eponymous television series works).
The cause of Einstein’s death was the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which is not uncommon in old people.
The pathologist who conducted the autopsy took Einstein’s brain without the permission of the family and had it preserved in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made him so intelligent.
The rest of Einstein’s body was cremated and the ashes scattered at an unknown location. Today, Einstein’s brain is still kept, not in one piece, but cut into thin slices, which are located in multiple locations.
During the last twenty years of his life, Einstein taught at Princeton University, in whose hospital he died.
He arrived to the famous University of New Jersey (south of New York) after Hitler came to power in his native Germany. Life and work in Nazi Germany was not possible for Albert Einstein, who was a Jew.
