G: Relative Genius

Imagine you have a disease.

You know you have the disease.

You know how you got it.

You can see very clear and painful signs of the disease on your body.

It's a disease that will take your life if left untreated, but you can't get any medical

help because your symptoms do not officially count as part of the disease according to

some bureaucratic checklist somewhere.

Somewhere.

This was the situation for over thousands of women in the 1990s, over a decade into

the AIDS epidemic, because the official symptoms of AIDS were based exclusively on male patients,

meaning that very clear signs of their bodies being immunocompromised, things like cervical

cancer, yeast infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, those were completely ignored and

discounted because men didn't get them.

So what the heck were these women supposed to do?

Today, before we dive into our Radiolab episode, I want to play you an excerpt from a new show

that tells the story of a small group of women who tried to do something, who tried to pull

off this seemingly impossible existential feat to unerase themselves.

The show is called Blindspot.

It's a collaboration between the History Channel and our colleagues at WNYC.

And this season sort of lives at just the same nexus of science and humanity that our

show does, and we thought some of you might really like it.

So to just get a feel for the show, I'm going to play an excerpt.

It's just a little over five minutes, and then we'll be on with today's Radiolab.

To set up what you're going to hear, it's the early 1990s, and we are zooming into one

of the key places where the movement to fight for women with HIV really began, in a maximum

security prison in New York State.

And what I think is so special about this tape is that you get to sort of peer inside

the oyster shell, and you see the factors, the coincidences, the intimacies, these sort

of actual tactile grains around which the whole pearl of the movement is spun.

So here we go.

I'm going to hand it off now to Blindspot host, Lizzie Ratner.

One name kept coming up at the center of this story.

Katrina.

Katrina.

I kind of became obsessed with who is Katrina Haslip.

Katrina was an inspiration to all.

Ooh, ooh, ooh.

Katrina Haslip.

She was young.

She was only in her 20s when she arrived at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

She grew up in Niagara Falls, one of 11 kids.

In her late teens, she found Islam and married a religious man and moved to Brooklyn.

But by the age of 21, she'd moved back to Niagara Falls and fallen pretty deep into

an addiction to heroin.

She could stay out on the streets all night and still somehow managed to go to college

in the morning.

She soon started doing sex work and stealing, and the word was that she could lift a wallet

off of anyone.

She ended up getting arrested for pulling a knife on a client, and that is how, in 1985,

she ended up in a maximum security prison for women in upstate New York.

Katrina was very fiery, and she had a real temper.

Judith Clark.

She met Katrina in solitary confinement, the prison's prison, at Bedford Hills.

I think she got into a scuffle with an officer is my memory of what led her there.

And I remember her saying something like, oh, God, it was worth it, with this great

big smile on her face.

Judy was also in prison at Bedford, and the crime that got her there, it was a big deal.

Good evening.

Good evening.

Echoes of the violent, radical underground of the 1960s rolled over the New York suburb

of Nanuet today in the botched ambush of an armored car that left one guard and two policemen

dead.

Among the four suspects...

The Brinks robbery.

It was a crime committed by an offshoot of the far left Weather Underground.

Three people were killed.

Judy was driving the getaway car, and she and Kathy Boudin were among the four people

arrested.

Judy was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison.

Our cells were very bare, you know, cinderblock walls and a solid door, and then a small window

on the other side that had a lot of mesh on it.

I mean, it sounds kind of terrifying.

It was.

In solitary confinement, they were allowed just one hour a day outside, and most days

Judy would walk laps around the track alone.

And then, after a few months, suddenly this woman appears.

She's beautiful and very elegant.

She wore a head wrap.

She wore a long dress and was incredibly stylish.

There are people who manage to be stylish in prison, and Katrina was one of them.

And something between the two women clicked.

This was a moment of transformation for both of them.

They were both grappling with their lives before prison, what they had done.

And so every day they would walk and just talk.

You know, she told me a little bit about her life and about her own struggle toward recovery,

having gone through a period of addiction.

On the one hand, she's incredibly intelligent.

She was a practicing Muslim, but she had this fire, and it could get her in trouble.

And that is what drew them together and got them to start organizing in prison.

Let's take a look at the issue of AIDS in prisons.

This is Dr. Sheldon Landesman, and he's speaking at a forum in 1987.

A huge percentage of the persons in the prison system, and I can't get a good handle on the

number, anywhere from 70 to 80 percent, have used drugs prior to coming to prison.

We know from a variety of studies that at a minimum, 50 percent of the intravenous drug

users in the New York City and surrounding area are infected with the AIDS virus, taking

the most conservative estimates.

AIDS was becoming a huge problem in the prison system and not just among injection drug users.

The New York Department of Health tested women as they were entering the prison system in 1988.

It found that fully 18.8 percent of women tested positive for HIV.

That is almost one in five women, higher than the rate for men.

In these numbers, they were probably an undercount.

In Bedford, so many women had fallen sick and disappeared that rumors were running wild.

Nobody knew what the hell was going on.

Meet Iwilda Gonzalez.

Everybody calls me Wendy.

Wendy got to Bedford around the same time as Katrina, in 1985.

She was in for possessing and selling drugs.

And when she arrived, she found everyone on edge.

Well, many women bullied other women, harassed them, beat them, shamed them, blamed them.

Their own fear, because at one point, we're all looking at these women and saying,

wait a minute, how many times did I share a needle?

See?

But how many times did you make love to somebody and they didn't tell you or they didn't know?

There was still a lot of confusion around how you got HIV, but there was one thing that everybody knew.

If you got infected, you died.

I mean, no one wanted to be seen going to the medical department for anything because

they were afraid that people would say, oh, she's an AIDS bitch.

Wendy worked as a hairdresser in the prison hair salon, and she was starting to get lots

and lots of questions.

My scissors, the knife that I used to do certain, you know, styles in the hair.

And women questioning me, what are you doing to disinfect this?

And I say, you know what?

I need to educate myself.

Either people were going to turn against each other, as was happening, or people were going

to be able to seek each other.

The women started organizing to put together a meeting.

You didn't have to be HIV positive to join.

Well, you know, we wanted women among the druggies.

We wanted women among the good old Christians.

We wanted white women.

We wanted Hispanic women.

We wanted Black women.

We wanted religious.

We wanted non-religious.

We wanted hippies.

Katrina was part of that initial organizing group.

She worked in the law library, and so she began spreading the word to other women.

Soon, they had 30 people who were interested.

Here's how she described that first meeting in a documentary a few years later.

So we, like, went around introducing ourselves.

And about the third woman, she said, my name is Sonia, and I have AIDS, you know.

And I had never heard anybody say that before out loud.

And I don't think anybody else in the room had heard anybody say that out loud.

And the room went, like, silent.

And then people, like, engulfed her.

And it made me cry because it was like there was so much support in the room for this person

who was able to say, I have AIDS, you know.

And I thought to myself, I can never say that.

All right, I'm going to stop the excerpt there.

Again, the show is called Blindspot.

This season is called The Plague in the Shadows.

Go check it out wherever you get podcasts to find out if this group of women will topple

a Goliath and in the process save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Spoiler alert, they do.

But keep listening to find out how.

All right, now I'm switching gears big time.

In tone, in vibe, we are heading over to hear a radio lab from a few years back that is

very near and dear to my heart.

It comes from the series we did on intelligence called G, which was hosted by Pat Walters,

who is now our managing editor, making sure all our stories sound good.

A few years back, he put together this series that's all about intelligence, how we measure

intelligence and how the concept of intelligence can cause incredible harm, but maybe sometimes

help.

And anyway, the episode we're about to hear is about the most bizarre treasure hunt I've

ever heard about.

It's a treasure hunt for a tiny chunk of human flesh that absolutely changed the world in

huge ways, and it went missing for a long time until an intrepid treasure hunter of

sorts went off to find it.

That's all I'm going to say.

The episode is called Relative Genius, and again, it's hosted by Pat Walters and co-reported

by Rachel Cusick.

Here we go.

Yeah.

Wait, you're listening.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

You're listening to Radiolab.

Radiolab.

From?

WNYC.

Yeah.

Three, one.

Hey, this is G, a Radiolab miniseries.

I'm Pat Walters.

And I'm Rachel Cusick.

And today, we're going to go looking for intelligence in what might seem like one of

the more obvious places.

Right over here.

Do you need water?

Yeah, yeah, water's okay.

And the story starts with this guy.

My name is Stephen Levy.

I'm an editor-at-large at Wired Magazine.

Thank you so much for coming in.

Basically, I guess, where did this all start for you?

So in 1978, I was working for a magazine called New Jersey Monthly.

Steve was young, fresh out of school.

It was my first real job in journalism.

Offices were in a suburb outside Princeton, New Jersey.

Sort of an office park, a very bland set of offices with cubicles and,

you know, really Dunder Mifflin-ish.

Steve says it was a typical, boring, entry-level job.

Until this one day.

We had a new editor.

It got interesting.

Yeah.

He called me into his office and said,

I want you to find Einstein's brain.

And I thought, what?

Were you like, that sounds exciting?

Or were you like, I don't know?

I thought that sounds pretty cool.

That sounds pretty cool.

You know, I've been working on a piece about the psychology of the New Jersey driver, right?

Right, right.

Not a real stiff competition.

I mean, I literally did a service piece about racquetball, which was a big trend then.

This is better.

Yeah.

Now, the reason the editor assigned him this story

is there had been these rumors going back years that when Einstein died back in 1955,

moments after his death, someone had literally stolen his brain and run off with it.

Sort of an urban legend.

Einstein's brain is somewhere and, you know, there's, you know,

the Russians have it and they're trying to clone Einstein.

And Steve's editor just wanted him to get to the bottom of it.

He literally said to me, I want you to find Einstein's brain.

What did you know about Einstein at that point in his brain?

Well, you know, what I knew about Einstein is what anyone on the street would know about

Einstein, essentially.

There's this guy with the funny hair, relativity, right?

Whatever that was.

What he would quickly learn,

Something to do with the atom bomb.

after a little bit of reading, is that in the early 20th century,

Einstein pretty much rewrote the way that we thought the universe worked.

Einstein, brilliant physicist and theoretical mathematician.

A scientific giant.

He said that mass is equivalent to energy.

E equals mc squared.

Which led to the atomic bomb.

The all-shattering devastation in which was born the atomic age.

He also said time and space could both bend,

which led to the discovery of black holes and like a million other things.

He enabled man to embark at last on a total adventure.

And it didn't take long before Einstein just became a symbol.

Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?

For intelligence.

Space and time.

Einstein!

For genius.

I am not a genius.

I'm not Einstein.

You don't have to be an Einstein to know it's me.

What am I supposed to do?

So that was Steve's assignment.

Find the brain of the guy whose name basically means genius.

Then he said, by the way, this is going to be our cover in August.

A few weeks, six weeks away or something.

Didn't have a lot of time.

How do you even begin looking for the brain of a guy that died decades ago?

You know, there was this thing called the library.

So Steve knew that Einstein lived in Princeton and died in Princeton.

April 1955.

So he headed over to the local public library,

pulls up the newspaper archive.

And look at the microfilm.

And he finds this article.

Written a couple days after Einstein died.

And it said Einstein's brain to be preserved for study.

And it talked about, yeah, there's going to be a study of Einstein's brain.

And, you know, they're going to have a press conference about it.

So he pulls up the next day's paper,

thinking there'll be a big front page story about this press conference.

And nothing.

Crickets.

Nothing.

There was no press conference.

It didn't happen.

No.

So then he thinks, OK.

That's 23 years ago.

You know, the brain studied.

Something's got to be published.

Like by scientists.

I went through all sorts of scientific papers.

Periodical guides.

No papers.

I mean, I really look hard.

And eventually he realizes that little newspaper article.

That was literally.

That was the last thing written about Einstein's brain.

But there was one clue in that little newspaper article.

A name.

The name of the guy who was supposed to hold that press conference.

That never happened.

Dr. Thomas Harvey.

Who, it seemed, in addition to being the guy who didn't hold that press conference.

Was also the pathologist who would have done the autopsy on Einstein.

So the next stop on Steve's search.

The Princeton Hospital.

The place Einstein died.

And where supposedly this Harvey guy worked at.

And I went there.

I found.

I talked to the vice president.

And I asked him about the pathologist.

Dr. Thomas Harvey.

Where's Dr. Harvey?

Hospital guy says.

He left here a long time ago.

And then Steve's like, what about the brain?

I heard the brain got taken.

Is it here at the hospital?

He didn't know anything.

I had to talk to Dr. Harvey.

So what do you do to find Harvey?

So looking for a person in 1978.

There's no Google.

There's no Facebook.

There's no LinkedIn.

And there's a lot of places.

A lot of cities.

Every city had a phone book.

But you couldn't look at every phone book.

I eventually figured one place I might go is the American Medical Association.

Figures this guy Harvey was a doctor.

Maybe they have his contact info.

So I called them up.

I really trying to find this Dr. Thomas Harvey.

Thomas S. Harvey.

I knew his middle name.

And this very kindly woman looked up stuff.

And then told me there is a Thomas S. Harvey in Wichita, Kansas.

So he calls directory assistants in Wichita.

Says, do you guys have a number for a Thomas Harvey?

They said yes.

He asked, is that number listed?

And they said yes.

They gave me his phone number.

And I took a deep breath and dialed the phone number.

Back then, if someone wasn't there, it would just ring and ring.

You'd hang up and that would be it.

Because it's a pre-answering machine.

But he'd pick up the phone.

And I said, is this Dr. Harvey?

And he said yes.

And I said, is this the Dr. Harvey who worked at Princeton Hospital in 1955?

And there was this pause.

I figured, wait, it's sort of a yes or no question, right?

There's a pause.

He was almost debating whether to own up to this.

And finally, he said yes.

In retrospect, maybe it was a little of the jig is up.

And he said, I don't know if I could help you.

And I said, well, I'd just like to talk to you.

He said, well, and he was sort of not saying yes or no.

And I said, you know what, I'm coming out there to talk to you.

So I booked a ticket for Wichita, Kansas.

Steve hops on a plane to Kansas.

He spends the night.

And then the next morning, he wakes up, gets a cab and goes over to Harvey's lab.

I rang the bell or whatever.

And Dr. Harvey came to open the door for me.

What did he look like?

He looked like, you know, the guy who would be your pediatrician.

You know, this kindly looking guy in his 60s, I guess.

He's wearing a lab coat.

And I remember very clearly he had in his pocket one of those pens that could write

in three colors, you know, red, green, blue.

And he took me back to the back of the facility to his office was basically a glassed in cubicle

and with a desk and a chair, some shelves and some cardboard boxes behind the chair.

And I sat down and we talked.

Now, at this point, Harvey hadn't admitted to anything, but Steve had a feeling.

A definite feeling.

Yeah, you could tell he's very cautious, very guarded.

You know, I'm asking every way to try to figure out where the brain is.

And I asked him a few times, you know, where's the brain?

And he really didn't want to answer that.

And then finally I say, well, don't do we have any pictures of it?

And then he sort of broke down when I asked, you know, can maybe because he says I was

so frustrated because, you know, I was like, no pictures even.

And he's sort of like sagging a little.

So he gets up and he walks behind me and there was sort of like a beer cooler near where

he was.

I don't think he's in the beer cooler.

No, he keeps walking past there.

And it goes behind me to where one of the cardboard boxes is.

And he pulls out these two jars.

And in one of the jars, there are these pieces of biomass floating in there that are clearly

brain stuff.

And I'm like staring at this thing and I'm like thunderstruck.

I mean, it was like a jolt, you know, this was amazing.

I mean, you know, you could hear, you know, the chorus of angels singing, Einstein's brain.

I'm taking this in and like this is the brain that changed the world.

And to see that brain was a moving experience.

Actually, I have to say, hey, I got this glimpse of something.

Of what, though?

Of something big, of something, you know, that of a mystery.

It followed from the special theory of relativity.

In this episode, we're going to try to untangle that mystery.

But different manifestations of the same thing.

What can the brain of one of the greatest geniuses that humanity has ever produced?

A somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average man.

Like what can that brain tell us?

On this week's On the Media, what happened to the offbeat, irreverent,

speaking truth to power alt-weeklies that used to populate newsstands across the country?

The voice was their guide to life from people who cared about what they were covering

with such intensity that there were fistfights and brawls inside the paper.

That's gone.

The end of an era on this week's On the Media from WNYC.

Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, this is the Radiolab miniseries G. I'm Pat Walters.

And today we're talking about Einstein's brain.

The actual physical thing of it.

And whether or not it can tell us anything about the nature of genius.

He was clearly a genius.

There's something about the idea that his genius

is tied to the physical structure of his brain that makes me itchy.

Literally, that's the physical sensation I have.

I start to itch.

Yeah.

I think you're dismissing it too soon.

I think there's more to it than you suspect.

All right.

Well, let me ask you a more basic question.

What's the fellow's name again?

Thomas Harvey.

How did he end up with that brain to begin with?

Well, you know, to answer your question.

This is Dr. Fred Lepore.

He's a neurologist, also wrote a book about Einstein.

He's one of the people we talked to to answer that very question.

And he says, you got to go back to the winter of 1955.

Einstein was living on borrowed time.

76 years old, retired, living in Princeton.

And he gets sick, starts to feel this pain in his abdomen.

It was so much.

It almost felt like a gallbladder attack.

Turned out to be way worse than that.

Ultimately, he had an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Frank Glenn, who was a neurosurgeon, not a nurse, a surgeon at Cornell came down.

Ready to operate.

But Einstein basically said, look, you know, my time is up.

I will die.

I think he said, I will die elegantly.

He knew he was.

And that was a brave thing to say because he was in pain.

And eventually in the spring of 1955.

Einstein into the hospital Friday.

Died this morning after refusing surgery, which it turned out would not have helped

him recover from a ruptured artery.

As the story goes, in the early morning hours of April 18th, he muttered a couple of incomprehensible

words, incomprehensible to his nurse, who didn't speak German.

And then in the early morning hours, he was found dead.

Now, Tom Harvey, our guy, was the chief pathologist at Princeton Hospital.

His job was to do autopsies.

And that night, April 18th, 1955, he's at home sleeping and he gets a call.

Yeah, I think the phone call came sometime before dawn.

And it was Einstein's personal physician who called him to let him know that Einstein's

son had given permission for an autopsy to be performed on his father.

This is Carolyn Abraham.

Science journalist, author of Possessing Genius.

The story of the bizarre odyssey of Einstein's brain.

Harvey actually died in 2007.

But before he did, Carolyn spent some time with him and got his take on that day.

He, you know, gets himself ready.

And he remembered it was a really nice morning.

A spring was in the air and, you know, things were turning green.

And he was walking towards what he realized was going to be a major opportunity in his

professional life.

He got to that hospital and he got to his pathology lab.

And someone that morning had already placed Einstein on the autopsy table.

She says he walked into the room.

Einstein's laying there flat on the table.

And he picks up a scalpel.

And, you know, he opened the abdomen and he saw it was full of blood from the aneurysm.

So he established his cause of death.

Did a routine examination of the heart.

But then he did something that was not in the script.

He removed the top of the skull.

Cut a bunch of cranial nerves and arteries.

And he took the brain out.

And then he put the brain in a jar and walked out.

So he literally just stole the brain out of Einstein's skull?

Just stole it?

Yeah, which is pretty gross.

Isn't that a crime?

Probably.

History has not been kind to Thomas S. Harvey.

But in Tom Harvey's estimation,

and he actually put it this way in our conversations once,

as that he would have felt ashamed if he didn't take it.

Here was ashamed because here was this opportunity to learn something about

sort of the biological underpinnings of intelligence, of genius,

you know, from arguably, you know,

certainly one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century.