Relics of grandeur: Beethoven's hair and Einstein's brain Analysis/Commentary Over the past year, forensic studies have focused with almost surreal interest on the remains of great men. The following rapid survey of two books tries to highlight some of the findings. In 1994, a few strands of Ludwig van Beethoven's hair went up for sale at Sotheby's auction house in England. The tale of their journey over time from 1827 to 1994 inspires Russell Martin's new book, Beethoven's Hair. By a similar congress of history and science, Albert Einstein's brain resurfaced in 1999. According to Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert, Einstein's brain lay on an old warehouse shelf for decades, and was trundled back and forth across the U.S. by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein's autopsy in 1955. The Driving Miss Daisy allusion refers to one final cross-country schlep from Princeton to California, where Harvey and Paterniti hope to turn over the brain to Einstein's adopted granddaughter, Esther Taylor. (Later, Harvey gives it to lab from which it was stolen.) Neuroanatomists, revisiting the brain in 2000, report abnormalities in the parietal region that may account for Einstein's extraordinary gifts. But, first: DA da da, dum! DA da da, dum! The opening notes of Ludwig van's Fifth Symphony rise to our minds like a hairnet might have haloed the lion-maned composer. As meaningful an icon as Einstein's brain, Beethoven's shock of hair recalls the days when the Enlightenment was young and emotions ran as thick as Medusa's braids. In the 1800s, men waited until they were apoplectic before asking a girl for a date, and stymied love seemed as good an excuse as any to curl up against a tree and ventilate your forehead with a dueling pistol. Although quite the Romantic apoplectic lover, Beethoven never married, nor even seems to have enjoyed a live-in girlfriend. When Beethoven died at 56 in 1827, a visiting friend and composer, Ferdinand Hiller, snipped a strand of the dead man's hair. Later, papa Hiller bequeathed the hair to number one son Paul, who had it encased in a glass locket. At Paul's death in 1934, the locket disappears. "Where did it go? Where did it go?" Russell Martin exclaims, and forages into the past with more questions than answers to trace the hair's later pilgrimage. The locket plays a small part in the heroic efforts of a village of Danes to smuggle out a few hundred Jews. In October 1943, Jews who had been safe in Denmark become the targets of Gestapo raids. The inhabitants of the village of Gilleje engage in a frantic effort to ferry them to safe haven in Sweden. Somehow, along the way, the locket of hair is deposited into the hands of a kindly village doctor. His adopted daughter makes the sale to Sotheby's and then to the Brilliant Institute at the State University of San Jose. When the principals of the Brilliant Institute for Beethoven Studies turn over a few strands of the hair to medical analysis, at first the forensic experts find nothing -- no indication that the master had received opiates, or that he had been treated with mercury. In Beethoven's time, doctors prescribed laudanum or other types of opium derivatives freely. Perhaps Ludwig van wanted to keep his head clear in case a tune came to mind. Likewise, the maestro gets a clean bill of health for V.D. That's one dirty little secret you can't plant on him, so say the hair analyses. But the scientists do find an incredible amount of lead. Lead poisoning indeed seems to match Beethoven's symptoms of gastrointestinal, liver, and kidney distress, and may even have caused his hearing loss, which began at 26. Driving Mr. Albert poses an altogether different problem -- a slight psychological mystery. What on earth was Doctor Harvey up to, squirreling Einstein's brain away for 45 years? Harvey seems to have acted alone, so says the Paterniti report, and since there are few instances of brain theft in the criminal record, Harvey suffered only mild sanctions. Like losing his job. Or later, having failed his medical license review, he finds himself compelled to go to work in a plastics factory. Another case of life's injustices adding up to retribution? Maybe. Yet, he does seem a kind old critter -- a sort of straight-laced Beat, a distant intellectual cousin to William Burroughs and Neal Cassidy, or a throwback to the age of Tim Leary and Alfred Kinsey. Harvey's pre-hippie iconoclastic act of defiance, the kidnapping of Einstein's brain, comes as close as any generation can to transcendance -- to seeing the mind of God floating in bits and pieces in a cookie jar or Tupperware vat. Scientists examining Einstein's brain discover a 15 percent abnormal growth in the temple area, the area associated with mathematical abstraction. And the connective tissue, which usually flaps over in most people, seems strangely loose, suggesting a free flow of neuron activity. The brain, slightly collapsed by age, weighs 2.7 pounds, hardly bigger than a dog's breakfast (to quote novelist Kurt Vonnegut). Was Einstein a pumped up mental champion? Or was he congenitally fated to succeed? (Someone should ask Kurt Vonnegut.) The two books, well-written and enjoyable, shed light on events that happened long before most of our births. They fail to connect genetics with genius, but they barely try, and their lack of closure hardly distracts from their enjoyment. January 10, 2001