Brain power

It has been Einstein week on television — the 50th anniversary of his death, and the centenary of the theory of relativity. This has handed producers a problem as knotty in its way as proving that e=mc2. How on earth do you put the most important yet the most incomprehensible scientific thought of the past century on to our screens without, for instance, having Davina McCall come on to yell at the top of her voice that gravity is the consequence of a curvature in space/time?

In The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain Channel 4 found a novel way round it. They didn’t concentrate on what Einstein’s brain came up with, but on the brain itself. This had been neatly removed by the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem, purely in the interests of scientific research. Though Dr Tom Harvey came to be regarded as a Frankenstein figure, or possibly his hunchbacked assistant Igor, he made chunks of the brain available to anyone with a genuine need for research purposes.