Hans Einstein
Einstein was born in Berlin, the son of Josefa Spiero Einstein Warburg and Dr. Fritz Einstein. He spent his childhood in Hamburg, Germany as Nazism gradually took hold. His parents were Quakers, but of Jewish origin. A year after Hitler took power in 1934, his mother moved Einstein and his sister to the Netherlands, leaving his father behind. He finished high school at Eerde, a boarding school in the Netherlands at age 16 and moved to the United States as an exchange student. He attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. One of the first things he did upon arriving was look up his last name in the phone book. The only Einstein he found was a relative: Albert Einstein's son, Hans Albert Einstein. They became friends and he was often invited over whenever Albert visited. He earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1946 and did his internship at Paterson General Hospital in Paterson, New Jersey. Following that, he became a medical officer in the United States Army. He then completed residencies in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary Diseases at the New York Veterans Hospitals.
Albert Einstein's brain
In the 1980s, University of California, Berkeley professor Marian Diamond received four sections of the cortical association regions of the superior prefrontal and inferior parietal lobes in the right and left hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain from Thomas Harvey. In 1984, Marian Diamond and her associates were the first ever to publish research on the brain of Albert Einstein. She compared the ratio of glial cells in Einstein's brain with that of the preserved brains of 11 other males. (Glial cells provide support and nutrition in the brain, form myelin, and participate in signal transmission, and are the other integral component of the brain, besides the neurons.) Dr. Diamond's laboratory made thin sections of Einstein's brain, each 6 micrometers thick. They then used a microscope to count the cells. Einstein's brain had more glial cells relative to neurons in all areas studied, but only in the left inferior parietal area was the difference statistically significant. This area is part of the association cortex, regions of the brain responsible for incorporating and synthesizing information from multiple other brain regions. A stimulating environment can increase the proportion of glial cells and the high ratio could possibly result from Einstein's life studying stimulating scientific problems.