What I learned from reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.
Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration.
But there was one part of his body that was not cremated in a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein's brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic.
Hours after his death, a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton Hospital, Thomas Harvey.
When he stitched the body back up, Harvey decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein's brain and keep it.
The next morning, in a fifth grade class at Princeton school, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard.
Einstein died, said one girl, eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information.
But she quickly found herself topped by an unusually quiet boy who sat in the back of the class.
My dad's got his brain, he said.
Einstein's family was horrified.
Harvey insisted that there may be scientific value to studying the brain.
Einstein would have wanted that, he said.
Einstein's son, unsure what legal and practical rights he now had in this matter, reluctantly went along.
Soon, Harvey was besieged by those who wanted Einstein's brain, or a piece of it.
He was summoned to Washington to meet officials of the US Army's pathology unit.
But despite their requests, he refused to show them his prized possession.
Guarding it had become a mission.
Harvey decided to have friends at the University of Pennsylvania turn part of it into microscopic slides.
And so he put Einstein's brain, now chopped into pieces, into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his fort.
Over the years, in a bizarre process, Harvey would send off slides or chunks of the remaining brain to random researchers who struck his fancy.
In the meantime, he quit Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple times, and moved around, often leaving no forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein's brain always with him.