Wish you had Einstein's brain? There's an App for that
A new iPad app offers the chance to gaze into the mind of a genius as though you were looking through a microscope, according to its developers.
The app consists of hundreds of digital images of the inside of Albert Einstein's brain, and scientists are hoping it will inspire a new generation of neurologists.
A blurb for the app on the iTunes Store website reads:
After Einstein's death in 1955, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy on his brain.
He cut it into more than 350 cubes and slivers, which he preserved in formaldehyde in the hope that studying them would shed light on the inner workings of his mind.
But since then very little research has been done on the samples. A 1999 study found that Einstein's parietal lobe - which processes maths, language and spatial relationships - was 15% wider than in normal humans.
The app developers hope that it will spur more studies into existence.
Photographs were taken of the brain samples, and these have been digitised in the new app.
But users of the app will not know exactly which part of Einstein's brain the images relate to due to the technical limitations of the time.
Jacopo Annese a researcher at the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego, said: "They didn't have MRI. We don't have a three-dimensional model of the brain of Einstein, so we don't know where the samples were taken from,"
Nevertheless, "it's a beautiful collection to have opened up to the public," Annese said.
But as well as raising scientific questions, the release of the app has also raised ethical ones.
Einstein never actually donated his brain to science and although Harvey got permission from his son retrospectively, the genius' wishes are not known.
Steve Landers, who designed the app, believes Einstein "would have been excited" by the potential advances to neuroscience.
A member of the board of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, Jim Pagli, said:
He added said the app could "inspire a whole new generation of neuroscientists."