THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601180571
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
The crucial, constant, central rule for journalists - an otherwise generally unregimented bunch - is this:
Make nothing up.
This dictum may come as a distinct surprise to critical outsiders who view reports of Big Foot sightings in the Weekly World News with skepticism. If you can't trust those, comes the inevitable argument, why should you trust accounts of high-level governmental dysfunction in The New York Times?
Why? Because the well-paid but fanciful writers for supermarket tabloids have not learned what those of us less lucratively but more reliably scribbling for the mainstream press know from long and emphatic experience: The plain truth requires no embroidery, since it is so often overwhelmingly weird to start with.
I enter into evidence the engagingly readable - but just as engagingly researched - nonfiction compilation by Harvey Rachlin, Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein's Brain: The Remarkable Stories Behind the Great Objects and Artifacts of History, from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Henry Holt, 402 pp., $27.50).
Herein are recounted documented facts concerning such interesting but offbeat items as the contents of King Tutankhamen's Tomb, the breast-pocket materials that saved the life of Theodore Roosevelt and John Dillinger's wooden jail-escape gun.
Next to these unlikely but true tales, the wild stretchers of the tabloids seem almost lacking in imagination.
Exhibit one: Einstein's brain. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - whose theory of general relativity revolutionized scientists' concepts of gravity, space, time, mass, energy and motion - was an acknowledged genius whom some pronounced ``the most brilliant being ever to have graced this Earth.'' Shortly after the great man's death, pathologist Thomas Stolz Harvey conducted an autopsy on his body, a routine procedure with one exception.
Stolz opened Einstein's noodle and kept the contents.
Einstein's 76-year-old brain weight, duly recorded on a spring scale, was 1,230 grams, well within the normal male range of 1,200 to 1,600, looking rather like a standard car-wash sponge. So the long-held theory that brain size and intelligence were somehow correlated immediately went out the window. There were no other surprises.
``It was,'' notes Rachlin of Einstein's brain, ``soft and pink and felt like semisolid Jell-O.''
Harvey chopped it up into 170 pieces and preserved each one for study. The scientist's other remains were cremated. Thirty years later, physiologist Marion Diamond, of the University of California at Berkeley, requested samples of Einstein's right and left superior frontal lobes and right and left inferior parietal lobes; Harvey mailed them off to her in a mayonnaise jar.
She found out that Einstein had more glial cells (which offer structure and support for the nerve cells) per neuron than the average male, but the variable was only statistically significant in the left inferior parietal cortex - and Diamond didn't have any other genius specimens with which to compare them.
Nobody else has published any research whatsoever on Einstein's brain. Harvey, now retired in Lawrence, Kansas, keeps the remaining brain chunks at home; they'll be donated to a medical center upon Harvey's death.
It's anyone's guess what will be done with them after that.
Exhibit two: George Washington's false teeth. Contrary to conventional received opinion, they weren't made of wood. When he was inaugurated president in 1789, the Father of Our Country only had two authentic choppers left in his head; the others were affixed to an uncomfortable prosthetic device constructed from hippopotamus ivory.
``Unless the lip and facial muscles were continually exerted to keep it in place, the dentures would shift around,'' Rachlin reports.
This may account for the fact that Washington has never been noted for his oratory.
Exhibit three: Napoleon's penis.
Well, you can read the book.
With documented material like Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein's Brain, who needs The National Enquirer? MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB