Friend of Friend of Friend of Albert Einstein!

 The six degrees of separation theorizes that everybody is within six or less social connections from each other. The connection of people socially is truly remarkable. 

As a boy growing up in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, I met a boy at school who was my age and lived nearby who shared some common interests. Harvey Rubin was a nice boy that enjoyed science and we both had chemistry sets. I had a little science laboratory set up in our basement where we did some experiments. I spent some time in their home and recall a special birthday for one of his two sisters that had a clown come, which was very unusual. 

Harvey came to visit me in Sebring, Florida back in the mid 1960’s after he moved to La Jolla, California. We kept in touch by correspondence back then, but later stopped. We lost track of each other until several years ago I discovered he had an account on LinkedIn. We spoke on the phone and emailed each other and caught up a bit. Which brings me back to the six degrees of separation. 

Harv’s father was a scientist. I always understood he was a psychiatrist. But in actual fact he did scientific research. Harv’s mother was an artist. But Harv sent me some photos of himself and his family several years ago via email. Included was this one.

The following is from an email I received from my childhood friend, Harv Rubin in 2019, and explains the photo.

“The last photo was taken in 1942 of my father, grandfather and family friend Albert Einstein in Princeton, NJ. My grandfather who was a prominent gynecologist in New York City was Einstein’s wife’s OB/GYN doctor. My father and grandfather visited Einstein on a number of weekends in which my father learned German. My grandfather immigrated to the US from Germany and spoke fluent German.

 

My father passed away in 2008 at 89 and my mother passed away in 2017 of dementia at 98. It’s amazing how much information people can obtain online about most people. He and his post-doctorate assistant published 32 scientific papers in respected journals. His goal was to win a Nobel Prize. He was on a “short list” for one but I believe the only reason he didn’t get it was he wasn’t associated a university or major research institute. My mother pursued her art making until her last year even though she too had dementia.”

So now you can see how the six degrees of separation applied to my social connection with Albert Einstein. We lived outside Philadelphia, and Einstein would have been at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton back during WW2 when Harv’s father met him. Harv’s father was working on cracking the genetic code (DNA), researching protein synthesis, but was beaten to the punch by Watson and Crick. Although the Nobel committee considered one of his academic papers he never got his Nobel prize. But he did know Albert Einstein! And his grandfather was a famous OB/GYN that has a test named after him, the Rubin Test. Pretty cool.