New York - A new book claims that Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter was born severely retarded, possibly with Down's syndrome, and died at 21 months after a bout with Scarlet fever.
When the first volume of Einstein's collected papers was released in 1987, it showed that he had had an affair while at university with a fellow student named Mileva Maric, who later became pregnant and gave birth to a child at her parent's home in rural Serbia.
The baby, a daughter named Lieserl, was born severely retarded, possibly with Down's syndrome, according to a new book, Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, by Michelle Zackheim, Time magazine reported.
Zackheim's book says Maric was unable to put the girl up for adoption and ultimately left her with her parents in the Vojovodina region of Serbia.
Zackheim says she wrote the book because of her curiosity about what became of the abandoned child. She said she wanted to find out how "(Einstein's) daughter felt about being abandoned, especially by someone who was so important to the culture".
But instead of turning up a living heir, the author's research led her to a letter Einstein had written to Maric in 1903 that said "I am very sorry about what has happened to Lieserl. Scarlet fever often leaves some lasting trace behind."
This clue led Zackheim to deduce that the baby died at the age of 21 months from Scarlet fever.
The new book is just the latest in a number of revelations about Einstein's personal life that have scholars re-evaluating the image of the wild-haired, iconoclastic inventor of the theory of relativity.
Boston University historian Robert Schulmann, director of the Einstein Papers Project, told Time that the book's conclusions about the child's fate are "as good as anything I could come up with, or anyone else. But it's speculation."
Harvard physicist and Einstein historian Gerald Holton was more critical.
"She worked very hard traipsing through all those Serbian cemeteries and came up with nothing." - Sapa-AP