Today, we create a body of knowledge. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In 1981, 27-year-old Joseph
Jernigan committed a robbery. Then he killed a
75-year-old man -- a potential witness. Jernigan
was convicted and executed on August 5th, 1993, by
lethal injection. Near the end, he said he deserved
his punishment. He also bequeathed his still young
and healthy body to science.
What science did with the mortal remains of Joseph
Jernigan is truly dazzling. David Wheeler tells
about it in the Chronicle of Higher
Education. First anatomists froze him solid
at -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Then they sliced him,
like a loaf of bread, into 1 mm thick sections --
1,871 of them. After each slice they made a
fine-grained photo of his new cross-section.
Finally, they digitized all those pictures and
loaded the information into a computer.
Joseph Jernigan was about to achieve a remarkable
kind of temporal immortality. He'd been reduced
from this too-too-solid flesh to 15 gigabytes of
electronic ectoplasm. Now it's possible to select,
from those bits of data, three-dimensional pictures
of any part of his interior and show them from any
angle.
Wheeler tells about a trip through the electronic
Jernigan. Jernigan was standing with his arms
reaching toward Wheeler. Wheeler then moved forward
along the ulna and radius, through the elbow and
upper arm, into the face, chest and stomach. The
spine and the back of the brain looked like a
cauliflower on a knobby stick. The journey ended as
he emerged from the last of Jernigan's shoulder
blades and buttocks.
That can be a pretty harrowing trip. The first
time I looked at the images I was grossed out,
says a graduate student. But Victor Spitzer, who
did the photography, looks at off-white bone,
glistening red muscle, and fat, and he simply says,
It's gorgeous!
Jernigan has given medicine a reference of normalcy
-- against which to compare the sick and wounded in
a detail that was once impossible. Project people
have already encoded, in even greater detail, the
body of a 59-year-old woman. Unfortunately, she
died of a heart attack. They don't yet have a
premenopausal woman who died in good health.
Healthy young people seldom die without significant
damage having been done to their bodies.
For now, both sets of images are held in cyberspace
by the National Library of Medicine. They're called
The Visible Man and The Visible
Woman. And those two are serving both clinical
medicine and medical instruction in new ways all
the time.
So, Wheeler observes, anatomists now look for whom
they might next reduce to electrical pulses. But
Jernigan was first. And by the information he gave
us, he may well have paid his debt to society. The
donation of his body has probably saved many lives
already. And it represents a whole new means for
understanding the terrible complexity -- of human
anatomy.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
