4. "A Fantastic Voyage Through the Human Body" Life, 33-81 (Feb 97).Here are the results of the Visible Humans Project, which cut up the body of a convicted and executed murderer, Josph Jernigan, who had willed his body to science. The contract for the work was awarded, by competition, to Victor Spitzer and David Whitlock, professors in the University of Colorado's Department of Cellular and Structural Biology. Jernigan's body was cut into sections, then planed away in wafer-thin increments for photographs of cross sections. It took nine months to produce pictures of the 1878 slices, and the article details the difficulties encountered. The raw data -- photographs, CAT scans, and MRI -- fit on 23 CD-ROMs. The work has already proven invaluable in the training of medical students who can "dissect" the cadaver, then put it back together and start all over again.
Life has presented a spectacular view of The Visible Man in this issue. Included are a short history of anatomical illustration from 1412 to 1992. Following are lavishly illustrated sections (of the sections) for the brain, the heart, the lungs, the viscera, and the spine. Finally, there is an illustration of the use of The Visible Man in an operation on young Mike, a fifth grader with a tumor of the brain-stem. If it wasn't removed, it would kll the boy. If he was operated on, he could die du ring the operation. The surgeon preplanned the operation using three-dimensional holograms. The story follows Mike's operation and recovery.
Perhaps of greatest value to human biology and anatom teachers is the four-page foldout of the whole body, which is both instructive and beautiful. If your library does not have this issue of Life, contact Barbara Fox, Managing Editor, Life, Time-Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020-1393.
When The Visible Man was finished, Spitzer began on The Visible Woman, a 59-year-old Maryland resident who died in 1993 and willed her body to science. Spitzer was able to produce almost three times as many cross sections of her -- 5,189. Jernigan can be found on the Internet through the National Library of Medicine at http://www.nlm.nih.gov
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