Lying on a gurney in a Texas deathhouse—his arms outstretched, as if in a crucifixion—Paul Jernigan just gawked upward as his brother watched. No last words came before the poison flowed into Jernigan’s veins.
Jernigan gave himself to science. A not-so-loquacious sister told me this was to spare the family the cost of burial. “It was like, matter of fact,” his last attorney said of the donation. “It was a gift. He wasn’t going to laud himself, pat himself on the back. We didn’t send an embossed announcement that ‘Paul Jernigan has donated his body to science and this is his ticket to redemption.’”[[5.1]] A former cellmate offered his own twist. Supposedly, Jernigan wanted his family to be able to sell his life story for a true-crime book. The donation just might make the planet care more about him in death than in life.
Within a year of the execution, in fact, I was reading clips about Paul Jernigan from the London Times, Jerusalem Post, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. My favorite lead came out in a British paper called The Independent: “A killer was yesterday let loose on the Internet computer network.” I wondered how he’d respond to flaming. The new Jernigan lived on as a digital atlas of the human body, a few steaklike cross sections of which I could dial up on the World Wide Web.
The Visible Human Project had come out of the National Library of Medicine in a Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C. It was one of the most spectacular examples of the Net’s potential for spreading knowledge, the topic of this chapter.
Researchers had cut Jernigan into four blocks, frozen him in a blue gel, ground him down millimeter by millimeter, digitally photographed the 1,878 cross sections that emerged, scanned these slices[[5.2]] into a computer, put them on magnetic tape, and then on the Internet. Now the cadaver would be grist for medical educators and cancer researchers and perhaps even the designers of a “Fantastic Voyage”-style game. Players might explore the human body from the inside, just as Isaac Asimov’s characters did in his novel. The government itself was spending $1.4 million on the project; expected commercial payoffs could reach the tens of millions and maybe more. Research and education, however, would be paramount here.
The Visible Human Project is but one of thousands of uses that academics and researchers have found for the Internet. The Net is why many scientific luminaries were quick to slap the “fraud” label on efforts to create energy through cold fusion. Skeptics throughout the world could compare notes. If Paris couldn’t replicate an experiment, then Boston would know within hours. Working in the other direction, fusion stalwarts have used the Internet to swap data and maintain the faith. Cyberspace is to knowledge what beehives are to honey.
Already the Net teems with thousands of mailing lists devoted to the most arcane disciplines, not just to the mainstream ones. Many scientists and other researchers envision the Net as a substitute for paper-style academic journals, subscriptions to some of which can cost as much as a Ford Escort. Stevan Harnad has caught the imaginations of many academics with “A Subversive Proposal” for scholars to publish their finished works formally on the Net without offering them to academic publishers. He puts out a vigilantly edited, psychology-related magazine with a circulation of tens of thousand on the Internet; he sees no reason for the Net just to be a repository for pre-publication papers. In his opinion, academics could use such opportunities to enjoy greater bargaining power with existing publishers.
Yet another glory of the Internet is that it serves as a bridge between experts and nonexperts, as well as one between authorities in many academic disciplines. A dean of a law school, for example, can sign up for mailing lists on electronic serials to learn more about the technology that is fueling the drive for copyright reform.
From Day One, the Internet was a creature of the elite research establishment, but knowledge-related uses have steadily grown more egalitarian—starting with the brightest students in elementary and high schools, then moving on to average children, and even to problem kids.
To dispose of a major issue, No, the Net shouldn’t replace teachers. I couldn’t agree more with Cliff Stoll when he rants against lax standards and mindless technocratic schemes. Well-trained teachers can provide inspiration and guidance to help children explore networks on their own. The last thing we need is to turn the educational reaches of the Net into one big flash card. What the Net can do is prepare children to deal with source material, with actual papers written by researchers, as opposed to pabulum in textbooks.