The Visible Human Project, however, would make it easier for Karen to learn more. Dr. S. could have shown Karen a computer image of an actual human heart and have pointed to the exact areas that the surgeon would kill off. Karen would have picked up a better appreciation of the complexities of the proposed operation. At the same time, Dr. S. could also have juggled around computer images to show the increased risk of clotting that would result if she failed to have the operation. Karen would have emerged better informed and more confident—or less, whatever the facts justified. Someday she might even be able to dial up on the Internet an animated, perfectly detailed series of pictures of the operation.
That was what the Visible Human Project would mean. What’s more, patient education was just one of many uses; the right technology could revolutionize the training of doctors and advance medical research.
As far back as the 1980s, such ideas intrigued Michael Ackerman, a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering who worked for the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health. He heard of a project at the University of Washington that was digitizing the human brain, although not the entire body. Researchers at other schools hoped to do the same with other organs. But they were less keen on collecting images and other data than on using them[them], so why duplicate each other? Like the Internet itself, then, just one digitized corpse could help many researchers at once.
In North Carolina a marketing executive with a drug company was dreaming of a human atlas on a computer screen. Why should medical students have to make do with fold-out drawings in anatomy guides? Michael Du Toit, Vice President of marketing for Glaxo Inc., passed the idea on to a small company called Butler Communications, which checked out the technology. Glaxo had three goals. First, it wanted to create the basic images. Second, it wanted viewers to be able to wander through the body; ideally they could move the body for the best view, spin it, travel through it. And third, it wanted researchers to be able to give the lungs cancer, clog the arteries to the heart, and demonstrate the effects of drugs. But computers weren’t ready. “The hype versus the deliverable,” Robert Butler told me, “was miles and miles apart.” To meet Glaxo’s specs—to show the body by way of artistic recreations and virtual reality—might cost as much as $100 million.
Imagine the excitement that Du Toit and Butler must have felt on learning that academic and government researchers were finally coming up with the means for this to happen at a fraction of the expense. The Feds put out a request for proposals for the dissection job, and the crew at the University of Colorado made the final cut. Still unanswered was the question of whose corpse would end up on the Internet. The contest judges allowed a bit more leeway than did the people choosing Miss America and Mr. Universe.
The ideal candidate for Visibility could be anywhere from maybe thirty to sixty years of age and be a bit thin or pudgy, albeit not exceedingly so. Height mustn’t go too far beyond the norms for male and female. Above all, the innards of the body had to be photogenic from an anatomical perspective. That weeded out anyone worn down by cancer or similar disease, not to mention any victims of automobile accidents or knifings.
A little unfairly, this contest had geographical limits. Texas, Maryland, and Colorado were the states with subcontracts to provide the body. I could understand Maryland and Colorado, but Texas? I wondered if the reason would be the fondness of the people down there for capital punishment. No longer did bodies have to roast in electric chairs. Texas helpfully killed its murderers with lethal injections. So, in this competition, Paul Jernigan was a strong contender from the beginning.
Murder is an act of the will no matter how poor or Hitlerian our parents are, or what genes shape us and our brains. But if Fate sent anyone to the deathhouse gurney and to Visible Manhood, it was Paul Jernigan. He lived out an updated Dreiser novel.
His full legal name was Joseph Paul Jernigan, and he was born in Geneva, Illinois, on January 31, 1954, the youngest of Earl Jernigan’s six children. The boy suffered from asthma and almost died of it. He and his brothers and sisters typically owned just one pair of jeans each. Their mother eked it out in a chicken-processing plant, as a clerk at Montgomery Wards, and at other low-paying jobs, and they lived in public housing. She married a truck driver who, like Earl, was a strict disciplinarian toward the children. Later she suffered a stroke. Afflicted with a learning disorder, Paul flunked a grade at school and dropped out two years before graduating. He was a drunk and eventually was doing a pharmacy’s worth of drugs, from Quaaludes to horse tranquilizers.
The Army trained Paul Jernigan as a mechanic, sent him to Germany, then tossed him out as unsalvageable. Perhaps recognizing the cruel matrix that shaped Jernigan, it gave him a general discharge (a “no comment” in effect) rather than a dishonorable one. A shrink later found Jernigan to be a passive-aggressive man who was sometimes TNT-volatile. In the years after the military Jernigan kept a cooler of ice and beer in his automobile; a typical paycheck went for pot, cheeseburgers, and enough octane for himself and the car.