Luckily from a bandwidth perspective, you didn’t have to download all of Jernigan. Each slice was a mere seven megabytes in a spatial resolution of 2,048 by 1,216 pixels (several times sharper than that of a typical personal computer). A maker of software for ophthalmologists could pull down only the images dealing with the eye and related brain areas. Those aiming for the podiatry market could focus on the feet and ankles. What’s more, even without a license, ordinary Net users could dial up Jernigan Lite, so to speak, from the World Wide Web.
Coming over the Net eventually would be more than just the raw, unprocessed images. Refined versions—for example, animated Jernigans, rotating in 3-D, or even virtual reality versions—could go anywhere in the world. And when they did, researchers and students would be wanting their own pet views. CD-ROMs just didn’t store enough data to anticipate all the possibilities. Typically they could hold maybe 650 megabytes of data. Even extended, the storage would offer a fraction of what could be available via high-speed connections to sites from Paris to Melbourne.
Jernigan, you might say, was more than just the material for a medical experiment. He was also a focus of a research project to develop special formats for libraries of visual information on the Net. Eventually people would be able to download not just images but also the “objects” that made up the images.
“These objects will have knowledge in them,” Michael Ackerman said, “so they know how they relate to each other and the rest of the scheme. Say you ask for the heart. What you get of course is the not a picture of the heart but the objects that made up the heart that your software has now rendered as the heart. If you point to something on the heart, it can open up because it’s made up of these objects. And if you point to something on the margin of the heart and say “What is attached here?” that object on the margin knows what its nearest neighbor is even though it’s not in the picture. And it knows to go back to the database and bring up what’s attached to it.”
Such an approach might even take advantage of Web-style technology to link together libraries at a number of locations. So you might smoothly travel from, say, a processed image of a blood vessel done up at School X to an animated image of a heart as tweaked by Company Y.
Those uses would increase the load on the Internet, of course. But ultimately the principle of the expanding pipeline might work to the benefit of all. That is, the heavier the traffic on the Net, the heftier the connections would be built. So in the end, everything would be cheaper—from image transmissions to sending one-page notes by electronic mail. The challenge, of course, was for this to happen without the costs of ordinary Net users being driven up by the workload that the image libraries and similar endeavors would bring about. That’s where TeleRead might come in. It could systematically promote the mass use of electronic forms for tax documents, business transactions, and other purposes. And indirectly the money saved on paperwork could go not only toward a national library but also to help upgrade the present Internet for researchers and the world at large.
Right now people tended to see the applications of the Net in terms of one use versus another—in terms of money for low-cost networks for consumer education versus high-bandwidth connections of the kind that Ackerman wanted. With a TeleRead-style approach and enough imagination, however, we could take full advantage of the economies of the technology. And so although we would not end the clashes between Net users with different priorities, we could at least reduce them.
Several other cost-related questions arose beyond those of the expense of the network connections. I wondered how much patients would be charged to see a picture of the innards of Jernigan or a Visible Woman. Robert Butler doubted that his client, Glaxo, was ready to say. However, he left me with the impression that this probably would not be pay per view. Glaxo had its own reasons for going ahead—for example, showing doctors the effects of its pharmaceuticals on the body. So, no, he said, this was not a plot to gouge the public with peep shows.
A related issue, arising from the involvement of drug companies, was the question of proprietary information. While the images were on the Internet for all to see, this project was not entirely in the spirit of the Net’s openness. Butler, for example, might have feared that I was working for a rival corporation, and he waited several weeks to return my calls. I could understand his reasons. Still, I was startled to learn that Ackerman at the National Institutes of Health would not even release to me a list of the companies that had licensed the use of the images. Nor had NIH organized a newsgroup or a mailing list. Surely all the hundreds of licensees would have common problems, common opportunities, that they could discuss without imperiling each other’s projects.
Yet another question went back to one of the main reasons given for the project. Could medical students really learn by hooking into the Net and dialing up the images from the Visible Man? David Dean should have been a complete booster of this endeavor. He was, after all, a Ph.D. who worked in medical imaging and taught anatomy at Case Western Reserve University. And yet he told me, “I feel you can’t replicate the experience in the anatomy lab. Students will have no time for this stuff. They’re totally overwhelmed. They can see the same structures again and again in different bodies.”