At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Gerry Oxford, professor of physiology, said that seeing organs in three dimensions wasn’t the same as feeling them. “Physicians in training need a visceral appreciation of the fact that they will have responsibility for the human body.” Even a believer in the project, Marc Nelson, assistant dean of medical education at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, worried that electronic anatomy could lessen contacts between students and teachers.[[5.8]]
Real bodies, however, cost universities $600 each—assuming they could get them in the first place. And students would not have eyeballs, hearts, hands, and livers to themselves.
Of all the boosters of the project, Martha Pelster may have been the most persuasive. She worked as a lab assistant, had cut up dozens of bodies, and now was headed to medical school. “When you look at this cadaver,” Pelster said of the digitized Jernigan, “everything is still in its orientation. When you go in and dissect, you take a lot of stuff out. If you cut something wrong or cut through something and toss the object into the reject bin, you’ve lost it. But with this visible male, you can go back in again. You can see what happened before your lab partner went in there and messed up your cadaver. This cross-sectional anatomy is going to be the be-all and end-all. A book can’t have this many cross sections, this good.”
Just as important, no one in the project, from Ackerman to Pelster, was touting electronic cadavers as a complete substitute for the real ones that the medical students studied. The digitized versions would simply augment the real cadavers, the ones that you couldn’t reboot if you cut them the wrong way. In the new era, medical schools could even require students to put the human body together, not just take it apart.
Cadavers in cyberspace would offer yet another advantage: even schoolchildren could study them. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and some rock-n-roll musicians such as Pearl Jam were asking schools to “cut out dissection” and use computer imaging or model frogs. Thanks to the Visible Human Project, however, students someday would do better than just viewing pixels flashing across the screen. They would be able to tour the body of an actual human. Potential medical students, moreover, could get a head start. Long before they reached the slicing rooms, they would be familiar with electronic cadavers and be able to make better use of the real ones. What’s more, the digitized Jernigan could revolutionize training in laparoscopic surgery, where doctors inserted tubes in patients and operated with tiny instruments and TV-like monitors and cameras. The view on the video screen of a training computer could be true to life.
All this was not even to mention other applications—for example, computer-simulated crash tests to improve auto safety, efforts to study the range of wrist motion and reduce carpal tunnel syndrome in typists, or investigations of ways to protect athletes against injuries.
I asked Mark Ticer if Jernigan’s family had ever thought of suing for any of the wealth that the project might create from medical products and the rest.
The answer pleased me in this litigious era. Ticer said that if anything the family would be offended that anyone raised the issue. That was the way Jernigan and his kin were. “There wasn’t a condition attached to his gift,” Ticer said.
Sharon Kuster, Jernigan’s sister, said her brother would “probably be happy about it. I am.”
“Now he can be remembered for all the good he did rather than all the evil,” Ticer said. “I think he’d be quietly delighted.” I picked up on the “quietly.” Jernigan’s invisibility, prior to his crimes, was not just because of his station or lack of station in life. That was his way. Many other inmates on death row gravitated toward microphones. Jernigan spurned them. The true crime book, if one ever resulted, would never have come out while he was walking and breathing.