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SCMP Reporter

CONVICTED killer Joseph Paul Jernigan was put to death 17 months ago but his body will live for ever.

The criminal was executed on August 5, 1993, by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, for the bloody murder of a 75-year-old night watchman. He was the 64th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982.

But Jernigan's superb 39-year-old body was neither burned nor left to decay in the earth. Instead it has gone on to become the world's greatest medical teaching tool.

Jernigan has become the Visible Man, history's first three-dimensional computerised cadaver, and he is already available to everyone on world computer networks.

What was once Joseph Paul Jernigan has become a detailed atlas of the human body assembled digitally from thousands of X-ray, magnetic and photo images of cross-sections of his body.

Instead of operating on donated cadavers who died from various causes and illnesses, Asian medical students will be able work on the killer's perfect body. Doctors worldwide will be able to show in exact detail operations they plan to perform on their patients.

 Surgical students will perform autopsies and operations on the Visible Man who will eventually have elasticity in his tissues and 'bleed' and react as a 'living' human. Doctors will be able to introduce cancer and learn how best to fight the illness. Scientists will introduce ageing and see exactly why and how it occurs.

 Who was the Visible Man? Joseph Paul Jernigan was a cruel and murderous drunk. He beat, stabbed and shot a watchman to death when he was disturbed in a burglary involving a radio and a microwave oven. Jernigan didn't want a living witness.

 But his mother, Annabelle McHenry of Corsicana, Texas, is proud of him at last. 'He told me he wanted to do something good and he finally has.'  His appeals attorney, Mark Ticer, says: 'He knew you couldn't take murder back so he wanted to make things better for people in general.'  But Navarro County, Texas District Attorney Pat Batchelor, who prosecuted Jernigan, says: 'I'm convinced Joseph Paul Jernigan is burning in hell right now. I hope science can use his body to save people - but his soul is gone.'  Jernigan was put to death by an injection of potassium chloride, a drug that caused his heart to fail in the presence of witnesses in the Texas death chamber. He nodded briefly to his watching brother then folded his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling until he saw no more. Then his body was quickly carried to a chartered plane and flown to the University of Colorado in Denver, placed in a wooden mold, surrounded by blue liquid gel and frozen to minus 56 degrees Celsius.70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

 The mold was cut into four pieces and the first, containing Jernigan's head and torso, was placed standing up before a special cadaver sawing machine.

 Researchers began slicing off a total of 1,870 one-millimetre strips. The body and slices were filmed by X-ray Computer tomography (CT scanned) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), then photographed from head to toe and the pictures stored digitally over six months.

 The layer images were stacked on top of each other electronically in the computer and thus was born the Visible Man.

 'This is the first time such detailed information about an entire human body has been compiled,' says project originator Dr Michael Ackerman, an anatomist at the National Library of Medicine in Washington, DC, which spent more than US$1 million (HK$7.73 million) on the project.

 The information is so extensive it takes as long as two weeks of uninterrupted time on the Internet to download it. The data takes up about 15 gigabytes of storage space - enough to hold 50 times the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 'It took two years to find a perfect physical specimen of man,' says Dr Victor Spitzer, who worked on the project with anatomist Dr David Whitlock.

 There were rigid criteria. The candidate must be in good physical shape, of average weight for his height, between 20 and 60 years old and of any race. Best would be a non-violent suicide brought into cold storage within 12 hours of death. On top of that he must have also willed his body to science.

 'The bodies of suicides are usually ruined for us by autopsies,' Spitzer says.

 An extremely healthy specimen is necessary because doctors will use the organs to compare with those of living people. Several bodies were rejected because of abnormalities or injuries. One, in otherwise perfect shape, was rejected because of an old football injury.

 'Our committee considered two great males with no disfiguring trauma or surgery and no diseases that altered their anatomy. Then we found this perfect specimen [Jernigan] and it took just 30 minutes to make him our choice,' Spitzer says.

 He estimates more than 90 per cent of bodies willed to science end up in medical school dissecting rooms.

 In all cases their names are carefully protected. But it was easy to discover the identity of the Visible Man: his was the only body carrying as reason for death 'lethal injection' and the date of Jernigan's execution.

 The many thousands of images of Jernigan are available like none ever seen before. Computer users accessing the three-dimensional computer body can study his heart by calling it up on the screen whole or section by section.

 Medical students studying anatomy and electronically dismembering the Visible Man will miss only the feel of a scalpel and the smell of formaldehyde.

 Every single part of Jernigan's body has been linked by words and pictures so researchers can just write in a name and up pops actual pictures detailing an area.

 Manufacturers of spare body parts will be able to prepare them more accurately and student surgeons using Jernigan as a 'simulator for surgical operations' will practise on the Visible Man instead of on live humans.

 Universities and businesses have submitted more than four dozen proposals for other applications. One is an educational computer game patterned after the science fiction film Fantastic Voyage in which scientists in a micro spacecraft travelled through a human body. Another is a programme that will let doctors show patients where their problems lie or what surgery will mean.

 Already underway is a scaled-down version of the Visible Man on CD-ROM to teach school children the basics of human anatomy.

 The Visible Man is alone out there waiting on the data superhighway but he'll soon have company. The Denver team is already at work on the Visible Woman, 'a nice anonymous lady of 59 who died of a heart attack' in Maryland.

 She will be prepared in three times more detail than Jernigan.

And the team is preparing for the future.

 There may a Visible Boy, Visible Girl and Visible Baby ahead. An entire library of digitised humans ranging in age from foetus to advanced old age is being considered.

 To view sample images of the Visible Man there are two Internet addresses: The FTP site is nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov. The gopher site is gopher.nlm.nih.gov 



Birth of the Visible Man