History of the Visible Human Project

The plan was refined in 1989 when an expert panel recommended the first step, a proposal called the Visible Human Project. The goal was to deconstruct the body into billions of small elements which could be represented electronically. Modern medical imaging like computerized tomography systems provided one way of acquiring the bits of information. A more challenging method was to actually section the body slice by slice and photograph each slice of tissue. The photographs could be represented in electronic form with each point in the photograph corresponding to a small volume of body tissue. By stacking the images of each slice, computer systems could create a three-dimensional digital model of the entire human body.

In 1991, the National Library of Medicine awarded the contract for the Visible Human Project to the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. The first problem the researchers encountered was the difficulty in selecting the male and female cadavers for the project. There were a number of restrictions limiting the suitability of a cadaver: excessive size, traumatic death, implants, etc. With such a long list of restrictions, it took over two years before a national committee selected three candidates for the male cadaver. The chosen Visible Man was a 39 year-old convicted murderer who was sentenced to death by lethal injection. The selected Visible Woman was a 59-year-old Maryland woman who had died of heart disease. Her husband had read an article about the Visible Human Project and specifically requested her body be donated for the project.

Both bodies are now imaged at high-resolution and in the public domain. Ironically, the physicial representation of the bodies were necessarily destroyed in making the digital representations.

A multimedia introduction to the Visible Human Project, complete with actual video clips, is available in the Digital Humans CD-ROM.