That, of course, was where TeleRead came in. Whatever their sizes, publishers needed to hook the nonelite in this videocentric era before they gave up on the written word. * * * * * The above is not to suggest that text is the only way to communicate knowledge over the Net. The right graphics certainly can as well. One of the most intriguing examples of the potential here is a remarkable endeavor—the Visible Human Project—in which, so to speak, a murder lives on forever in cyberspace to the benefit of medical education and cancer research. I’ll discuss this in the next chapter. CHAPTER FIVE Wired Knowledge: When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet Paul Jernigan was a tattooed ex-mechanic just under six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds. He had been a drug addict and a chronic drunk, but nearly all his organs still looked in textbook shape by the standards of gross anatomy—a stroke of luck that would later help him win him a macabre competition. Jernigan had fatally stabbed and shot a seventy-five-year-old watchman after stealing a radio and a microwave oven. More than a decade had passed. So had his hopes for a successful appeal to the courts. Lying on a gurney in a Texas deathhouse—his arms outstretched, as if in a crucifixion—Paul Jernigan just gawked upward as his brother watched. No last words came before the poison flowed into Jernigan’s veins. Jernigan gave himself to science. A not-so-loquacious sister told me this was to spare the family the cost of burial. “It was like, matter of fact,” his last attorney said of the donation. “It was a gift. He wasn’t going to laud himself, pat himself on the back. We didn’t send an embossed announcement that ‘Paul Jernigan has donated his body to science and this is his ticket to redemption.’”[5.1] A former cellmate offered his own twist. Supposedly, Jernigan wanted his family to be able to sell his life story for a true-crime book. The donation just might make the planet care more about him in death than in life. Within a year of the execution, in fact, I was reading clips about Paul Jernigan from the _London Times_, _Jerusalem Post_, _New York Times_, _Washington Post_, _Los Angeles Times_, and the _Boston Globe_. My favorite lead came out in a British paper called _The Independent_: “A killer was yesterday let loose on the Internet computer network.” I wondered how he’d respond to flaming. The new Jernigan lived on as a digital atlas of the human body, a few steaklike cross sections of which I could dial up on the World Wide Web. The Visible Human Project had come out of the National Library of Medicine in a Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C. It was one of the most spectacular examples of the Net’s potential for spreading knowledge, the topic of this chapter.