I asked Martha Pelster if her work haunted her at night. “I kind of keep it on a pretty even level,” she said. “I don’t have too much trouble with it.”[5.7] She said Butzer felt the same. Had Jernigan inspired much after-hours talk with her husband? “If there was a problem that needed to be worked out.” But did Pelster and Butzer reflect on the Visible Man’s past in relation to what was happening now? “Not too much. Getting emotionally involved with something like that—you don’t want to discuss it. It isn’t relevant to what we’re doing.” Inquiring about the university’s most famous cadaver, I learned that Jernigan had come with at least two tattoos on his chest area; they looked vaguely like dragons. His build and muscles were impressive. The lab had to modify some of the machinery to handle Jernigan. He showed up with just one testicle, which, I learned elsewhere, was the aftermath of painful surgery from his military days. I also heard that another operation had left him without an appendix. Students and researchers seeking to unravel the mysteries of appendixdom would just have to turn elsewhere. As a taxpayer, however, I didn’t feel cheated. This was the States, not Bangladesh; did that many Americans die without any remnants of surgery? Jernigan’s cadaver stood head and shoulders above a rival, a woman who was a chronic alcoholic with visible damage to her liver. In the hierarchy of the dissection room livers must have counted more than appendixes. Before the millimeter-by-millimeter grinding, the scientists treated Jernigan to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, mixing radio waves and magnetic fields) and computer-aided tomography (CAT or CT, which is like topography except that it’s on the innards of the human body). MRI picks up soft tissue. CAT scans are good for hard tissue, and for the differences between it and soft tissue. The researchers CT’ed Jernigan both before and after he was frozen, and these scans had to correspond with the alignment of the digitized photographs. Imagine the precision required here. Preparing to slice the icy cadaver into four blocks for convenient grinding, the lab crew sharpened up on a less exalted cadaver. Vertebrae were a problem. “This saw would curve,” Pelster said, “so you wouldn’t have a perfect perpendicular flat cut. It would have a curve to it. So we took the cadaver back to the CT scanner and found the level where we could make a cut.” In the end there were three cuts and four sections of Jernigan—head and torso, abdomen and pelvis just down to the thighs, the rest of the thighs and the knees, and just below the knees to the feet. The frozen pieces went into an aluminum mold, one at a time. And then the researchers poured a blue gel around them (the same blue you’ll see on the edges of the cross sections if you dial them up on the World Wide Web). The result was four chunks of ice, each approximately 20 by 20 by 15 inches.