Yet another question went back to one of the main reasons given for the project. Could medical students really learn by hooking into the Net and dialing up the images from the Visible Man? David Dean should have been a complete booster of this endeavor. He was, after all, a Ph.D. who worked in medical imaging and taught anatomy at Case Western Reserve University. And yet he told me, “I feel you can’t replicate the experience in the anatomy lab. Students will have no time for this stuff. They’re totally overwhelmed. They can see the same structures again and again in different bodies.” 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.