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A dead woman's body has been digitized for science.
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
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Scientists have divided the body of a dead woman into 5,000 pieces for the future of science and medicine.
The woman's body was donated for scientific research by her husband, and it is also known that the woman died in 1995 from a heart attack, and the body underwent certain preparation before becoming "digital".
Experts divided the woman's body into 5,000 parts and converted them into digital format, resulting in a highly detailed image of the human body (the digital version was called the "phantom human").
It is worth noting that scientists have already conducted a similar process with a male body (robber and murderer from Texas Joseph Paul Jernigan, who was executed in 1993 and bequeathed his body to science), which was cut into pieces only 1 mm thick. Almost all experts are sure that medicine and science have only benefited from such experiments.
The research on the woman's body is being conducted in Massachusetts (Worcester Institute), and the team of scientists emphasizes that it was the female specimen that allowed more details to be established. Thanks to the digital version of the "woman", scientists will be able to better study human tissue, from the head to the toes. In addition, the husband of the deceased woman handed over to the experts the results of the CT and MRI scans and other studies that the woman underwent in the last weeks of her life.
According to experts, the digital version of the human body will allow experiments to be conducted that cannot be carried out with the participation of living people (due to the high risk to the health and life of the participants).
Before dissecting, the scientists kept the woman's body in a special mixture of gelatin and water. The leading specialist was Sergei Makarov, a professor at a private institute in Worcester, who noted that the project had already corrected inaccuracies in anatomical textbooks, such as the location of the bladder and the shape of the muscles in the pelvic area.
Now specialists are creating a complete digital version of the human body, including 213 parts, including the eyeballs, trachea, and all parts of the body will be controllable.
Sergey Makarov explained that he and his team have already started experimenting with a digital version of a woman. During the experiment, scientists tried to find out what would happen to a person with metal prostheses (hip and thigh implants) during magnetic resonance imaging (the scanner has the ability to heat the metal).
This approach will allow specialists to develop safer research methods for people with various metal implants, as well as improve breast cancer diagnostics, and study how long-term mobile phone use affects the brain (using electromagnetic radiation).
The "human phantom", according to experts, will allow us to study the tissues of the human body without the need to conduct experiments on living people, which are not only lengthy and expensive, but also contradict certain moral standards.