By Andrea Gawrylewski
ARTICLE EXTRAS
Video: Frog neuromuscular junction
In 1991, Vic Spitzer and David Whitlock at the University of Colorado at Boulder went hunting for cadavers - one male, one female. It took two years to find bodies that were considered normal - meaning of feasible proportions (no more than six feet tall, 20 inches wide, and 14 inches deep), and no history of cancer, operations, transplants, or implants. "A normal cadaver is an oxymoron, because everybody dies from something," says Michael Ackerman from the National Library of Medicine, which funded the work. Finally, the researchers found what they were looking for: a 38-year-old male who died from lethal injection in a Texas prison, and a 58-year-old female who died from congestive heart failure, both Caucasian.
The scientists went about the business of freezing, slicing, and imaging the two cadavers, then ...
