Narrator: No one knows her name or why she ended up here, on the Internet, in classrooms, in laboratories.  Cut into thousands of slices, picked over and probed, analyzed and inspected by strangers around the world.

She's the most autopsied woman on Earth.  The world's one and only Visible Woman has revealed everything for modern science except her identity.

If anyone knows the identity of the world's most mysterious woman, it would be this man.

Dr. Victor Spitzer runs the Visible Human Project, the state-of-the-art in teaching anatomy. Dr. Spitzer takes donated cadavers, freezes them, cuts them into thousands of paper-thin slices, and then scans each slice on a computer.

Dr. Spitzer: We're asking for a lot of things. We're asking for no large surgeries, disruptive surgeries during life, we're asking for a death that doesn't have any visible cancers or trauma, and then we're asking for the person to donate the body.

Narrator: The result is a virtual 3D human, seen from every angle inside and out.

Dr. Spitzer: The detail is there to support a practicing surgeon learning more about the body. What we have to do is simplify it so that a sixth grader can learn something from the same data.

Teenage Girl: It's cool because it, gives us a chance to see, like, what we’re actually learning about, instead of  just looking at, like, a drawing.

Narrator: The first and most publicized project was his visible man.  Joseph Paul Jernigan was a convicted murderer put to death by lethal injection in a Texas prison.

Jernigan wasn't perfect, but for Dr. Spitzer he was a perfect specimen for the visible man.

Dr. Spitzer: We're asking for everything to look as though there were no cause of death.  We didn't want any traumatic surgery during their life, and we didn't want any traumatic death that we could see.

Narrator: Joseph Paul Jernigan hoped to pay for the sins of his past by giving over his body for the future.  But Dr. Spitzer didn't stop there.  He found a mate, and this woman is very different.  Not only was she sliced into 5,189 layers, compared with Jernigan's 1,878, the Virtual Woman was to remain anonymous.

Dr. Spitzer: It would be nice if either she or her family actually wanted her name to be revealed, but we don't know that, and consequently, we haven't and don't reveal the names of any of our donors.

Narrator: We searched for her identity.  We found she was a 59-year-old housewife, she died suddenly from a heart condition, she lived in Maryland.  That's also the home of the National Library of Medicine, which sponsors Dr. Spitzer’s research.

Dr. Michael Ackerman is the library's  director of the Visible Human Project.

Dr. Ackerman: I guess that's part of what, you know, the mysterious woman is always intriguing.  And maybe there's something about that mystery that ought to be left kind of like the unknown soldier.

Narrator: Dr. Spitzer got word of the woman’s death through the Maryland body donor program.  Within hours, he got the body flown to his lab at the University of Colorado, and got to work, exactly as he had done with Joseph Paul Jernigan.

First, with three-dimensional MRI scans, then freezing the body, cutting it into paper-thin slices from head to toe, photographing each slice, and combining all of the images on a computer screen.

Dr. Spitzer: Now we see a picture of the segmentation, a picture of a slice, and the bottom of the specimen all at the same time.

Narrator: And remember, she was cut into many more slices than Jernigan.  Those extra-thin cuts give her a big edge on her partner.

Dr. Spitzer: It makes it more complex and it allows you to zoom in on smaller structures.  Well fine, maybe if we zoom in on her pancreas, and at that point in time, you forget about the whole rest of her body.

Narrator: At nearby Smoky Hill High School, teacher Mark Morrissey says the Visible Woman is already a hit.

Morrissey: For my classes, it gives me the opportunity to do some anatomy detail that we don't get any other way, since we don’t get any access to cadavers and it’s a whole lot better than charts.

Narrator: Students still wonder who the Visible Woman was in her other life, but they're no less happy to have her around today.

Teenage Girl 2: I think it'd be hard to give your body up to science, but, in a way, it's a good way because it'll help other people understand more of the human body and how it works.

Teenage Boy w/ Cap: It'd be interesting to know what sort of lifestyle she led, you know, what her health condition was when she died, what she died from.

Narrator: But no matter where she turns up around the world, there's still some poetic justice to the saga of this unknown cyber-celebrity.

Gregan Dorfer is the director of the Maryland Science Center.  He hopes the Visible Woman will soon be welcomed back to her home state in a new exhibit right next to the Visible Man.

Dorfer: We are developing a larger exhibit about the human body, I'm sure we'll find some way to put the Visible Woman in that one as well.

Narrator: In the meantime, the mysterious woman in Dr. Spitzer's life is going to stay that way.

Interviewer: Do you know the identity of the Visible Woman?

Dr. Spitzer: We have her death certificate.  We have a death certificate on all donated bodies.  Yes.

Interviewer: What are you able to divulge about her?

Dr. Spitzer: There's not much on the death certificate except for the cause of death.

Interviewer: Are you able to tell us anything about her race, her age, where she was from?

Dr. Spitzer: She's Caucasian.  We don't know any more, oh, the age is fifty-nine.  She's Caucasian and I think that's about all we know.