My eldest two daughters grew up with The Magic School Bus and under Ms. Frizzle’s tutelage explored the insides of the human body. Now, when they are not studying for a college biology exam, you might find them exploring Second Life. My youngest daughter is not yet six. She still likes to sit in my lap as I work in Second Life. She is just discovering The Magic School bus. She still believes that I’m all knowing and can explain just about anything and, with the tools available online, I can answer many of her questions.

All of this provides an interesting backdrop to my experiences this afternoon in Second Life. Dr. Douglas Danforth of The Ohio State University Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, showed me some of his work in creating a model the human testis. I sent a picture from the interview as my Wordless Wednesday post yesterday.

As a philosophy major and technologist, I found Doug’s work fascinating and I learned something about the male reproductive system concerning spermatogonia that I didn’t know before.

This came up as a discussions on a Second Life Educators mailing list after I posted my blog post, Second Life as your next browser, where I asked, “Why don’t biology classes take place inside of a human body?” Doug’s work is a wonderful starting point, but it is, in my mind, just a starting point.

As I spoke with him, he described difficulties he had faced. Apparently, Second Life doesn’t do a good job of manipulating very large prims. He spoke of using tools like pipemaker, photoshop, wings3d, as well as his electron microscope and probably some other tools I don’t have access. I urged him to write up some of his notes on what has been involved in creating the model.

You see, this model could be the great starting point for a wonderful project, which I’m calling the Pygmalion Project. Wouldn’t it be great if every organ of the body were modeled in Second Life to a scale that you could move around in it? Would it be great if systems like the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, and so on were all connected up? What we need is a fully functioning model of a healthy human adult male. Of course, this leads to other models that would need to be done, a healthy human adult female, fetal, infant, juvenile and geriatric humans, diseased humans, other animals, the list goes on and on.

Much of this would take place at the organ level, but it would be great to drill down to the cellular level. From there, drilling down to the molecular level would be wonderful. As I discussed this with Kim, a retired molecular biologist, she spoke about how useful such a model at the molecular level would be to explain the Kreps cycle, the expression of DNA and RNA and so on. (Note, as a philosopher and not a molecular biologist, I may not have gotten these quite right, and will edit accordingly when Kim is available). Here’s a challenge, can we get the human genome in Second Life?

From the molecular level, we could easily dig down to the atomic level and enter the realms of chemistry. From there we could head off into non-organic chemistry as well, or dig deeper to visit our physicist friends living in a world of sub atomic particles.

All of this would be great for the first phase, but the real interesting areas come when we get to the second phase. Imagine an oncology professor leading a class through a Second Life model of a person with metastized cancer. As the class, and treatment progressed, the students could watch the chemo or radiation as it battled the cancer.

Of course funding for such a project would be an issue. There have been discussions about seeking some sort of grant for such a project. I hope a grant writer steps up to the plate and such a project takes shape. I would probably kick in my pittance right now, and, if I ever become wealthy again, I would love to fund the development of a lymph node, or something like that.

This would all take us to an even more interesting phase, the day when medical imaging systems feed their images directly into models in Second Life. Imagine walking through your body with your doctor as you discuss treatment options.

Yes, perhaps this is a pipedream. It would be a giant project. However, people could start working on pieces now and collaborating, sharing experiences, the way Doug shared some of his experiences with me yesterday afternoon. There are a lot of people looking at ways to use Second Life. Let’s encourage some big dreams.