Hey, it's Ira, and you're listening to Science Friday.

When I was a kid, my dad gave me a copy of Gray's Anatomy, you know, that five-inch-thick, classic anatomy textbook.

And I became fascinated with the human body.

I loved going over the hyper-detailed illustrations of our muscles

and our organs, and ever since then, I've been a fan of unique anatomy books. Well, my next

guest is leading a project that brings Gray's Anatomy into the digital age. It's called the Human

Organ Atlas. It's a new public database of organs that are scanned with the help of an actual particle accelerator.

Yeah, giving visitors an up close and personal look at 56 human organs.

Here to explain why they needed so much power and what kind of research advances will follow

is Dr. Claire Walsh, Associate Professor at University College London, and director of the Human Organ Atlas Hub.

She researches 3D imaging techniques for human organs.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira.

Thank you very much for having me here. It's a pleasure.

You're welcome. I got to say these organ images, they're just stunning. You can see tiny individual

ridges on the eyeball, all the tiny little pockmarks in the lungs. What was it like for you

seeing these for the first time? Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, as an imaging scientist,

images is what I love to work with and to deal with. And I think going all the way back to

2021, when we first started to get these images through, it was really a wow moment. You know,

the first time we saw the images of the lung, which was what we started with, coming off the

particle accelerator that we used, because this was all during the COVID pandemic, opening

them up during screen shares with all the collaborators on the projects there, and everyone

...