Susan Potter

Susan Christina Potter (born Witschel; 25 December 1927 – 16 February 2015

For nearly two decades, National Geographic documented the story of Susan Potter and Dr. Victor M. Spitzer, the director of the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who led the NIH-funded project, releasing a video documentary in 2018. By the time Potter met Spitzer in 2000, she had gone through 26 surgeries and had been diagnosed with melanoma, breast cancer and diabetes: her participation in the Visible Human Project marked a significant departure from the original goals of the project, which up until then had only focused on the dissection and imaging of healthy bodies.

After her death in 2015, Potter's body was frozen solid at , cut in four sections on March 9, 2017 and subsequently sliced into 27,000 slices in 63-μm increments, individually scanned during a period of 60 working days. Because the technology used in the Visible Human project significantly improved since its launch in 1993, much more detail will be available in Potter's scans: images from the two previous donors were based on 1,000 μm sections for the male subject and 300 μm for the female subject.