Professor Karl Heinz Hohne of the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science in Medicine department of the University of Hamburg has been neglecting his serious scientific work recently in order to play around with a woman - a much younger woman, what is more. And as if being constantly seen in her company was not enough, he has actually gone on record to say that although he is not allowed to touch his 30-year old companion, he is using the resources of the department in order to virtually unwrap her by computer.
However Mrs Hohne - if there is such a person - need not start consulting her divorce lawyer just yet. The woman was 30 about 2,300 years ago - she is an Egyptian mummy.
Unfortunately, we do not know this femme fatale's name, for the coffin in which she arrived at the university was in poor condition and the hieroglyphs of the name are illegible. We do know, however, that the woman died during the Ptolemaic era, for the style of the sycamore wood coffin and the hieroglyphic inscriptions painted on it belong to that period.
Professor Hohne has access to a large CAT scanner at the Radiological Clinic of the University Hospital of Eppendorf. Computer Aided Tomography means that a highly specialised x-ray machine takes a series of x-ray photographs from all around a person and the computer juggles with the results in order to produce a "slice", a picture of what you would see if you could cut the person in half at that point. The machine then moves on a small amount and takes another "slice". The result is a series of pictures of the inside of the patient: the first one will show a small portion of the top of the skull; a little further down you will see a thick circle - the sides of the skull - with the brain inside it; down at chest level you will see a section through the ribs, the lungs, the heart and the spine; and you finish up with the soles of the patient's feet.
All this is very clever indeed, but the really clever bit is yet to come. The computer can then reassemble all these slices, guess at the bits in between and produce a 3D picture of the person from any angle you please. In fact, you can instruct the computer to ignore - for example - all soft tissue, and end up with a perfect 3D picture of the skeleton. In a hospital x-ray department I once saw just such a picture of an accident victim who had a fractured skull: the consultants had done just that and what I saw was a skull that was perfect from the left side, but when it was rotated to bring the right side into view all I could see was shattered fragments of bone. It was horrifying - and amazing to learn that the surgeons had been able to use this amazingly detailed picture to reconstruct the woman's head and face!
Dr Hohne has now subjected his unknown Egyptian woman to this procedure and come up with ten million numbers that describe her every part. Using a specially written programme, his Egyptian is now on display in an exhibition called, "The Secret of the Mummies - Eternal Life on the Nile" and visitors to this exhibition can manipulate the on-screen images, gradually stripping away the coffin, the mask and bandages and finally the desiccated flesh of the mummy.
It all sounds rather gruesome, but if you want to know what he has been up to with this mysterious stranger from the exotic East, why not visit Dr Hohne's website and see for yourself.
(Incidentally, just in case I haven't typed that rather complicated address in correctly, try typing "Hamburg+university" into Yahoo or some other search engine, find the university website and head for the Department of Computer Science in Medicine and on their page look for "The Virtual Mummy".