Organizers planned to unveil their $500 million Abilene Network.

More than 300 miles from his operating room in Ohio, a doctor in Washington will show, during live surgery on Wednesday, how the next generation of the Internet could aid doctors in one city work with patients elsewhere. Organizers planned to unveil their $500 million Abilene Network, the new super-fast data pipeline linking more than three dozen research universities nationwide at speeds 45,000 times faster than the best telephone modems people now use to surf the Web. The high-speed computer connection, named after an important railhead founded in the 1860s in Kansas, is faster, at 2.4 gigabits per second, than all but a few highly experimental federal government networks. Privately financed by corporations and run by a nonprofit group based in Washington, its use is limited to academics and other professional researchers, with no way to let home users dial into Abilene. But experts anticipate benefits will trickle down to consumers within just a few years. Dr. Jerry Johnson, who will be at Washington_s Union Station rail terminal, will collaborate Wednesday night with a surgical team at Ohio State University_s hospital as they perform laparoscopic surgery, snaking a miniature video camera within a volunteer patient suffering from a gastrointestinal disorder. Johnson, a doctor and researcher at Ohio State, will talk with his colleagues using wireless microphones and a video camera, with the words and pictures transmitted across the high-speed Internet lines…