If you have a quarter-billion dollars to stress a healthy lifestyle, how do you spend it?

Perhaps you create a towering robot, the star at a museum on the West Coast. Maybe you go lower-tech, with a model of the human heart that youngsters squeeze to watch blood course through arteries. Or maybe you go with something gross to appeal to the inner kid in us all — a journey down the human throat, perhaps?

National Health Museum (ENLARGE)

An artist's conception of how the National Health Museum might look. Nobody has said where the museum might be located, but planners are looking at sites near Centennial Olympic Park.

National Health Museum (ENLARGE)

Regardless of how the money is spent at the National Museum of Health, a $250 million showplace announced this week, specialists agree: To succeed, the proposed Atlanta-based museum must engage, entertain and encourage visitors to come back.

The museum will be a must-see attraction, promised its president.

"This [museum] won't be just about objects," but instead will offer people lessons in how to live better, said Mark Dunham, who heads the museum. "We want to somehow inspire and encourage people to do that."

Gov. Sonny Perdue announced Wednesday that downtown Atlanta would be the site of the museum, which was proposed in Washington a decade ago but still exists only online. Atlanta benefited from museum organizers deciding to give up on Washington because, they say, they couldn't secure a site or local support. Atlanta won out over Chicago, New York and Philadelphia to become its home.

The museum, whose costs are comparable to the Georgia Aquarium, would be a bricks-and-mortar monument to healthy living. Architects foresee a $200 million structure comprising about 200,000 square feet. Planners want to spend $25 million for land, exhibits and interactive features. They propose an additional $25 million as an annual endowment. They want it open by 2013.

Dunham predicts more than 1 million people will visit annually.

But Harvey Newman, a Georgia State University professor who has studied Atlanta's tourism industry for decades, isn't convinced a museum about health would be the attraction its backers claim.

"It's a difficult museum to structure," said Newman, who chairs Georgia State's Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies. "How do you sell that?"

One major challenge, he said: Creating a place that stresses good health without becoming a marketing tool for big sponsors such as drug companies. Indeed, some of the biggest contributors listed on the museum's Web site include businesses such as health insurance provider WellPoint and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.

No one has said exactly where the museum would be located, though boosters are looking at sites near Centennial Olympic Park. The park's bricked borders all but nudge the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola.

Dunham said the museum should be a place where people contemplate their own lifestyles and how to live well.

A series of colorful images on the museum's Web site depict different exhibits — "experience zones," they're called — highlighting functions of the human body. They are titled Heal, Move, Feel, Think and Eat. Plans also call for a conference center, classrooms and a place where visitors can eat.

"There is nothing like it now," Dunham said.

The proposed museum sounds unique, said Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums. The nonprofit association, based in Washington, is an umbrella association for more than 3,000 museums. The association these days is urging its members to embrace computers and other interactive, high-tech gadgetry to ensure their survival in a digital age.

The Atlanta museum, said Bell, should do no less. He envisions a place where people can get an up-close look at bodily functions. For example, said Bell, he has seen replicas of human hearts that people squeeze — a literal hands-on lesson on how blood moves through the body. At the California Science Center in Los Angeles, he said, visitors view a 30-foot-tall female robot whose limbs move, heart beats, and more.

"It's absolutely riveting," he said.

And maybe, Bell said, the proposed Atlanta museum should feature a few exhibits that turn an unblinking eye on things that make most folks shudder. He suggested an endoscopic look at the human body — a camera probe down a throat, for example. Or maybe a journey in some other orifice?

"You want to hook in [visitors] with the kind of gross things kids lean toward," he said.

Getting children interested is the challenge, said GSU's Newman: "How do you create something so that the kid wakes up in the morning and says, 'Mommy, I'm dying to go to the health museum'?"