“I’m studying,” said Kandice Baker, as her eyes shuttled back and forth between her copy of Anatomy and Physiology, and a plastinated specimen called “The X-Lady.”
“I’ve been picking out things [from the book] and pointing them out [on bodies] all day,” she said. “I’m used to seeing cartoon forms of what you learn, but seeing it in real life … has been absolutely amazing.”
Baker-a first-year kinesiology student at Brock University-and her mother drove from Bradford, an hour away, to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit, which opened at the Ontario Science Centre on Friday.
The exhibit features 25 bodies, wholly plastinated, arranged in various poses: among them are figure skaters, a skateboarder, and a ski jumper. On the side are 200-odd plastinated organs, organs slices, and body parts.
“I thought it would be a bit gross,” said her mother, Irene Baker, a registered nurse. “I thought I would get that nauseous feeling-but it’s not bad at all.” Instead, she was very impressed by the exhibits, and felt it would make for a valuable educational experience for medical and nursing students.
“I’ve seen surgeries, I can relate to a lot of it because of my background,” Baker said.
The brains behind the Body Worlds 2 travelling exhibit is Professor Gunther von Hagens, a German anatomist. He was born Gunther Liebchen in 1945, in Poznan, which is now in Poland. He grew up in East Germany, where he was jailed for protesting the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. When West Germany bought his freedom two years later, he studied medicine there, and received a doctorate in 1975. He retained the surname “von Hagens” from his first marriage.
In 1977, von Hagens developed the plastination process, through which the liquids in a tissue are replaced with a polymer-theoretically allowing the specimen to be preserved in perpetuity.
The skin is cut away, and the fat dissolved with warm acetone-the stuff found in nail-polish remover. The corpse is bathed in a cold acetone solution, which slowly diffuses into every cell. Afterward, the body is immersed in a second solution, containing the desired polymer.
Polymers such as silicone rubber, epoxy resins or polyester may be used. Polymer choice determines whether the specimen will be stiff or flexible, transparent or opaque. In the second step, polymer solution is warm, and the process carried out under a vacuum, causing the acetone to evaporate.
Von Hagens founded the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, in Germany, in 1983-the same year he started a private donation program to collect corpses for plastination. That, he said at a press briefing on Thursday, has now grown to 6,500 living donors, and 300 bodies already delivered.
In recent years, von Hagens has been at the centre of much controversy. His Body Worlds touring exhibit premiered in 1995, attracting an estimated 15 million visitors. In 2002, he performed an autopsy in a London theater, before a crowd of 500. It was the first public autopsy in London in 170 years.
The year before, allegations emerged that von Hagens had received a shipment of 56 bodies from the Russian city of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. Some of the corpses, it is said, may have been those of prisoners, homeless people and the mentally ill whose bodies went unclaimed after their deaths. Further claims emerged in 2002, that two of the 600-odd bodies stored at his centre in Dalian, in China, had bullet holes in their skulls.
(Recently, von Hagens announced plans to open a large facilty for plastinating corpses in Poland. There was an uproar, however, after the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that von Hagens’ father, who works for the Institute of Plastination, was suspected of comitting crimes against Poles in World War II, as a member of the Nazi Waffen S.S..)
At Thursday’s press briefing, von Hagens dismissed these claims. “The internet is full of … speculation that there are prisoners or unclaimed bodies … in the exhibition,” he said. When Der Spiegel alleged as much in an article last year, von Hagenss’ lawyers won a €250,000 injunction against the magazine. “Der Spiegel is not allowed to ever state that there are unclaimed, or even Chinese bodies in the exhibition.”
He also defended his craft. “I am an educator. I gave up my university career to be an educator of the laity.” His goal, he said, was the “democratization of anatomy,” by making available to the paying public specimens of a quality not available even to physicians. His plastinated models, he added, also make good teaching aids for anatomy classes.
Plastinated models are useful for teaching, said Dr. Mike Wiley, chair of U of T’s division of anatomy, but only up to a point. “It’s not cost-effective to use plastinated specimens for teaching if you expect the students to put their hands on them.”
Most useful are plastinated models of organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, and kidney. “Things like limbs where there are lots of nerves, blood vessels and tendons that students … can try to pull at so see underneath-they tend to get broken.”
The anatomy division creates its plastinated models in-house, at a cost that Wiley estimated at around $100 per pound of tissue-and that is for the chemicals alone. Other than these models, students rely on plastic and sculpted models as teaching aids, as well as computer and internet programs.
“Still the most valuable to us is the cadaver-commercially purchased models don’t represent the variability that is really a key element of anatomy,” said Wiley.
Back at the exhibit, there seemed to be little controversy. “I don’t look at it as dead bodies,” said Baker, the Brock kinesiology student. “I see it as more as a learning opportunity-I look at it as a display of the human body.”
Other exhibit-goers, however, such as Rebecca Donne, were still somewhat troubled. “It’s gross,” she said. “It’s fascinating, but it’s the fact that these were human beings at some point.”
Though she had come to see “this morbid curiosity” to get a glimpse inside human bodies you cannot find in textbooks, Donne was plagued by one thought. “I can’t understand how some people would donate their bodies for this.
“I’d rather donate [organs] so that they can help people out, as opposed to having people come here and gawk at me on a pair of skis,” she said.
Ryan Dunn, Jen Dunn and Elly Pham, however, students at Seneca, York and Brock respectively, thought otherwise. “To be honest, I don’t think they’d wanna plasticize [sic] my body,” said Ryan, eliciting giggles from his sister and Pham. “But I wouldn’t have a problem with that, actually.”
Body Worlds 2 runs at the Ontario Science Centre through February 26, 2006. The exhibit is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and evenings from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays in October, and on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays in November. Admission to the exhibit starts at $20.
