Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Being Human

The longer that I am in Los Angeles, the less human I feel. The constant barrage of "what's in it for me" and "I want things my way, screw you" behavior wears at me and I have sort of closed my eyes and formed a robot-like mentality so I don't absorb too much of the negative energy directed my way.

But yesterday, I had a little reminder that I am indeed human.

The place where I am living is going to be tented for termites in a few weeks and the condo owners met yesterday to discuss the process with the exterminator. Before the meeting there was concern about one condo owner. She had previously stated that she was against the tenting and had "bought some poisons from Home Depot and sprayed it on her porch and there are no termites anymore", and that we should spray around her. There was concern that she did not understand the process (since English is her second language) and she would not leave her unit for the spraying. One neighbor tried to knock on her door to talk to her and she wouldn't answer for him. I tried calling a few times before the meeting and she didn't answer. I ended up leaving a phone message stating that we could discuss her concerns and maybe help her out.

She didn't show up to the meeting.

Immediately some of the other condo owners wanted to hire a lawyer to put a lien against her property to force her to leave her unit. Many of us felt horrible about this, and we left the meeting feeling a little horrible about the entire thing.

Yesterday evening, after the meeting was well over, she called me. She told me that she didn't have a job and didn't have the money to pay for the tenting, and that she had asthma and didn't know how to move her plants. She was extremely concerned about her plants. So I talked to her as a compassionate neighbor. I told her there was the possibility of paying in small increments. I also told her that I would help her move her plants to the side yard where they would not be killed. And after I told her this, her demeanor completely changed. She was extremely grateful and willing to go through the tenting.

As I lay in bed after the phone call, I realized that I felt human for the first time in a long time. Since moving to L.A., I have gotten used to being bullied into submission. It's hard not to feel jaded against people when this happens. But this was a little reminder that sometimes operating from a place of love is better than operating from a place of fear.

Hopefully I don't forget the feeling too soon.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

The guy who created Body Worlds

Last Friday I saw a celebrity of sorts-- Gunther Von Hagens gave a talk at UCLA. Dr. Von Hagens is the man who patented the plastination process that is responsible for the Body Worlds exhibits. For those who may not have heard of Body Worlds, they are a series of exhibits where human bodies are plastinated after death and peeled apart and posed in various life-like positions. This exhibit has been so popular that they are on exhibition version number 4, and others have created several knock-off exhibits.

I have had several occasions to see Body Worlds, but chose not to go because something about the entire concept does not sit well with me. In fact, I wasn't planning on going to Von Hagens' talk except several people in the lab were going (yup, I sometimes go to academic talks based on peer pressure).

He had a full house. All the seats were taken and people were standing and sitting on the steps on the side of the lecture hall. Since the lecture was hosted by the Department of Pathology in the medical school, I could understand the interest in his talk. A lot of people attended because (1) they were curious about the man who created the exhibit, and (2) they understood his results and wanted some insight into the process. Basically the guy brought his version of science to the masses and the masses included educated scientists at UCLA.

Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), the talk was more of an oral history of the exhibit and a slide show of his 'work'. It was not a very technical talk. His technique was summed up in one slide (*technique summarized below). His talk was more of an art exhibit talk and during the Q&A, he received a question that pretty much 'accused' him of being an artist rather than a scientist. Truthfully, I think he is an artist that uses scientific technique and facts as his materials and canvas. But I think there is nothing wrong with that because a lot of science is personal interpretation anyways. A lot of science is more art than unbiased 'science'.

From the scientific and teaching point of view, I have no problems with his work. One of his Q&A criticisms was that he artificially colored muscles and other parts of the body rather than leaving them 'as is'. For anybody who has had an anatomy lab knows, it is hard to differentiate between different parts of tissue 'as is' and the contrast helps people understand what they are looking at. Plus, looking at an entire body the color of boiled chicken feels morose. In the same vane he was also been criticized for 'posing' the bodies. I also agree with him that it is more interesting and educational to see the entire body in positions of movement and action rather than posed as they would be in a morgue.

However I can't seem to put aside my spiritual and ethical biases. I find his work creepy. The funny thing is that he is starting to include animals like giraffes and elephants in his exhibit and I found those slides fascinating and not creepy. I did not, however, feel the same way with the human body slides. I think it is the same queasiness I feel when I see people missing limbs on television or read about dismembered body parts. There is something about seeing bodies when they are not the biological 'norm' that just feels dreadful. When Von Hagens showed a picture of his newer 'works' where he shifts body parts around like a cubist painting, I was particularily turned-off. I would probably feel this way about animals if he started to shift their body parts around too.

As for the man Von Hagens himself, I found him to be over-the-top. He constantly wears a fedora and speaks with a lot of 'flair'. He was more of a circus barker than a scientist. Then again, I wonder if it would have been more creepy if he were very technical and scientific. He has a strong East German accent. Technical descriptions of body position and dissecting of body parts would have been like a caricature of a bad guy scientist in an Indiana Jones movie.

Am I now more likely to see a Body Worlds exhibit? Yes, I would go mainly to see the animals. But I don't plan on putting in any extra effort to make it to his exhibits any time soon.

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*Shortly after death, the bodies are saturated with very cold acetone to essentially freeze the tissues in acetone. They are then soaked in a liquid plasticizer (think epoxy) and placed under vacuum. The vacuum causes the acetone to evaporate out of the tissues and the plasticizer to be pulled into the body. The plasticizer is then cured using the corresponding fixer (such as UV light or a second chemical).