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).