Exhibition on the Human Body Gets Under People's Skin
Laker or Clipper? Hard to tell with this basketball player. Not only is he not wearing a team jersey, he's not wearing his own skin.
This nameless, skinless "athlete" has just arrived in Los Angeles from Frankfurt, Germany, to be part of the American premiere of the popular but controversial "Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies," opening Friday at the California Science Center in Exposition Park.
On display will be more than 200 human specimens, about 25 of them whole bodies, each preserved through a special "plastination" technique and placed on view in lifelike, free-standing poses.
The exhibitions created by German scientist Gunther von Hagens have attracted more than 14 million viewers in Europe and Asia since their 1995 premiere in Tokyo. With each stop, they have prompted outrage and indignation as well as long lines of the scientifically inquisitive and merely curious.
Visitors to the Science Center can expect to see whole bodies and parts, skinned and dissected, laid open to show bone, muscle and nerve, all in minute detail. On display will be cautionary tales in the form of blackened smokers' lungs and clogged arteries. Here is the body of a man, posed as a chess player, his brain exposed. Another man dangles his own skin in one hand, as though he casually shrugged off an overcoat. And there is the astonishing combination of two riders astride a rearing, preserved horse.
Rendered dry and odorless by a preservation process that replaces body fluid with plastics, human tissue feels stiff but flexible, like the head of a drum.
Von Hagens, 59, says that despite its shock value, "Body Worlds" is about science, education and enlightenment for the public. "First of all, it is health education, by specifically comparing healthy and diseased organs," he said in a telephone interview. "Before the exhibitions, when I used to give lectures, I noticed that the cleaning lady and the doorman were more interested than my colleagues. That is what makes plastination different -- they start to identify with the specimens."
To address concerns about "Body Worlds," the Science Center contracted an independent bioethicist, Dr. Hans-Martin Sass, to travel to Germany to review the records of each whole body to be shown in Los Angeles. The center also assembled an ethics committee of religious leaders and bioethicists to review the exhibition and polled the reaction of Science Center visitors to postcard photos of bodies before courting "Body Worlds" for Los Angeles.
