Cadaver shows raise consent concerns
SACRAMENTO — Cars packed the parking lot of a shuttered Comp USA store one recent weekday afternoon as school kids, health professionals and the just plain curious paid $24 apiece to stare at a score of plasticized, dissected human cadavers and roomfuls of preserved body parts.
The cadavers are displayed dramatically with layers of skin and muscle pealed back to reveal internal organs, bones, blood vessels and nerves. The exhibition, which includes these bodies in poses such as playing a violin and swinging a golf club, provoked plenty of hushed comments.
"Where do they come from?" a young woman asked a helpful guide dressed in a white lab coat.
"They're elderly Chinese men who donated their bodies," the docent explained.
Now, California lawmakers are asking similar questions about these traveling exhibits of so-called plastinated bodies. On Thursday the state Assembly voted 54-0 to approve legislation to make sure that the people, whose remains are on display, consented to be gawked at by the public. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.
"Although plastination was intended to advance medicine and science, many entrepreneurs are using plastination to make outrageous profits by dissecting, mutilating and parading unwilled bodies around the world and in our state," the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco), said during Assembly debate. "Asking for consent and verification is not too much to ask."
The two major anatomy exhibitors are divided on the legislation. Industry pioneer Body Worlds says it has no problem providing donor documentation. The other exhibitor, Premier Exhibitions Inc., says it obtained all the remains legally from Chinese medical and scientific organizations but does not know the identity of the donors.
Ma, a Chinese American, says she became concerned about the use of Chinese remains after viewing a 2005 anatomy exhibition when she served on the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors.
"Chinese people are very superstitious about death. If someone dies in a house, they won't buy the house," she said. "They believe in full-body burials. They don't believe in organ donations, and some people don't even believe in giving blood. "So, automatically, I thought that something was wrong with the show."
She sponsored a successful ordinance requiring exhibitors to provide documentation that bodies had been willfully donated by the people or their next of kin. The ordinance became the basis for the bill in Sacramento.
