South Los Angeles resident Erlyne Toney-Alvarez, 67, had always planned to be cremated when she died. Simple. Inexpensive. Graves, she said, are a waste of land occupied by the dead.
Then she saw the intricately plastinated bodies at a California Science Center exhibit -- bodies that had been stripped of their fat, filled with plastics and shown off in all their muscular, organic and anatomical glory for the world to see in traveling shows.
Now that, she thought, is the way she wants to go.
"I was so excited," she said of seeing the exhibit with her twin sister, Ernestine Toney-Dixon. "We went to the exhibition hall and we just got so overwhelmed with all this new stuff, and we said, 'We're going to donate our bodies!' "
Toney-Alvarez and her sister were among 115 future body donors who met Saturday with Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the creator of Body Worlds and the inventor of the plastination technique. Forty-seven others in attendance were friends or relatives of the donors.
Many said they were inspired after seeing Body Worlds' anatomical exhibitions. The California Science Center hosted the exhibition's first North American visit, which began in 2004. Since then, Body Worlds has traveled to numerous cities nationwide. The exhibit is on its third tour at the Science Center and is scheduled to be on display until September.
The exhibits feature whole bodies, down to the muscles and organs, that are posed acrobatically. Its first two runs drew record crowds in L.A. There are now four Body Worlds tours rotating among museums in North America. And along the way, hundreds of people have to pledged to donate their bodies for plastination.
According to Dr. Angelina Whalley, Von Hagens' wife, 8,625 people worldwide have agreed to give their bodies to Von Hagens' German-based Institute for Plastination. While 85% of donors are from Germany, 728 donors are from the United States.
In his hourlong lecture Saturday, Von Hagens spoke about how, as a young medical student, he was dismayed at the poor quality of anatomical specimens, which were mostly colorless and locked in jars. He developed the plastination technique as an anatomist trying to find a better way to improve specimens, he said.
He also explained the reasons why the bodies are portrayed as acrobatic, life-like models. At Body Worlds' first exhibition in Japan, visitors commented on how dead the specimens looked. Von Hagens said the comments led him to realize that specimens should be portrayed realistically as living humans, similar to the way Renaissance scientists depicted human anatomy in lifelike poses.
