Slices of life

The statue stares out ominously, muscles all red-orange and eyes blotted out. He is crouched up and angled forward on his skateboard, but there is no mistaking that he is a cadaver, pouncing at the audience almost ghoulishly.

That statue is one of the features of "Body Worlds 2 & The Brain," the second showing in the last three years at the Franklin Institute of researcher Gunther von Hagens' examination of anatomy via his plastination preservation process.

"The point was to teach what the body looks like in the most lifelike way," says Angelina Whalley, von Hagens' wife and physician-collaborator, who came here to set up the latest version of "Body Worlds," which opened at the Franklin Institute last month and runs through Feb. 21. "Not unlike mummies, plastination provides a relatively permanent way to view what goes on inside the human body."

"Body Worlds," which takes up the better part of two floors of exhibition space, is both a perfect complement to a post-Halloween party and an effective anatomical lesson. The musculature of the figures is dyed an orange-red for visual purposes and faces have a bug-eyed cast. One figure even wields a used bat from Phillies rightfielder Jayson Werth. And the bodies' sexual appendages are preserved too.

According to Whalley, von Hagens was a pathologist at the University of Heidelberg in the 1970s who wanted to find a better way to display the body for anatomy and medical students. He discovered that quickly replacing the bodily fluids of cadavers with a polymer plastic would harden the tissues but not otherwise disturb them. With proper slices and other manipulations, von Hagens could show the bodies either in lifelike poses or in parts - say, the musculature of the "skateboarder" or how a section of a lung damaged by longtime smoking looked.

The exhibit relies on people to volunteer their bodies after death - a few dozen in Pennsylvania have already signed up - and it focuses on the brain in both its physical and ethereal forms, showing, according to Whalley, how "everything revolves around the brain and its functions."

It starts out by showing displays on how the brain develops incrementally in the embryo and on into infancy, while at the same time matching it with a quote from musician/psychologist Daniel Levitin: "All infants are born in a state of psychedelic splendor."

The displays move on chronologically, showing how the brain develops into a risk-taking organ in adolescence (with accompanying quotes from a young Bill Gates and the hard-rocking Beatles), and on through adulthood and old age, with a particular emphasis on Alzheimer's disease, which Whalley finds important given its prevalence and the mysteries surrounding it.

"Body Worlds" displays a series of plastinated brains, or slices of brain, to show the differences between ages, or diseased vs. nondiseased brains at different stages. Whalley and von Hagens keep matching historical and literary views of brain function to those plastinated slices.

"We are scientists, true, but we also know that humanity itself comes from the brain, which controls all that makes us human," said Whalley. "Our hope is that 'Body Worlds' teaches about both the physical and spiritual parts of the brain and nervous system."

"Even as you see the physical brain, sliced here in various ways, you know there is something more. Plastination is meant to show the anatomy, not to take away the spiritual."

The current exhibit also shows the perils of bad health habits. There are plastinated lungs from smokers - looking quite soot-soaked beside "clean" lungs from nonsmokers. Such diseases as arthritis and osteoporosis, commonly associated with old age, are given their due, but animals and humans with more common all-age afflictions such as bone breaks, spinal injuries and muscle tears also have their plastinated parts on display.

None of these visuals bothered Shirley Segal as she envisioned herself after death. As a volunteer guide at the Franklin Institute, Segal, 70, a retired nurse from Philadelphia, saw "Body Worlds" when it was here initially in 2006 and was awed. She discussed the afterlife with her daughter, a pharmacist, and then put herself on the list - one of 44 in Pennsylvania and several thousand around the world, mostly in Europe - to be plastinated after death.

"On a personal level, I believe in God very much, but I believe that after death the soul leaves the body and is basically anywhere the descendants want it to be," said Segal. "In my own teeny way, I wanted my body to be doing something good. I could have donated it to Jefferson, say, but then only a few medical students would see it and it would be thrown away. This way, it will be there a long time and many people will get some educational benefit from it."

Segal said her daughter, and several other people in the medical field in her extended family, were reluctant to approve such an untraditional situation. "But my daughter especially came around. I know it sounds unconventional, but when I learned about the process and how long-lasting it is, I was convinced, too," she said.

Whalley said only a few dozen bodies a year get used for von Hagens' work, and only a few actually get into "Body Worlds" as it travels. Most are sold or donated to various medical schools, primarily in Europe, in lieu of traditional cadavers, used in a more permanent way because of the plastination. To get them into, say, a skateboarder's shape, von Hagens and some of his 300 employees have to stretch the cadavers out, using wires and pulleys to set them into the proper anatomical configuration, which sometimes takes several months. Whalley said that often they think of themselves as sculptors instead of anatomists.

There has been some controversy about von Hagens' work and "Body Worlds," which had its first showing in Japan in 1995. Some in religious circles say the exhibition of plastinated dead bodies is sacrilegious at worst and disrespectful at best. Legislation in the United States and Europe aimed at stopping the exhibits, or even the process itself, has been unsuccessful, and von Hagens has been careful in keeping within medical and legal guidelines about the use of bodies and the consent of the donors.

Whalley feels, after more than a decade on tour, "Body Worlds" needs no real defense.

"There are other ways to see the human body, but none so permanent and durable as this," she said. "Body Worlds" is said to have had 26 million visitors in museums, perhaps making it the most popular touring exhibit in the world. "To educate in an artistic and entertaining way is not a bad thing," she said.

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