Plasticized human specimens on display in Beijing

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, January 10, 2004

Plasticized human specimens on display in Beijing

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A month after the outrage at a factory processing dead bodies in northeast China's Dalian City for a German company, a human specimen show was opened in this Chinese capital Wednesday, with specimens supplied by the Dalian Medical Institute, the organizer said.

The exhibition, at the Beijing Natural History Museum, will runfor three months, according to Shen Jingwu, deputy curator of the museum. The museum is the sponsor of the exhibition.

The plasticized bodies and body parts were processed through chemical methods to replace protein and water in bodies with special plastic materials and the like, museum workers said.

The process serves not only to better conserve bodies but to make specimens more lifelike and colorful, compared with the specimens that used to be preserved in formaldehyde, an aqueous solution widely used for antiseptic purposes, according to museum workers.

A media report in late Nov. stirred up nationwide anger at the Chinese body processing plant based in Dalian. The plant was used by Body Worlds, which was founded by Guenther von Hagens, a Germananatomist who created a stir with his exhibitions of flayed human corpses in a variety of poses, according to the weekly magazine Outlook Orient.

The magazine said the plant imports more than 100 corpses from abroad every year, and reprocesses them into about 40 plasticized works of art. Body Worlds has arranged exhibitions in Vienna, Berlin, London and a number of Asian cities. "The aim of the exhibition is to inform visitors and to give opportunities, particularly to laymen, to better understand the human body and its functions," the company says on its website.

But Chinese medical scholars have criticized the idea of commercializing dead bodies, and hold that they should be used only for research purposes.

The curator did not say if any human specimens on display in his museum were from the Dalian plant. He insisted that the exhibition is being held to help visitors have "correct opinions" on death and on "the relations between humans and animals."

Shen said that people can only understand life when they understand death.

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