Caskets and cremation are old hat — in today’s world members of the Body Worlds donor program have signed over plastination rights to their body upon death, which means the corpse will likely enjoy a long shelf life as bodily fluids are replaced with plastic.

Most donors feel as though they’re giving back to humankind by allowing others to study their material remains. But, critics worry that some of the bodies on display may have been procured through “questionable means”.

Catering to educators, artists and the clinically minded, Body Worlds is an “exhibit that shows preserved human specimens bisected and stripped of skin,” according to CNN.

Many of the bodies on display are frozen in motion, demonstrating how various muscles and body parts operate. The goal is to merge art and science in a new way, encouraging everyone to look at the human body differently.

That reasoning doesn’t comfort skeptics of the program, but Gunther von Hagens, the German anatomist who started the Body Worlds program says “I feel it is in line with democratic principles that you can decide in your lifetime whether to go to the cemetery or put yourself on display in an exhibition to teach the next generation.”

He may have a point, but we’ll likely end up paying lawyers millions of dollars to determine the outcome of that moral dilemma.

Questions about where Body Worlds sources its “materials” from are usually at the top of skeptic hit lists, and Body Worlds takes those concerns very seriously. Von Hagens says Body Worlds distinguishes itself from other similar exhibits by relying heavily on its donor program for new bodies.

But other organizations aren’t so discerning. In one case, Premier Exhibitions, which displayed similar exhibits admitted to the possibility that some of its bodies may be the victims of “. . . torture or execution from Chinese prisons.”

Underlying it all is an uncomfortable confrontation between ethics, comfort zones, art, and scientific research. It’s up to you to decide if human beauty is only skin deep.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:01 pm under Science and technology.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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