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The creator of a controversial new anatomical exhibit that opened Thursday at the Tech Museum of Innovation hopes his exhibit will encourage Silicon Valley residents to identify the value and beauty of their own bodies.
Body Worlds 2 and the Three Pound Gem is an exhibit that shows real human bodies and organs that have been preserved in a manner that opens the mysteries of the human body to the public.
The exhibit could easily be taken as grotesque or disturbing, but if taken as intended by its creator Dr. Gunther van Hagens, it should be enlightening and educational.
All around the Parkside Hall exhibit, human bodies stand flayed out, posed and exposed. One of the bodies captures the musculature of a skateboarder inverted above a skateboard ramp with a hand grasping a skateboard and another planted on the top of the ramp, a pose sure to connect with young people.
The exhibit focuses on the path of the human brain, or the “three pound gem,” through life as it develops from the curious sponge of an infant to the natural decay of old age.
“What intrigues me most about the brain, is its creativity,” van Hagens said.
Other exhibits capture the course of disease and the effects of unhealthful activities such as smoking.
The exhibit has moved people to feel many things but van Hagens hopes people will be inspired to quit smoking, exercise, live healthier and take advantage of life.
“I live much more consciously,” van Hagens said about his lifestyle in the shadow of a career exposing the mysteries of life and death.
Van Hagens story is one of overcoming immense challenges from nearly fatal medical complications to the time he served in an East German prison in the 1970s to fights with colleagues about his newly invented preservation process called plastination. His work eventually became too controversial in his native Germany and he came to the United States where he said “Americans don’t think so much in boxes.”
Van Hagens said the pioneers of the Silicon Valley such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak inspired him to pursue his innovative ideas about plastination, a process that replaces liquid inside cells with plastic polymers.
His trailblazing work first began in 1977 when van Hagens, then a research assistant at the University of Heidelberg, observed medical samples of human organs encased in blocks of plastic. Convinced there was a better way to preserve tissue samples he began figuring a way to push plastic into the cells rather than encase them.
Van Hagens said that his plastinates can be used to study anatomy on a microscopic level, preserved in a state without decay.
“Specimens should become more lifelike,” van Hagens said about the future of his craft. “In 20 years plastinates will be common place.”
“It’s a tremendously important exhibit,” San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said. “I’m hoping it will inspire more people to become nurses and doctors.”
All of the bodies in Body Worlds 2 are donated by the people themselves during their life and van Hagens makes sure to thank them for their valued contribution.
Dr. Angelina Whalley, van Hagens wife and creative and conceptual designer of the exhibit, called the body donors the “ethical backbone” of the project.
Body Worlds 2 and the Three Pound Gem opened Thursday, Sept. 27, at the Tech Museum of Innovation, located at 201 S. Market St.
I saw this display in Florida last year on vacation. Very cool stuff indeed.
JT