Body World

pegasus

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desert hills, az
It's a bit ghoulish to me... especially knowing that the 20 or so companies in China that do most of the preparation have trouble explaining the sources of their cadavers... eeeeccchhhh...
 
It's a bit ghoulish to me... especially knowing that the 20 or so companies in China that do most of the preparation have trouble explaining the sources of their cadavers... eeeeccchhhh...

Doc, do you remember a few years back researchers were searching for the most perfect physical specimen they could find, in order to quick freeze him in liquid nitrogen and then slice him microscopically, lenghtwise, so they could get a full and complete MRI of the human body and all of its organs?

I'm pretty sure the volunteer was a death row inmate who was in peak physical condition, with no extraordinary medical conditions or abnormalities. After he was executed by lethal injection, he was immediately transported to the research facility to do his part for the advancement of science.
 
I had 6 weeks of skinned cadavers in anatomy / physiology....that was enough for me. :bleh: Nothing worse than test day when the little red flags were stuck all over the bodies..:eek: :doh:
 
Doc, do you remember a few years back researchers were searching for the most perfect physical specimen they could find, in order to quick freeze him in liquid nitrogen and then slice him microscopically, lenghtwise, so they could get a full and complete MRI of the human body and all of its organs?

I'm pretty sure the volunteer was a death row inmate who was in peak physical condition, with no extraordinary medical conditions or abnormalities. After he was executed by lethal injection, he was immediately transported to the research facility to do his part for the advancement of science.

I do actually, and have looked at the fine slice scans, very impressive especially the coronal reconstructions.

A condemned man volunteering his body... sure, okay, that's great. My medical school cadavers were all donated by former patients of the hospital. We have a ceremony at the end of gross anatomy to thank them for their donation for our education. It's a great and poignant moment in medical education.

Unexplained cadavers though... I don't know. Especially in China where organs and other things are collected from prisoners for all sorts of reasons and justice is not exactly meted out with any sense of fairness or even basic evidentiary rules... just gives me a queasy feeling. And all those people looking at flayed bodies like they were looking at any old museum exhibit... Just weirds me out a little. Tourism based on idle curiosity based on the dead just seems somewhat unsettling. Like the idea of a gift shop at Auschwitz... not bad per se, just seems icky to me, to use a techinical term.

Does it make any sense Spinner? I'm just talking here.
 
I do actually, and have looked at the fine slice scans, very impressive especially the coronal reconstructions.

A condemned man volunteering his body... sure, okay, that's great. My medical school cadavers were all donated by former patients of the hospital. We have a ceremony at the end of gross anatomy to thank them for their donation for our education. It's a great and poignant moment in medical education.

Unexplained cadavers though... I don't know. Especially in China where organs and other things are collected from prisoners for all sorts of reasons and justice is not exactly meted out with any sense of fairness or even basic evidentially rules... just gives me a queasy feeling. And all those people looking at flayed bodies like they were looking at any old museum exhibit... Just weirds me out a little. Tourism based on idle curiosity based on the dead just seems somewhat unsettling. Like the idea of a gift shop at Auschwitz... not bad per se, just seems icky to me, to use a technical term.

Does it make any sense Spinner? I'm just talking here.

There just dogs...relax
 
I do actually, and have looked at the fine slice scans, very impressive especially the coronal reconstructions.

A condemned man volunteering his body... sure, okay, that's great. My medical school cadavers were all donated by former patients of the hospital. We have a ceremony at the end of gross anatomy to thank them for their donation for our education. It's a great and poignant moment in medical education.

Unexplained cadavers though... I don't know. Especially in China where organs and other things are collected from prisoners for all sorts of reasons and justice is not exactly meted out with any sense of fairness or even basic evidentiary rules... just gives me a queasy feeling. And all those people looking at flayed bodies like they were looking at any old museum exhibit... Just weirds me out a little. Tourism based on idle curiosity based on the dead just seems somewhat unsettling. Like the idea of a gift shop at Auschwitz... not bad per se, just seems icky to me, to use a techinical term.

Does it make any sense Spinner? I'm just talking here.

Absolutely.

Donated bodies = ethical.

Unexplained cadavers = unethical.

I wonder if much grave robbing goes on these days, like back in the late 19th early 20th century.

As a caveat, I'm referring for the purpose of donating the bodies to medical schools, not for having good times in Wisconsin with the corpse of a woman you read about in the obituaries.:eek:
 
I also don't mean to say curiousity and seeing the body is not a bad thing. I think having an interest in human anatomy is to be expected for people of some intellect. So I hope Pegasus doesn't get offended. Large throngs of rubberneckers is another thing.

Now what the hell are you talking about with the whole Wisconsin thing? :eek:
 
DD, I agree with you. While the exhibit is fascinating, the possibility of bodies of homeless people being snatched off the street or prisoners 'donating' their bodies is just....unsettling and upsetting.
 
Reminds me of the German movie Anatomy with the chick from Run Lola Run and The Bourne Supremacy...
 
....
February 3, 2004
Frankfurt Journal; A New Spine-Tingler From the Impresario of Cadavers

By MARK LANDLER
As Gunther von Hagens hurried out of his exhibit here the other day and hopped into a waiting van, fans thrust programs through the open door, beseeching him for an autograph.

Though late for a flight to Beijing, Dr. von Hagens obligingly scrawled his name. Public support has been the doctor's lifeline, especially since last month, when his photo appeared on the cover of Germany's most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, under the headline ''Dr. Death.''

Six years after Dr. von Hagens scandalized some Germans, and fascinated many others, with an exhibit devoted to preserved cross sections of human cadavers, he is back in the glare of a controversy.

Notoriety returned with a report in Der Spiegel that Dr. von Hagens had bought the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners for his exhibits. Citing e-mail messages from a former Chinese employee of Dr. von Hagens, the magazine declared that the doctor's company in the Chinese city of Dalian had bought corpses with bullet holes in their heads.

Preserving bodies without the prior consent of the deceased may be a violation of German law, according to legal experts.

''There's not one witness, not one signed document, no proof that I knew anything about this,'' Dr. von Hagens said in an interview. ''Until there is evidence to the contrary, I believe that my colleagues and employees stuck to my strict rule that they do not accept victims of execution.''

Still, he concedes, in the twilight world where human remains are bought and sold, his employees might have acquired the bodies of people who spent their last moments kneeling, with a gun barrel at their backs.

''The likelihood is very slim, but I cannot rule it out,'' he said, fiddling with his ever-present black fedora. ''After all, it is possible that you have a corpse in your cellar, and you don't know it.''

From Dr. von Hagens's tone, it is hard to tell whether he views this latest outcry as an affront to his professional reputation or a novel way to publicize his latest installation of Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit of cadavers that has attracted nearly 14 million visitors since its debut in Mannheim in 1998.

More than 50,000 people have flocked to a converted factory in the industrial quarter of Frankfurt since the exhibit opened on Jan. 16. They pay about $15 to see a gallery of corpses in athletic poses -- muscles, organs, bones and skin flayed to reveal the inner workings of the human anatomy.

It is like Madame Tussaud's turned inside out, except these figures are real -- their body parts leached of water and injected with a molten plastic that hardens, preserving them in lifelike color. Dr. von Hagens, 59, pioneered the technique two decades ago at the University of Heidelberg.

Part science project, part freak show, the Body Worlds exhibit has provoked a steady din of protest from church leaders and human rights groups. They say Dr. von Hagens violates the dignity of the human body and disguises prurient commerce as a Leonardo-like exploration of anatomy.

''One must distinguish between artistic freedom and human rights,'' said Karl Hafen, the managing director of the International Society for Human Rights in Frankfurt. ''He buys dead bodies like raw material.''

Until now, Dr. von Hagens has been an elusive quarry for those who would find grounds for prosecution because the bodies in his exhibits were all donated by volunteers who knew what they would be used for. Body Worlds has toured from London to Singapore, drawing sell-out crowds and becoming a multimillion-dollar franchise with a ravenous appetite for fresh cadavers.

The allegations in Der Spiegel, however, opened a new front against the doctor. Mr. Hafen's group has demanded that the exhibition be closed until the authorities confirm the origin of the Chinese corpses. The public prosecutor in Heidelberg said it would consider an investigation.

''When he says he doesn't know about this, it sounds naïve,'' Mr. Hafens said. ''He goes to these countries, which are so careless in dealing with this issue. He simply cannot pretend he is not aware of it.''

Dr. von Hagens said the Chinese authorities had offered him bodies that he suspected had been executed, which he said he turned town. He also said he had broken off relations with the former general manager of his Chinese operation, whose incriminating e-mail messages were cited in Der Spiegel. The manager, he asserted, had started a side business in trading corpses without telling him.

At first, Dr. von Hagens said, he worried that the dispute might dent attendance. ''Some people might say, 'That's a scandal -- I don't want to support a scandal,' '' he said. ''But in the long run, it won't matter.''

On a recent afternoon, visitors seemed so distracted by the cadavers -- sliced, diced, some clutching their internal organs in their hands -- that no one bothered to ask where the bodies had come from.

Guiseppe Modica, 20, could not take his eyes off an aged body with a prosthetic knee. ''My father-in-law is about to get one of those,'' he said. ''He needs to come down and have a look.''

For Dr. von Hagens, whose goal is to ''democratize'' the study of anatomy, these are the endorsements that matter. ''When you cannot go after the exhibit,'' he said, ''you go after the one who organized it.''
 
Holy cow! I just saw this. Makes you think twice before you donate your body.
March 12, 2004
In Science's Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts

THIS ARTICLE WAS REPORTED BY SANDRA BLAKESLEE, JOHN M. BRODER, CHARLIE LEDUFF AND ANDREW POLLACK AND WRITTEN BY MR. BRODER.; SANDRA BLAKESLEE REPORTED FROM SANTA FE, N.M., FOR THIS ARTICLE, JOHN M. BRODER AND CHARLIE LEDUFF FROM LOS ANGELES, AND ANDREW POLLACK FROM SAN FRANCISCO.
About 10,000 Americans will their bodies to science each year, choosing a path that, in the popular imagination at least, leads to the clinical dignity of the medical school or teaching hospital, where the dead help to unveil the wonders of human anatomy or the mysteries of disease.

Few donors, it is safe to say, imagine the many other ways corpses give their all for science: mangled in automobile crash tests, blown to bits by land mines or cut up with power saws to be shipped in pieces around the country or even abroad. Few see themselves ending up in a row of trunks, limbless and headless, arrayed on gurneys in the ballroom of a resort hotel for a surgical training seminar.

Nor do many people suspect that corpses are precious raw material in a little-known profit-making industry, and that they are worth far more cut up than whole.

A scandal at the cadaver laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, has thrown back a heavy curtain that has kept this business largely hidden from public view.

The university suspended its Willed Body Program this week, and university police arrested the program's director and a man the university accuses of trafficking in as many as 800 cadavers in a six-year body-parts-for-profit scheme.

The accused middleman, Ernest V. Nelson, who has cut up and carted away hundreds of cadavers from the U.C.L.A. medical school since 1998, said the university had been fully aware of what he was doing. He transferred the human parts, for sizable fees, to as many as 100 research institutions and private companies, including major companies like Johnson & Johnson, his lawyer said.

There is little controversy in the medical community about the use of donated bodies in teaching and research, although few discuss the topic openly and many prefer not to ask where the body parts they use come from.

The parts are supplied by a largely invisible network of brokers who make handsome profits for processing and transporting human remains. Selling body parts is illegal, but there is no prohibition on charging for shipping and handling. Research doctors say the demand for bodies and parts far outstrips the supply, raising prices and encouraging a growing number of body-parts entrepreneurs. Some of these are companies that promote their ''facilitator'' services on Web sites emphasizing the great benefit to humanity a willed body provides.

These sites do not mention that a human body, particularly one in pieces, is also of considerable benefit to a broker. Delivery of an intact cadaver costs as little as $1,000, but different specialists seek out specific pieces of anatomy for their work, and individual parts can be expensive. A head can cost $500 in processing fees, according to brokers who handle such parts. A torso in good condition can fetch $5,000. A spine goes for as much as $3,500, a knee $650, a cornea $400. In 2002, a pharmaceutical company paid $4,000 for a box of fingernails and toenails.

''Until pretty recently, it was something everybody kind of knew about but didn't want to talk about,'' said Dr. Stuart J. Youngner, chairman of the department of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. ''It's icky. It's upsetting. The people who handle these things have been able to get away with stuff because nobody really wants to get into it.''

Dr. Youngner added that the interests of medicine and the people who handle the dead, legally or not, have intersected for hundreds of years and have led to recurring scandals. He cited the case of William Burke and William Hare, two Scotsmen of the 19th century whose trade in corpses was so profitable that they graduated to murder to provide fresh bodies to anatomists and university students.

Mistreatment of the Dead

In the last five years, authorities have uncovered numerous instances of mistreatment of the dead. In 1999, the director of the Willed Body Program at the University of California, Irvine, was fired for selling six spines to a Phoenix hospital for $5,000. An investigation discovered that hundreds of bodies were unaccounted for.

The director of the cadaver laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston was fired in 2002 for selling body parts to a pharmaceutical company and other entities. In 2003, Michael Francis Brown, the owner of a crematory in Riverside County, Calif., was convicted of embezzlement and mutilation of corpses. He received 20 years in prison for illegally removing and selling heads, knees, spines and other parts from bodies he was supposed to cremate. Prosecutors say he made more than $400,000 in the body trade.

Doctors and medical device manufacturers say the use of human remains is indispensable to advancing medical science. There is no substitute, they say, for unembalmed flesh in teaching a doctor how to perform laparoscopic or arthroscopic surgery, or how to repair a heart valve.

But even those who benefit from the knowledge gleaned from work on cadavers say they are troubled by the black market in body parts and the cavalier way many donated bodies are handled.

''The problem is the insensitive and illegal treatment of remains of bodies obtained for medical education and research,'' said Dr. Todd R. Olson, a professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and director of its anatomical donations program.

''A lot of money is changing hands,'' Dr. Olson said, and there is virtually no regulation of the interstate traffic in body parts. ''It is easier to bring a crate of heads into California than a crate of apples. If it's produce, authorities want to know all about it.''

Dr. Olson said he believed the majority of university-based cadaver programs were properly run and served a vital function in medical education. But those seeking body parts for profit constantly approach others involved in handling corpses, including licensed funeral directors and morgue workers, and many succumb to temptation. ''Whatever you call it, it is theft,'' he said.

Fresh Cadavers for Training

Many aspects of this tale are chillingly described in an article by Annie Cheney in the current issue of Harper's Magazine. Books, movies and urban myths have explored this grisly trade for years. But the business is rapidly growing and changing.

One of the largest suppliers of bodies and body parts for medical experimentation is the Medical Education and Research Institute in Memphis. The institute conducted 478 seminars last year; 90 percent of them used fresh cadaver specimens.

Janice Hepler, the institute's executive director, said each part of a cut-up cadaver was tagged with a number so that the remains could be reassembled for cremation when research was complete. Staff members accompany body parts to seminars around the country, where they are treated as surgical patients who ''are asleep and not dead,'' she said. The body parts are returned to Memphis, where they are ultimately cremated as a whole person.

The institute works closely with the Methodist Church, funeral directors and hospices to seek donations, Ms. Hepler said. It collects the bodies of 200 donors a year. It charges medical societies $6,000 to $35,000 for training seminars, and the societies pass the costs on to the doctors who attend them.

Last weekend, the institute sent six torsos with heads to a Marriott hotel in Phoenix for a training course purchased by the International Spinal Injection Society, a San Francisco organization that teaches physicians how to inject painkillers into the upper spine. Staff members accompanied the bodies, conducted the training and brought the bodies back, Ms. Hepler said.

The society conducts 14 such cadaver courses a year and requires 90 specimens, a spokeswoman said.

The Memphis operation and several like it, including a Philadelphia company called Innovations in Medical Education and Training and a cadaver transport company called National Anatomical Services, on Staten Island, are the aboveground sector of the industry.

But there is a thriving underground market as well, practitioners say, a direct descendant of the grave robbers who supplied cadavers to doctors and researchers.

The society of those who deal in black-market body parts is a small one, said Vidal Herrera, who has logged more than 30 years in the business of death and dissection. It occasionally comes to light, as it did last November when Federal Express employees at a depot near St. Louis noticed a package leaking what looked like blood. Inside were a human arm and two legs packed in dry ice. The parts were addressed to a freelance body broker, Richard Leutheuser, who operated from his home in suburban Kirkwood, Mo.

''It's no secret,'' Mr. Herrera said while sitting at a dissection table in his gray, windowless storefront morgue in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. ''Everybody knows who to call -- the buyers, the sellers, the disarticulators, the schools, the crematoriums. It's a lucrative business.''

Mr. Herrera described the business as a world of thugs, hacksaws and back-alley body pickups. He would know. His résumé includes two years with the Los Angeles County morgue; eight years with the Los Angeles medical examiner's office, where he was an investigator; 16 years as autopsy technician with the veterans hospital in Westwood; and 16 years as a freelance dissectionist, performing autopsies and procuring organs and tissue for universities.

For two years, he was the director of the U.C.L.A. Willed Body Program. The world of death is an insular one, he said.

The Role of the Middleman

Mr. Herrera, 51, was embroiled in an earlier scandal at the U.C.L.A. body program. In 1993, he was accused of illegally disposing of human remains that were mixed with medical instruments and animal parts. Though he was the director of the program, hired to come in and clean it up, he was never charged with a crime and the university eventually settled with him for an undisclosed amount for wrongful termination.

In the black market, there are generally three places where tissue, organs and bone can be illegally procured, he said: university programs like U.C.L.A.'s; hospitals and county morgues that perform autopsies; and crematories and funeral homes.

In Southern California, Mr. Herrera said, there are about a dozen middlemen mining these institutions. These go-betweens play on the worst impulses of technicians who are underpaid, undereducated and often underappreciated, he said.

''It's not a market created by guys like Ernie; he's only serving the medical companies and medical societies,'' Mr. Herrera said, referring to Mr. Nelson, the accused middleman. ''When I started at U.C.L.A., I got at least a dozen calls from these very same guys telling me how the game is played and what the prevailing prices are.''

The movement of supermarket beef is ''better monitored than human parts,'' he said. ''The demand is greater than the supply, and so the researchers and the doctors at the other end of things don't want to know. They want to have their conference in the hotel, take off their gloves, throw them in a bucket and go home.''

A great many ways have been found to supply the growing demand for body parts, Mr. Herrera and others in the funerary business say. With the cost of burial exploding, the next of kin are generally responsive to the pitch of signing over loved ones' remains to disarticulators for medical study.

When legitimate ways cannot be found, Mr. Herrera said, men like Mr. Nelson come calling. Many times, a man with a van is dispatched in darkness to a crematory to pick up boxes of arms and legs and heads. Days or weeks later, he said, ''someone is handed an urn of ashes. Who's going to know?''

Relatives of some of those who have donated bodies have been surprised to learn what happened after death. In a class-action lawsuit dating back to 1996, dozens of families are suing U.C.L.A. over how the university handled remains.

Sidney Liroff, who died two years ago this month, willed his body to U.C.L.A. as a gift to science. His widow, Selma, 81, said that she had planned to follow him, even though they are both Jewish and, according to custom, must be buried intact within 24 hours of death.

''We just wanted quietly to do a good thing,'' Mrs. Liroff said in an interview this week. ''We are kept alive by science. Research is a good thing. That's why we did it.''

But having learned of the scandal at U.C.L.A., she said, she has no idea what happened to her husband, and she is devastated. ''It's ghoulish,'' she said, her voice hoarse and crackling. ''Imagine the pictures that come up in my mind.''

Mrs. Liroff said she had been promised that her husband would be returned to her after research was completed. She wanted to scatter his ashes in a rose garden. But when she called the university she was told by a technician that her wishes could not be accommodated.

''We were married for 57 years,'' she said. ''I just wanted him back.''

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
 
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