Plastinated bodies stick around after death

Baxter’s decision was driven by other factors as well. About 30 years ago she was diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition in which tissue from the uterus lining grows outside the uterus, causing painful cysts. She said people might learn about the disease if her tissue were preserved and displayed.

“It’s something that you want to do instead of being ashes or worm food, to be some kind of asset instead of being in the ground,” she said.

When Owens and Baxter die, their bodies will be sent, at their own expense, to an embalming facility in Upland, Calif. From there, they will go to the Institute for Plastination, which has laboratories in Guben and Heidelberg, Germany, as well as in Dalian, China.

“We definitely request donors for input on how they would like to be plastinated,” Gomez said, though the institute can’t guarantee how or where the body will be displayed.

Gomez estimates about half of the donors are used in exhibitions and half are sent to medical facilities to be used in teaching. Some become full-body specimens, a process that takes up to a year to complete at a cost of between $40,000 and $60,000.

Thomas Peipert / AP file A full-body "plastinate" is displayed at Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds" exhibit in Dallas. The show, which puts real human specimens on display, has been fiercely criticized. Von Hagens, depicted in the background, insists he's helping viewers understand how their own bodies work.

“Each specimen would be used in a way that would best represent their own human anatomy,” she said. “Really it just depends on what’s needed at that time.”

Dignified, or commercialized?
Von Hagens and Gomez said the institute keeps track of donors, spread across 24 countries, with regular letters and meetings, as well as with donor cards, which are matched to death certificates when the donor dies. Some museums have created ethics panels before accepting the show to make sure all of the bodies were willfully donated.

But that hasn’t stopped accusations that “Body Worlds” and similar shows have unethically accepted bodies.

German prosecutors said in 2004 there was no evidence that Von Hagens used the corpses of executed Chinese prisoners in his show, as some reports claimed. Von Hagens also denied the allegations.

More commonly, critics say von Hagens’ shows violate the sanctity of death.

Carol Taylor, a health care ethicist who directs the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, said the exhibit is “purely for commercial amusement.”

“My major objection stems from the belief that there’s an innate dignity to humans that extends to our bodies,” she said. “Anything that denigrates our bodies by commercializing them I’m opposed to.”

Baxter and Owens, whose families support their decision to donate, disagree.

“The body is just a vessel,” Owens said. “This is just what I have in this life.”

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