Yet again, I backed off from my plan. Not so much because of the harvesting process—as you may have gleaned, I’m not a squeamish individual—but because of my mistaken expectations. I wanted to be a brain in a jar, at Harvard. I wanted to look atmospheric and fascinating on a shelf. I didn’t want to spend the hereafter as cut-up pieces in a storeroom refrigerator.
There is but one way to be an organ on a shelf, and that is to be plastinated. Plastination is the process of taking organic tissue—a rosebud, say, or a human head—and replacing the water in it with a liquid silicone polymer, turning the organism into a permanently preserved version of itself. Plastination was developed by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Like most plastinators, von Hagens makes educational models for anatomy programs. He is best known, however, for his controversial plastinated whole-body art exhibit, “Körperwelten”—or, in England, “Bodyworlds”—which has toured Europe for the past five years, raising eyebrows and tidy sums of cash (attendance to date is over eight million). The skinless bodies are posed as living people in action: swimming, riding (plastinated horse included), playing chess. One figure’s skin flies out behind it like a cape. Von Hagens cites as inspiration the works of Renaissance anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius, whose De Humani Corporis Fabrica featured bodies drawn in active human poses, rather than lying flat or standing arms to the side, à la the typical medical illustration. A skeleton waves hello; a “muscle man” gazes at the view from a hilltop of the town below.
“Körperwelten” raises the ire of church fathers and conservatives wherever it opens, mainly on the grounds of violated dignity. Von Hagens counters that the bodies in the show were donated by their owners specifically for this purpose. (He leaves a stack of donor forms at the exit of the exhibit. According to a 2001 London Observer article, the donor list is up to 3,700.)
Most of von Hagens’s bodies are plastinated in China, in an operation called Plastination City. He is said to employ two hundred Chinese in what sounds to me like a sort of cadaver sweat shop. This is not all that surprising, as his technique is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming—it takes over a year to plastinate one individual. (The U.S. version of the technique, modified by Dow Corning after von Hagens’s patent expired, takes one tenth the time.) I contacted von Hagens’s office in Germany to see if I could visit Plastination City and see what kind of shenanigans are in store for a donor body, but von Hagens was on the road and did not return my e-mails in time.
Instead of China, I traveled to the University of Michigan Medical School, where anatomy professor Roy Glover and plastination chemicals manufacturer Dan Corcoran, who worked with Dow Corning to update the technique, have been plastinating whole dead bodies for a museum project of their own, called “Exhibit Human: The Wonders Within”—slated to open in San Francisco in mid-2003. Theirs is strictly educationaclass="underline" twelve plastinated (Corcoran prefers the term “polymer-preserved”) bodies, each displaying a different system—nervous, digestive, reproductive, etc. (At press date, no U.S. museum had signed up to exhibit “Körperwelten.”)
Glover offered to show me how plastination works. We met in his office.
Glover has a long face that made me think of Leo G. Carroll. (I had recently seen Tarantula, wherein Carroll plays a scientist who figures out how to make huge, scary versions of harmless animals, e.g. “Guinea pigs the size of police dogs!”) You could tell Glover was a nice guy because a To Do list on a white board on his office wall said: “Maria Lopez, brain for daughter— science fair.” I decided that this was what I wanted to do with my remains. Travel around to classrooms and science fairs, astounding children and inspiring careers in science. Glover took me across the hall, to a storeroom with a wall of shelves crowded with plastinated human pieces and parts. There was a brain sliced like a loaf of bread and a head split in two so that you could see the labyrinths of the sinuses and the deep, secret source of the tongue. You could pick the organs up and marvel at them, for they were completely dry and had no smell. Yet still, they were clearly real and not plastic. For the many disciplines (dentistry, nursing, speech pathology) that study anatomy but have no time for dissection, models like these are a godsend.
Glover took me down the hall to the plastination lab, which was chilly and cluttered with heavy, strange-looking tanks. He began explaining the process. “First the body is washed.” This is done much as it was when the body was alive: in a tub. “This is a body,” said Glover, quite unnecessarily, regarding a figure on its back in the tub.
The man had been in his sixties. He had a mustache and a tattoo, both of which would survive the plastination process. The head was submerged, giving the corpse a disconcerting murder-victim sort of look. Also, the front chest wall had been separated from the rest of the torso and lay off to the side of the body. It looked like a Roman gladiator’s chest plate, or maybe I just found it helpful to think of it that way. Glover said that he and Corcoran planned to reattach it with a hinge on one side, so that it would swing open “like a refrigerator door” to reveal the organs within. (Months later, I saw photos of the exhibit pieces. Disappointingly, someone must have nixed the refrigerator door idea.)
The second body lay in a stainless-steel tank of acetone, which filled the lab with a powerful smell of nail polish remover each time Dr. Glover lifted the lid. The acetone drives water from the body’s tissue, readying it for impregnation with the silicone polymer. I tried to picture this dead man propped on a stand in a science museum. “Will he be wearing anything, or will his penis just be hanging out?” I asked tactlessly.
“He’s going to have it hanging out,” replied Glover. I got the feeling he’d been asked this question before. “I mean, this is a perfectly normal part of a person’s anatomy. Why should we attempt to hide what’s normal?”
From the acetone bath, the cadavers are transferred to the whole-body plastination chamber, a cylindrical stainless-steel tank filled with liquid polymer. A vacuum attached to the tank lowers the internal pressure, turning the acetone to a gas and drawing it from the body. “When the acetone comes out of the specimen, it creates space, and into that space is pulled the polymer,” said Glover. He handed me a flashlight so I could see the view through a porthole on the top of the chamber, which happened to look down onto a perfectly normal part of a person’s anatomy.
It looked peaceful in there. Like a guinea pig the size of a police dog, the concept of being plastinated is more unsettling than the reality. You just lie there, soaking and plastinating. Eventually, someone lifts you out and poses you, much as one poses a Gumby. A catalyst is then rubbed into your skin, and a two-day hardening process begins, working its way through your tissues, preserving you for all eternity in your freshly dead state. I asked Dean Mueller, a southeastern Michigan funeral director whose company, Eternal Preservation, offers mortuary plastination for about $50,000, how long he thought a plastinated specimen would last.
He said at least ten thousand years, which is about as eternal as anyone in their right, or even their wrong, mind could care about. Mueller has high hopes that the process will catch on among heads of state (think what plastination could have done for Lenin) and rich eccentrics, and I imagine that it might.