http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/nyregion/18bodies.html?
incamp=article_popular_4


Cadaver Exhibition Raises Questions Beyond Taste

By ANDREW JACOBS, The New York Times

(Nov. 18) - The jaunty fellow with the conductor's baton waving in one 
hand stands on a pedestal seemingly lost in the music. But there are a 
few startlingly odd things about this tall, lithe gentleman: He is 
dead, his skin has been methodically ripped away and there is a pinkish 
void where his viscera are supposed to be. Besides a few supporting 
segments of muscle, bone and ligament, the man has been rendered into a 
web of white spindly nerves.

Critics question the whether the bodies in the exhibit are those of 
executed Chinese prisoners. The company running the exhibit says the 
bodies were poor, unclaimed or unidentified.

  
It is impossible to know what he did in life, but in death the man has 
become a ghoulish show-and-tell exemplar of the human nervous system, 
part of a new exhibit that opens tomorrow at the South Street Seaport. 
The show, called "Bodies . . . the Exhibition," features the preserved 
remains of 22 people and 260 other specimens, including a set of 
conjoined fetuses, a set of male genitalia, a pudgy woman who has been 
vertically sliced into four equal segments and a sprinter whose flayed 
muscles fly around him like slices of prosciutto.

While the notion of displaying the dead for profit is bound to provoke 
controversy, some critics say this particular show, which relies 
entirely on cadavers from China, is more troubling than those sponsored 
by other companies that have gotten into the macabre business of 
anatomical exhibitions. Citing the Chinese government's poor human 
rights record and the medical establishment's practice of recycling the 
organs of executed prisoners, medical ethicists and human rights 
advocates are questioning whether the show's specimens were legally 
obtained.

"Given the government's track record on the treatment of prisoners, I 
find this exhibit deeply problematic," said Sharon Hom, the executive 
director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China.

Arnie Geller, the president of Premier Exhibitions Inc., the company 
that spent $25 million to obtain the specimens from a Chinese 
university, insists that the human remains, all but two of them male, 
are those of the poor, the unclaimed or the unidentified. Although he 
said he was not allowed to keep copies of documents, officials at 
Dalian University in northern China showed him papers attesting to the 
origin of the remains. The documents were kept confidential, Mr. Geller 
said, because international law forbids public disclosure of the 
identities of those who have donated their bodies to medical science.

"I am certain that all these specimens were legally obtained," he said.

But Harry Wu, the executive director of the LaoGai Research Foundation, 
an organization that documents abuses in China's penal system, said 
officials from Dalian University had been previously implicated in the 
use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, having supplied 
bodies to Gunter von Hagens, the German entrepreneur who started the 
first traveling show of the dead, "World of Bodies." Dr. Sui Hongjin, 
who was previously Mr. Von Hagen's Chinese partner until a falling out 
three years ago, is now working with Premier Exhibitions, which has its 
headquarters in Atlanta.

"Considering that China executes between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners a 
year and their long history of freely using death row prisoners for 
medical purposes, you have to wonder," Mr. Wu said, adding that he 
would pursue legal steps in this country to ensure that the show was 
not using illegally obtained bodies. "In China, a piece of paper means 
nothing."

If the past is any guide, such controversy coupled with public hand-
wringing over the show's ghastliness is fully expected, even welcomed, 
by its sponsors. A publicly traded company that has prospered by 
exhibiting relics from the Titanic, Premier is clearly hoping news 
coverage will help draw enough people, at $24.50 for adults and $18.50 
for children, to earn back its sizable investment.  
   
The show, which has taken over the second floor of a building once 
occupied by fishmongers, is scheduled to run for at least six months, 
although organizers are hoping public interest will lead to a 12-month 
extension. This is the first time such an exhibition has come to New 
York.

A smaller show the company organized last summer in Tampa, Fla., 
provoked condemnation from religious leaders, a state medical board and 
the state attorney general (who could not find a reason to shut it 
down). That exhibition has been drawing huge crowds.

Playing down the sensationalism, Premier executives use the 
word "specimen" to describe the exhibits and emphasize their value as 
educational tools that can teach children about human physiology and 
help adults learn how to lead healthier lives. Dr. Roy Glover, a 
retired anatomy professor who is the company's medical adviser, makes a 
point of showing off a set of lungs blackened by smoking and a brain 
damaged by a stroke. The exhibit's explanatory text, written by Dr. 
Glover, counsels against obesity, steroid use and inactivity.

"This is not a freak show," Dr. Glover said, standing beside the 
musculature of a man who is holding hands with his own removed 
skeleton. "People go away fascinated by what they've seen, and they're 
better educated about their bodies."