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Museum offers full peek at 'Bodies'

Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry offered the media a preview of the controversial cadaver exhibit Tuesday.

By BILL DURYEA
Published August 16, 2005

	[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.] Jeanette Brooks, of Jensen Beach, views the "Bodies" exhibit Tuesday. Photo gallery

TAMPA - The Museum of Science and Industry gave a preview Tuesday of a controversial exhibition of dramatically dissected human bodies, emphasizing the specimens' educational value and trying to allay concerns about how the bodies were obtained in China.

"Bodies, The Exhibition," is scheduled to open at 10 a.m. Saturday, but the exhibition must first clear a hurdle Wednesday when the state's Anatomical Board -- which regulates the use of cadavers for research and medical education -- meets in Gainesville. The board has asked for documentation showing the people or their families consented to the use of the bodies for this exhibition.

Premier Exhibitions, Inc., which is promoting the show, has said the bodies belonged to people who were unclaimed and unknown, so consent forms do not exist. The bodies, said Arnie Geller, president and CEO of Premier, were obtained legally from the Dalian Medical University in China, which obtained the bodies from local police.

"The provenance is quite specific," Geller said Tuesday. "We've done our homework quite properly."

Geller said his company will provide new information to the Anatomical Board before its meeting Wednesday. The new documents will show that the Chinese government endorsed the use of "these exact specimens" when they were displayed in a museum in Beijing. Premier will provide letters from the museum that displayed the specimens and the Chinese Anatomical Association, which also "approved of the exhibition there."

The exhibition includes 20 posed bodies - a man kicking a soccer ball, a man dribbling a basketball, another running. Some of the full-size figures have been cut open to reveal various systems in the body. One person is sawn in half lengthwise to reveal the digestive and respiratory systems.

In a gallery devoted to the circulatory system, visitors will see a body reduced to its blood vessels. Even without skin or bones, the human shape and even some facial features are discernible. One gallery displays fetuses that died at various stages of development, some of them with severe deformities such as spina bifida.

Glass cases with some 260 individual organs are distributed throughout the galleries. Often a healthy organ is set next to one that is diseased. Several of the figures have lungs blackened either from smoking or pollution.

"Health is the only thing we have to preserve," said MOSI's President Wit Ostrenko. "Medicine cannot do it all for us. Those of you who are still smoking, you need to take a second consideration.

"This is the kind of exhibition that is going to change people's lives and that's our core mission," Ostrenko said.

[Last modified August 16, 2005, 15:51:03]