======================================================
by Philipina Apresto Marcelo
For the past two years, I have been planning a trip to Dallas, Texas to visit very good friends who promised me a good time, good company… and lots of steak! Each time I attempted to book a flight after an agonizingly long thinking process, planning and budget optimization, a glitch in my schedule never failed to raise the red flag, or so I imagined, and I always ended up not going. Yes, I can be really boring like that. But last winter break, one friend’s incessant invitation, my desperate need to get out of Ithaca, a drop-dead plane ticket sale in Travelocity and an extremely high sugar loading made me book a flight in a heartbeat. Before fully realizing it, I was in Dallas-Forth Worth airport at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning “howdy-ing” my surprised friend who was so impressed by the fact that I am actually capable of spontaneity! Hah, I am not that boring after all!
Driving from the airport to my friend’s place, my hopes for a great vacation started to sag. Huge and flat, Texas is, perhaps, the least picturesque place I’ve ever been to. OK, I admit,.jpg)
maybe I’m not being fair to J. R. Ewing’s country ‘cause those disturbingly humongous water melons amidst the countless restaurant chains, Wal Mart outlets and churches are actually quite a sight to behold! They were like the formidable planet Jupiter staring you down menacingly, challenging you to eat them if you dare, which I didn’t! So, there you go… on my first visit, J. R. Ewing’s country was actually made exciting for me by genetically modified water melons. And that has absolutely nothing to do with my desire to become a food scientist. I know, that’s beyond boring… that’s sad.
Determined to make my first Texan vacation an unforgettable one, my friend took me to the “Body Worlds” exhibition at the Dallas Science Center on the first day of my visit. True enough, the “traveling exhibit” certainly helped my vacation-on-an-impulse such an awesome experience.
The Body Worlds exhibition was a fascinating walk through the inner workings of the human body. Human bodies and organs were preserved in a process called plastination, a specimen preservation technique invented by German anatomist, polymer scientist and licensed physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens. The process involves the removal of water and fats from tissue to prevent decomposition after death. These bodily fluids on which decomposition-promoting bacteria thrive are replaced with polymers in a two-step fluid exchange. First, the fluids are replaced by acetone, which is replaced with polymer solution by forced vacuum impregnation in the second step. The intermediate fluid exchange with acetone is necessary because of the chemical incompatibility of body fluids and the polymer solutions. Acetone is an apt intermediate exchange fluid because of its low vapor point that allows its complete removal from the tissues under vacuum condition during the forced impregnation of the tissues with polymer solution. The impregnation continues until each cell is saturated with the polymer solution.
Through the plastination process, human bodies were preserved to allow the observation of true-to-life spatial relationships among body organs in various real activity poses such as when a basketball player leaps to dunk the ball in the basket, when a teacher bends forward to write in the chalkboard or when a ballerina stretches her back and stands on her toes to make a graceful pirouette. Parts of the flesh were carefully sliced, without destroying the muscle grains, so they came off the bones intact to reveal the organs underneath while the plastinates are maintained in such poses. The plastinates looked like mannequins, but they are real human bodies and organs from human donors who believed in the cause of the Institute for Plastination (IfP) established by Dr. von Hagens in 1993 in Heidelberg, Germany. Through a contract with the institute, the donors – to whom the traveling exhibition is dedicated – donated their bodies or body organs on the event of their death. The plastinates are used by the IfP and other allied institutes in basic medical education, continuing medical research and in general medical education of the public.
A number of whole body plastinates were displayed on the exhibition floor. In many pieces, an upright body was sliced from the top of the head down to the feet into a series of thin longitudinal cross-sections and arranged like accordion, gathered at the feet, to give life-size pictures inside the human body. Viewing such amazing figures was very much like viewing the insides of a Swatch watch, a truly wonderful experience for those attempting to use logic in understanding the human body’s fascinating complexity.
There was an interesting plastinate of a man mounted on a plastinate of a galloping horse. Curiously, it was like looking at a decaying man on its decaying horse at first glance. And yet, on close scrutiny, one can see the tensions in a man’s body muscles as it rides a galloping horse. Some plastinates showed the amazing circulatory system of the human body, from the unimaginably humungous arteries down to the minutest of veins in the human eye in a maze of red threads. In such plastinates, the rest of the human body is stripped from the skeletal system, leaving only the circulatory system snaking around the skeleton.
Although, I walked around the exhibition floor overwhelmed by fascination, both from the exhibit pieces themselves and the intricacy of the process by which they were preserved, I found some pieces totally disturbing, especially those that showed defects and diseases, such as uterus and breast tumors as well as lungs enveloped in nicotine residues. Somehow, it scared me to think that it is not a complete impossibility to have those tumors in my own body. Perhaps, that was the other objective of the exhibit, to make people aware of how the perfection of their bodies could mutate into something absolutely scary with the onset of diseases that are otherwise preventable.
The last part of the exhibit featured the “beginning of life”. The body of a pregnant woman – lying on her side in a glass cubicle – her stomach opened to reveal the inside of her womb, greeted visitors through the makeshift door of dark blue curtains. Around the whole-body plastinate were preserved fetuses at different stages of maturity, mounted in little glass cases like flower bulbs about to bloom in springtime. The serenity in their faces, unadulterated by the harsh realities of life, and the purity of their little bodies were absolutely moving, they made my knees go weak.
The plastinate of the pregnant woman was, to me, the most amazing part of the exhibit – two lives in one body, captured beautifully and most amazingly through an artful rendition of science, obviously with as extreme a care as human’s wits allowed. I stood there totally enchanted, oblivious to the world around me. I stood motionless, not daring to blink, afraid that such magical moment would disappear if I did. The woman’s face, despite the plastinized flesh, was a picture of soft beauty and feminine bloom. The richness of her bosoms due to expectancy was very prominent. Her body seemed to come alive in glorious curves and ample volume of flesh, perhaps due to another life she carried in her womb, which her body cushioned in a way most natural for a mother protecting her offspring. The baby, crouched in its mother’s womb, was a picture of a small perfection of life. The fragility of its body curved in a ball of limbs and small head, enveloped in its mother’s womb, melted me with a totally engulfing awe, almost bringing tears to my eyes. There they were, two breaths in unison, a pure miracle if there was one. I stood there wondering what it was like to carry a baby in one’s womb, to feel a seed of life growing within one’s own body, to experience the surge of love most tender and affection most overpowering that plant the seed there, and the painfully beautiful experience of bringing forth a new life into this world. If only for having allowed me to experience the awesome emotion of such contemplation, my long delayed trip to Dallas was so worth it. I just know I will never ever forget that moment.
Reference: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html
Copyright 2007 LIKHA Literary Magazine, published by the Cornell Filipino Association, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
by Philipina Apresto Marcelo
For the past two years, I have been planning a trip to Dallas, Texas to visit very good friends who promised me a good time, good company… and lots of steak! Each time I attempted to book a flight after an agonizingly long thinking process, planning and budget optimization, a glitch in my schedule never failed to raise the red flag, or so I imagined, and I always ended up not going. Yes, I can be really boring like that. But last winter break, one friend’s incessant invitation, my desperate need to get out of Ithaca, a drop-dead plane ticket sale in Travelocity and an extremely high sugar loading made me book a flight in a heartbeat. Before fully realizing it, I was in Dallas-Forth Worth airport at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning “howdy-ing” my surprised friend who was so impressed by the fact that I am actually capable of spontaneity! Hah, I am not that boring after all!
Driving from the airport to my friend’s place, my hopes for a great vacation started to sag. Huge and flat, Texas is, perhaps, the least picturesque place I’ve ever been to. OK, I admit,
.jpg)
maybe I’m not being fair to J. R. Ewing’s country ‘cause those disturbingly humongous water melons amidst the countless restaurant chains, Wal Mart outlets and churches are actually quite a sight to behold! They were like the formidable planet Jupiter staring you down menacingly, challenging you to eat them if you dare, which I didn’t! So, there you go… on my first visit, J. R. Ewing’s country was actually made exciting for me by genetically modified water melons. And that has absolutely nothing to do with my desire to become a food scientist. I know, that’s beyond boring… that’s sad.Determined to make my first Texan vacation an unforgettable one, my friend took me to the “Body Worlds” exhibition at the Dallas Science Center on the first day of my visit. True enough, the “traveling exhibit” certainly helped my vacation-on-an-impulse such an awesome experience.
The Body Worlds exhibition was a fascinating walk through the inner workings of the human body. Human bodies and organs were preserved in a process called plastination, a specimen preservation technique invented by German anatomist, polymer scientist and licensed physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens. The process involves the removal of water and fats from tissue to prevent decomposition after death. These bodily fluids on which decomposition-promoting bacteria thrive are replaced with polymers in a two-step fluid exchange. First, the fluids are replaced by acetone, which is replaced with polymer solution by forced vacuum impregnation in the second step. The intermediate fluid exchange with acetone is necessary because of the chemical incompatibility of body fluids and the polymer solutions. Acetone is an apt intermediate exchange fluid because of its low vapor point that allows its complete removal from the tissues under vacuum condition during the forced impregnation of the tissues with polymer solution. The impregnation continues until each cell is saturated with the polymer solution.
Through the plastination process, human bodies were preserved to allow the observation of true-to-life spatial relationships among body organs in various real activity poses such as when a basketball player leaps to dunk the ball in the basket, when a teacher bends forward to write in the chalkboard or when a ballerina stretches her back and stands on her toes to make a graceful pirouette. Parts of the flesh were carefully sliced, without destroying the muscle grains, so they came off the bones intact to reveal the organs underneath while the plastinates are maintained in such poses. The plastinates looked like mannequins, but they are real human bodies and organs from human donors who believed in the cause of the Institute for Plastination (IfP) established by Dr. von Hagens in 1993 in Heidelberg, Germany. Through a contract with the institute, the donors – to whom the traveling exhibition is dedicated – donated their bodies or body organs on the event of their death. The plastinates are used by the IfP and other allied institutes in basic medical education, continuing medical research and in general medical education of the public.
A number of whole body plastinates were displayed on the exhibition floor. In many pieces, an upright body was sliced from the top of the head down to the feet into a series of thin longitudinal cross-sections and arranged like accordion, gathered at the feet, to give life-size pictures inside the human body. Viewing such amazing figures was very much like viewing the insides of a Swatch watch, a truly wonderful experience for those attempting to use logic in understanding the human body’s fascinating complexity.
There was an interesting plastinate of a man mounted on a plastinate of a galloping horse. Curiously, it was like looking at a decaying man on its decaying horse at first glance. And yet, on close scrutiny, one can see the tensions in a man’s body muscles as it rides a galloping horse. Some plastinates showed the amazing circulatory system of the human body, from the unimaginably humungous arteries down to the minutest of veins in the human eye in a maze of red threads. In such plastinates, the rest of the human body is stripped from the skeletal system, leaving only the circulatory system snaking around the skeleton.
Although, I walked around the exhibition floor overwhelmed by fascination, both from the exhibit pieces themselves and the intricacy of the process by which they were preserved, I found some pieces totally disturbing, especially those that showed defects and diseases, such as uterus and breast tumors as well as lungs enveloped in nicotine residues. Somehow, it scared me to think that it is not a complete impossibility to have those tumors in my own body. Perhaps, that was the other objective of the exhibit, to make people aware of how the perfection of their bodies could mutate into something absolutely scary with the onset of diseases that are otherwise preventable.
The last part of the exhibit featured the “beginning of life”. The body of a pregnant woman – lying on her side in a glass cubicle – her stomach opened to reveal the inside of her womb, greeted visitors through the makeshift door of dark blue curtains. Around the whole-body plastinate were preserved fetuses at different stages of maturity, mounted in little glass cases like flower bulbs about to bloom in springtime. The serenity in their faces, unadulterated by the harsh realities of life, and the purity of their little bodies were absolutely moving, they made my knees go weak.
The plastinate of the pregnant woman was, to me, the most amazing part of the exhibit – two lives in one body, captured beautifully and most amazingly through an artful rendition of science, obviously with as extreme a care as human’s wits allowed. I stood there totally enchanted, oblivious to the world around me. I stood motionless, not daring to blink, afraid that such magical moment would disappear if I did. The woman’s face, despite the plastinized flesh, was a picture of soft beauty and feminine bloom. The richness of her bosoms due to expectancy was very prominent. Her body seemed to come alive in glorious curves and ample volume of flesh, perhaps due to another life she carried in her womb, which her body cushioned in a way most natural for a mother protecting her offspring. The baby, crouched in its mother’s womb, was a picture of a small perfection of life. The fragility of its body curved in a ball of limbs and small head, enveloped in its mother’s womb, melted me with a totally engulfing awe, almost bringing tears to my eyes. There they were, two breaths in unison, a pure miracle if there was one. I stood there wondering what it was like to carry a baby in one’s womb, to feel a seed of life growing within one’s own body, to experience the surge of love most tender and affection most overpowering that plant the seed there, and the painfully beautiful experience of bringing forth a new life into this world. If only for having allowed me to experience the awesome emotion of such contemplation, my long delayed trip to Dallas was so worth it. I just know I will never ever forget that moment.
Reference: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html
Copyright 2007 LIKHA Literary Magazine, published by the Cornell Filipino Association, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
