Let the bodies hit the floor

Yesterday, I went to the Bodies exhibit. Strangely enough, it came to the mall just around the corner from our apartment. For those of you not familiar with Bodies, they preserve real human bodies using a polymer preservation process which replaces all water and degradable substances with silicon.

They have displays with whole and partial organs as well as near complete bodies partially dissected to reveal key features. Eerily, they remove most of the skin but still leave humanizing patches like eyebrows, lips, and belly buttons. The butt crack was also usually left on. Don't ask me why. But with these humanizing features, it was easy to picture these people alive and doing normal things (with skin on, of course).

As I studied these infinitely detailed organisms, my own muscles almost involuntarily flexed and twitched. They were dynamically posed, often simulating a sports move, and the muscles and tendons stretched tight between the bones. It was not hard to imagine what my own muscles looked like straining beneath my skin. Everyone else began to seem transparent, too. I could envision the fetus curled up inside the pregnant lady to my left. I could see the heart rhythmically pumping in the boy to my right.

They have one process where they inject a polymer into the circulatory system and then dissolve the rest of the tissues, leaving only the arteries, veins and capillaries. Life size and recognizable as a human body. The fingertips had a surprising number of capillaries. So many that I could still see the faint fingerprints even though there was no skin left.

I really gained a new appreciation for the miraculous engineering that makes up our bodies. A billion trillion tiny little machines, all working together to keep us alive. It made me realize that even when I'm being extremely lazy (which happens more often than it should), at the cellular level I am really quite busy.

The whole experience was breathtaking. Thank you, Alice, for a wonderful birthday present.

P.S. All the bodies are unclaimed Chinese cadavers. Or at least that's what the chinese government is telling us.