Web Site for the Official Student Newspaper of Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota Students get in touch with the human body By Barb Teed NCC students Dawn Whitney and Allison Giese just had to touch it. Carefully extending their fingers, they came in contact with a finger not of this world. They jumped and giggled, not quite sure what to make of this human being. The finger, and the rest of the body the students were gingerly exploring, was made of plastination, a special way of preserving the human body after death. Whitney and Giese were part of a group of NCC anthropology, archeology and anthropology club students visiting an anatomical collection called Body Worlds at the Science Museum of Minnesota on Dec.1. A plastinated lung caught the fancy of NCC student Tom Kuppe. Picking up the lung, he tried to fill it with air. “That tastes weird,” he said. Another NCC student, Mustaf Hassan, enjoyed the to-scale plastination of a horse. NCC anthropology instructor Steve Wiley said he organized the trip so his students could see first-hand how the body functions. “I wanted them to have a chance to see in three dimensions and ‘living’ tissue, what was up until then only diagrams and verbal descriptions,” he said. Body Worlds’ Communication and Media Manager Christine Olsen said the exhibit will leave St. Paul and open in Dallas, Texas on Dec. 8. “They take everything here and it’s transported by truck with a crew of 25, some of who are already in Dallas,” she said. “The set-up takes less than a week.” Olsen, a Minnesota native, has a B.A in fine arts. She was a media consultant and found her job with Body Worlds on craigslist. She was hired permanently and now travels with the exhibit. “They will have an apartment for me in Dallas,” she said. Body Worlds has copy-cat or imitation exhibits, such as one in New York City called Body Works, which Olsen has not visited. “I have never seen one of those, so I don’t have an opinion. Body Worlds is the only one with a donor program.” All specimens on display in the Body Worlds exhibit are authentic, according to the website www.bodyworlds.com. The website also states the bodies “belonged to people who declared during their lifetime that their bodies should be made available after their deaths for the qualification of physicians and the instruction of laypersons.” So far, there are 6,800 living and 400 deceased body donors. The inventor of plastination, Dr. Gunther von Hagens, had a childhood marked with illness that made him more sensitive to the medical world. Born in Germany, von Hagens established the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg. There are now more than 400 plastination laboratories in 40 countries around the world using plastination to prepare specimens for academic study. Preparing a technically correct, whole-body plastinate requires 1000 to 1500 man-hours, the website states. The webpage also has contact information for becoming a body donor. For students leery of dissecting, von Hagens is currently in the process of designing the first anatomy curriculum in the United States that will use plastinated specimens in lieu of dissection.