Gunther von Hagens: How Plastination Turned Bodies Into Body Worlds

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For thousands of years, efforts to stop decay produced brittle Egyptian mummies, specimens floating in gray formalin after 1896, or cloudy, fragile paraffin. In 1977, at an anatomy institute in Heidelberg, Germany, Gunther von Hagens developed plastination, a four step process that replaces the water and soluble fat in tissue with curable liquid polymers. This episode walks through each stage: fixation with a formaldehyde based solution, which also locks the pose; weeks of dehydration in acetone kept at minus 20 to minus 30 degrees Celsius; forced impregnation in a vacuum chamber, where boiling acetone pulls liquid plastic into every cell; and curing with gas, heat, or ultraviolet light.

He filed a German patent in November 1979, but for about 20 years plastination was used mostly on small specimens such as brain slices and organs, and the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg was not founded until 1993. A single full body specimen could take up to 1,500 hours of work. In 1995 his first public show of whole plastinated bodies in Japan drew three million visitors, and Body Worlds went on to more than 50 cities and over 29 million people.

Why the acetone bath is kept freezing cold: heat would denature proteins and shrink and distort the tissue
More than 10,000 people signed up to donate their bodies, about 90 percent of them German, with roughly one body arriving each day
Objections from Catholic and Jewish organizations over the dignity of the dead and the sale of tickets
Plastinated specimens in use at over 40 medical and dental schools, including Vienna, Michigan, Sheffield, and AIIMS in New Delhi
Dog gut specimens held permanently dilated so veterinary students can practice endoscopy without formalin fumes

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