GERMANY: Bodies sliced up at "beauty salon for the dead"

A disused factory in an economically-depressed East German town has been turned into a "beauty salon for the dead" by anatomist Gunther von Hagens. In a rare splurge of investment in the former Communist east of Germany, von Hagens has opened a production line for his so-called plastination process in which the bodies of donors are preserved in hard resin and dissected in slices. Visitors to the factory in Guben, a small town on the border with Poland, are also treated to a display of anatomical models, like the ones used in his "Body Worlds" exhibitions, together with a goulish show of misformed organs and diseased tissues. Von Hagens, once named Dr. Death by Germany's Spiegel magazine, defended his unconventional business on Thursday (November 16). "I am a ennobler of corpses who takes corpses and turns them into useful objects. This is an extension beyond death of the trend for beauty treatments," said the anatomist who was born in Poland and later defected from communist East Germany. The eccentric man, invariably seen dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, told reporters at the opening of his new centre that the slices of bodies which he sells to schools and universities were no different than a slice of meat sold on a slab. Named the Plastinarium after von Hagens' unique resin-based process, the new centre will create around 200 jobs for a town hit by high unemployment since the collapse of communism. Aided by Chinese scientists, the workers will coat the bodies of donors in hard resins before slicing them into cross-sections to be sold around the world as teaching aides. A full frontal section of a human would cost 7,000 euros, von Hagens said, adding that depending on how a body was cut it could yield up to 600 sections of various sizes. "I am not dreaming but I am convinced that in three to five years we will be able to produce between half to a million slices a year," he said, adding that would require around 40 of 80 donor bodies they expect to receive in Germany in that time. Singing 'We Shall Overcome' a group of around 20 protesters campaigned against the centre, arguing that von Hagens disturbed the dignity of the dead. "Those few jobs that are being created here, we could have created others instead, they do not mean anything. I have to say I'm of no religious faith, but the dead need to be left in peace," said one protester Inside the four-storey, red brick factory, clusters of workers crowd round bodies in various stages of dissection. One man, wearing surgical overalls, hovers over dozens of sacks of human bones under a sign which reads: bleaching. At the next station on the visitor's tour, three workers pick at the resin-coated fibres of a body lying on a surgical gurney. While protesters have their problems with von Hagens' methods, his new employees, many of whom were unemployed for years, are happy to obey their new boss.

ITN Source | November 17, 2006

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