MaladyLink: Plastination! No fuss, no muss.

(originally posted 06/19/05, which is why I'm referencing an event which has long since come and gone. "The Universe Within" was *amazing*, by the way.)

Soon, I'll have the pleasure of visiting The Universe Within at the Nob Hill Masonic Center. The Universe Within is described as "an educational exhibit
comprised of actual human bodies and organs that have been preserved using a method known as plastination."

This lead to some curiosity on my part: what is plastination?

It turns out, plastination is a technique of anatomical preservation pioneered in 1978 by anatomist Gunter von Hagens of the University of Heidelberg.

The technique is actually fairly simple. Plastination basically involves ultimately replacing the body fluids with a plastic, in a four step process that takes about 1500 hours:
fixation, dehydration (with acetone), forced impregnation (in which vacuum is used to replace the acetone with a polymer) and hardening or curing.

The process results in a specimen which is safer, and of course, less smelly, than a conventionally preserved body part.

Some digging around, yielded these tidbits:

The International Society for Plastination.

University of Michigan Medical School: Plastination Laboratory

Gunter von Hagen's BodyWorlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. This is the original anatomical exhibit, which preceded The Universe Within.

Plastination at University of Vienna. Human anatomy atlas featuring images of plastinated specimens.