The exhibitions are the creation of Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a German who developed "plastination," a means of removing fluids and fats from bodies and replacing them with polymers. Some body parts on display -- a coal miner's lung, a metastasized liver -- look essentially like plastic models. But what drew more than 900,000 visitors to the California Science Center were dissected corpses posed in lifelike attitudes: skateboarding, ski-jumping, dancing, roping.

Some Thoughts on Seeing the Polymerized Remains of Human Cadavers