My Ethical Dilemna

This week marks the opening of the infamous Dr Gunther von Hagens exhibition: 'Body Worlds and the Mirror of Time', a collection of carefully preserved corpses whose bodies have been skinned and filled with a plastic that allows them to be shaped into a range of poses. The exhibition appears to be part science part art in aim, educating visitors on the ins and outs of the human body (such as how a diseased lung after a lifetime of smoking looks in its natural habitat) in a way only medical students are normally privvy to, whilst fostering a new appreciation of human anatomy in all its glory.

There is a reason, however, why Dr von Hagens' reputation is one of infamy, why he was only reluctantly allowed to put on his exhibition in London and why across Europe he is known as 'Dr Death' and, in his own native Germany, as Dr Mengele. The bodies von Hagens uses are at the centre of the controversy; bodies' whose background stories the Doctor prefers to say as little about as possible as he doesn't want any 'human' stories to detract from appreciation of the anatomy on show. He insists that every single one of them has been legitimately donated to science, but his detractors say different.

In 2004, German magazine Der Spiegel published an expose on von Hagens, whose laboratories are based in China and Kyrgyzstan and whom German authorities refused to recognise as a professor because he qualified for the title in the Far East. They accused him of using the bodies of Chinese political prisoners and aborted foetuses, victims of the regime's one-child policy, as well as of buying the bodies of the homeless and mentally ill from Russia with the added charge of not even consulting their relatives beforehand. The end result of the subsequent investigations, two years after his exhibition first came to the UK, was that von Hagens was forced to return several corpses to China after admitting they 'may have been' executed prisoners.

The public reaction, mirrored in the press has naturally been quite polarised. The anatomist's critics were quick to leap on the revelations to qualify their initial revulsion at the exhibition whilst his supporters defended him as an open minded pioneer of progress whose achievements could be used to gain a whole new understanding of the human body.

These reactions pretty much sum up my own mixed feelings towards the exhibition. On the one hand, how fascinating it must be simply to see other humans in this form; to study an Alzeihmers ridden brain not from a book or TV show, but from within the very skull it was encased all along; to see the posture of the basketball player and all the muscles, organs and bones once shrouded in the mystery of a thin layer of skin, paralysed in time as if just for our benefit. Yet, how sickening the feeling that the dead foetus and mother on show might ne nothing but props in a scientist's fantasy with absolutely no regard for their story; no regard for the baby who might have lived a long and happy life if only it were born in a country that valued that life; eve less regard for the woman whose family might still be asking after her, unbeknown to them that her body was sold off like meat in an abbatoir, to the highest bidder, after she met her end alone in a Siberian mental asylum.

There are wider implications of this ghastly cadaver trade though. Warwick University just spend hundreds of thousands of pounds purchasing some of von Hagens' bodies for their own medical students to study on. People across Europe have been paying good money to see these bodies, introducing a cash incentive for their exploitation and, in some cases, murder. What about stem cell research, the scope of which has now been significantly widened by the successful passage of the goverment's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill? If it is morally repugnant to use the corpses of individuals for possibly ground-breaking research without their express consent, then what of growing and discarding human embryos for exactly the same purpose and under the same circumstances - especially if you believe, as I do, that the absence of unequivocal proof that an unborn child is not alive requires it to be endowed with the same right to life as the rest of us?