Front page	From the Event Guide archive! This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 30 June 2009 Science - 'Bodies....The Exhibition' / Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, until the end of June 2009 Body Talk ‘BODIES…The Exhibition’ opened in Dublin for a limited run from January 24th. Downstairs, the Ambassador Theatre has been transformed into an arresting spectacle of skeletons, dissected organs, floating circulatory systems and preserved embryos right through to entire human bodies. Sara Baume investigates this weird world for The Event Guide. Dr. Roy Glover, Chief Medical Director and Spokesperson for the Exhibition, is a middle-aged gentleman with a professor’s spectacles and an unperturbed American drawl. In order to avail of the light from an overhead spot-bulb, our conversation takes place in particularly close quarters to a seated body. The specimen’s fist is pressed thoughtfully against his skinless chin, as he contemplates somebody else’s rubberised brain displayed under some plexi-glass in front of him You retired from the University of Michigan in 2004. Instead of taking up golf or gardening, you decided to travel the world with BODIES... What drove you to this decision? I don’t say I retired, I say I changed jobs. I was teaching medical students for more than thirty years. So I’m still teaching, it’s just a different group of people. While I was in the University I was preserving cadavers using silicone like you see here, and then going out and talking to the public about them. People were so inquisitive that it made me realise how little they actually understood about their own bodies. When I was asked to help with these exhibitions I saw it as a good opportunity to engage the public, a public I could not have reached from the medical school. The display is undoubtedly education orientated. Do you foresee a day when preserved humans will be replacing plastic skeletons in school science labs? That’s hard to say, because there still needs to be some control over them. When I was teaching, we would use beef hearts and kidneys. We’d just go to a slaughter house and obtain them, then preserve them and use them just as adequately to teach students. Schools are now setting up mini-laboratories where they can preserve bugs for the kids to study, then put them in a filing cabinet and bring them out again for the next class. We’ve preserved foetal pigs like this. We’ve done cats. Teachers can have a whole wealth of specimens to hand that show real examples of what they are teaching. Plenty of kids don’t study biology because they can’t take the goo. This process removes that goo. So there are many ways the technology can be used, and many ways it will be significant into the future. In most of the cadavers little sections of skin have been left intact specifically around the nose, eyes, ears, belly buttons and fingertips, but the skin is yellowed and waxy enough not to seem too eerily human. What I find most disturbing is where the eyebrows and eyelashes are also left in place. Are aspects like these deliberately retained to make them seem more alive and somehow more related to us? These aspects are left in place for people to appreciate that there are parts of the body that contain hair and can be preserved in the same way the other tissue structures of the body can. The laboratory I ran was also a research facility where we would experiment with the process to learn how to make it better. For example, I have a friend who goes out deer hunting and once he brought me back a section of deer hide and asked if I would preserve it for him. I said I’d like to try because I’d like to experiment with the fur, and so we did it and it looked exactly like real animal hair. Now we can do it to the point where it feels silky smooth. It certainly sounds like a strangely versatile preservation process. What other potential uses and applications does it have? I knew of a person who had cancer on one side of their face which was affecting their ear. The ear had to be removed, but they were able to preserve the organ and reattach it later on. If I had to choose between a plastic organ and my own original organ, I know which one I’d take. Outside of the medical arena, this process can be used to preserve wood and eventually the wood on a person’s house may be infused with silicone to keep all the bugs and termites from getting into it. There is also a process for preserving rare manuscripts with silicone. Anything that is porous can be impregnated with the substance. The US government even experimented with putting it on money to keep it from deteriorating, and because they thought it would be more difficult to counterfeit. But the money machines wouldn’t take the banknotes, so after a while they decided it wasn’t going to work. So the process can be applied to many more things than just human bodies. Unfortunately, there will always be people who disapprove of these exhibitions. And also those of us who enjoyed poking dead things with sticks as children and will come solely out of morbid fascination. What would you say to parents who may be resistant to bringing their kids? When I was a young child, which is many years ago, we never talked about this kind of stuff. The body was always perceived to be something sexual, a closet issue. So we never really learned how our bodies are put together, how they work, or how to care for them. I think this was really devastating in terms of my generation and how we grew up. People still come to the Exhibition and ask if we display reproductive organs. And I say, sure we do, because there is a reproductive system in every body that we need to be aware of. But we certainly don’t over-exaggerate it. It’s just another part of the Exhibition. Kids need to learn, and bringing children here is terribly important. Most of the bodies are manipulated into positions that imitate every day movement. While I understand the logic behind this, I also find it slightly disconcerting. As in, here is a person who has lost all of their skin but still appears to be able to play tennis. Where do you draw the line in terms of positions? From what you were just saying, I’m presuming sexual positions would be a step too far… We concentrate on the dynamic positions because medical books always illustrate the body doing some form of physical exercise, like throwing, or kicking, or hitting a ball. That’s how they get you to understand more about movement. Some of the other positions that you see here are taken from antiquity, such as the thinker and Da Vinci’s historic Vitruvian pose. You have visited many cities with BODIES... Have you ever encountered any protests? There is undeniably a certain amount of creative tension that comes along with what we do. Unfortunately, most of the people who have concerns never actually come to the Exhibition. A Right to Life, who are a large anti-abortion group in the US, called us up when we were in Atlanta. They wanted to come and see the foetal and embryonic gallery, so we invited them as our guests. After they had visited, they wrote us a letter saying that it had been the strongest message in support of their position that they could possibly ever provide. When you make judgements from a distance, then it’s hard to be accurate about what you are saying. All we ask is that people come and see for themselves. I must admit that I had expected something more gory or shocking. Probably the most frightening part is seeing the effects that ill health can have on your internal systems and organs. I was particularly impressed by the large plastic box, positioned next to an example of a diseased lung, for people to deposit their cigarettes into. What do you want Irish people to take home with them after visiting the Exhibition? They say that in the US, within the next several years, better than one in every five dollars spent will be spent on healthcare. That’s a terrible amount of money and clearly it would be preferable for people not to end up in hospital in the first place. So the medical community supports us strongly, and our desire for being here in Dublin is for people in this country to better understand, be more knowledgeable, become stronger advocates for their health and assume more care and responsibility for their own bodies. I wanted to finish by asking Dr. Glover how far science is from hooking all the preserved organs back up and making them function again, effectively bringing people back from the dead. But I got the distinct impression, from his impassioned advocacy of the educational mission of BODIES… that such a ludicrous suggestion would be greeted with little enthusiasm. So we said our thank yous. And Dr. Glover disappeared back into his shadowy morgue of ravaged sporting enthusiasts. ‘Bodies…The Exhibition’ runs at the Ambassador Theatre, Parnell Square South, Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin 1, until the end of June 2009. Friday and Saturday, 10am – 10pm; Sunday – Thursday, 10am – 8pm. Adults, €20; Seniot Citizens and Students, €16; Family (2 adults, 2 children, €14.75 each); children (4 – 12), €12; children under 4, free. www.bodiesdublin.com / www.mcd.ie