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Gunther von Hagens | |
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 Gunther von Hagens in 2009 | |
| Born | Gunther Gerhard Liebchen (1945-01-10)10 January 1945 (age 81) Alt-Skalden,Reichsgau Wartheland, Germany |
| Occupation | Anatomist |
| Spouse | Angelina Whalley[1] |
| Children | Rurik, Bera, and Tona[2] |
| Parent | Gerhard Liebchen[3] |
Gunther von Hagens (bornGunther Gerhard Liebchen; 10 January 1945) is a Germananatomist, businessman, and lecturer. He developed the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens calledplastination. Von Hagens has organized numerousBody Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value. The sourcing of biological specimens for and the commercial background of his exhibits has been controversial.[4][5]
Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen inAlt-Skalden (now called Skalmierzyce) nearOstrowo,Reichsgau Wartheland, inGerman-annexed Poland. Gerhard Liebchen, his father, was a member of theSS ofNazi Germany.[6] When he was five days old, his parents took him on a six-month trek westwards, to escape from the advancingRed Army and the imminentSoviet occupation. The family lived briefly inBerlin and its vicinity, before finally settling inGreiz, a town which was allocated to theSoviet occupation zone, so that Hagens grew up inEast Germany. He lived in Greiz until the age of nineteen.
Ahaemophiliac, as a child Hagens spent six months in hospital after being injured. This stimulated an interest in medical science, and in 1965 he began to study medicine at theUniversity of Jena. While there, he began to questionCommunism andSocialism, and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from non-communist news sources. He participated in student protests against the 1968invasion of Czechoslovakia byWarsaw Pact troops. In January 1969, disguised as a vacationing student, he made his way across Bulgaria and Hungary, and on 8 January attempted to cross the Czechoslovak border into Austria. He failed, but made a second attempt the next day, at another location along the border.[7] He was arrested and punished with two years in jail.[8]
Hagens escaped to West Germany in 1970.[9] He continued his medical studies inLübeck and received a doctorate in 1975 from theUniversity of Heidelberg. When he married his first wife, he changed his surname from Liebchen to that of his wife, "von Hagens".[10]
Hagens is best known for hisplastination technique, which he invented and patented between 1977 and 1982.[11][12] In 1982, Hagens was appointed as a lecturer in the Institutes of Anatomy and Pathology at theUniversity of Heidelberg, and in 1993 he founded the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg. By 2004, he had been in the city for 22 years.[13] In 1996 he became a visiting professor atDalian in China, where he runs a second plastination institute, and he also directs a plastination center at the State Medical Academy inBishkek,Kyrgyzstan.[14] Since 2004, Hagens has also been a guest professor at theNew York University College of Dentistry.[14]
In its first twenty years, plastination was used to preserve small specimens of tissue for medical study. It was not until the early 1990s that equipment was developed to make it possible to plastinate whole body specimens, each specimen taking up to 1,500 hours of work to prepare.[15] The first exhibition of whole plastinated bodies took place in Japan in 1995. Over the next two years, Hagens developed his firstBody Worlds exhibition, showing whole bodies plastinated in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy, and these have since met with public interest and controversy in more than fifty cities around the world. The exhibition, and Hagens' subsequent exhibitionsBody Worlds 2, 3 and 4, had received more than 26 million visitors all over the world as of 2008[update].[16]
To produce specimens for aBody Worlds exhibition, Hagens employs around 100 people at his laboratory in Guben, Germany. The plastinated giraffe which appeared in 'Body Worlds 3 & The Story of the Heart' and is now part of 'Animal Inside Out' was one of the most difficult specimens to create,[17] taking a total of three years – ten times longer than it takes to prepare a human body. Ten people were required to move the giraffe, because its final weight, like all specimens after plastination, was equal to its original weight.[citation needed]
TheBody Worlds exhibits were featured in a supposedMiami exhibition in the 2006 filmCasino Royale, although the actual location for the exterior shots was the Ministry of Transport inPrague, Czech Republic. Hagens himself makes acameo appearance in the film and can be seen leading a tour past whereJames Bond kills a villain.[citation needed]
Hagens has developed new body sectioning methods that yield very thin slices, which can then be plastinated and used for anatomical studies. He is also developing similar techniques for specimens as large as elephants. He works in a concealed laboratory, with an entrance behind a movable staircase, where he developed his wafer plastination techniques.[18][19]
Religious groups, including representatives of the Roman Catholic Church[20] and rabbiShe'ar Yashuv Cohen,[21] have objected to the display of human remains, stating that it is inconsistent with reverence towards the human body.
In 2002 Hagens performed the first publicautopsy to take place in the United Kingdom in 170 years, before a sold-out audience of 500 people in a London theatre.[22] Prior to performing the autopsy, he had received a letter from Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy, the British government official responsible for regulating the educational use of cadavers. The letter warned Hagens that performing a public autopsy would be a criminal act under section 11 of theAnatomy Act 1984. The show was attended by officers from theMetropolitan Police, but they did not intervene, and the dissection was performed in full. The autopsy was shown in November 2002 on the BritishChannel 4 television channel; it resulted in over 130 complaints, anOFCOM record, but theIndependent Television Commission ruled that the programme had not been sensationalist and had not broken broadcasting rules.[23]
In 2003, the television production companyMentorn proposed a documentary calledFuturehuman, in which Hagens would perform a series of modifications on a corpse to demonstrate "improvements" to human anatomy. Controversy was sparked when the company, with Hagens, appealed publicly for a terminally ill person to donate their body for the project. A donor was found, but the documentary was cancelled after the body donor pulled out.[24]
In February 2004, the German newspaperSüddeutsche Zeitung confirmed earlier reports by the German TV stationARD that Hagens had offered a one-time payment and a lifelong pension toAlexander Sizonenko if he would agree to have his body transferred to the Institute of Plastination after his death. Sizonenko, reported to be one of the world's tallest men at 2.48 m (8 ft 2 in), had played basketball for theSoviet Union and was later plagued by numerous health problems until his death in 2012. He declined the offer.[25]
After several legal challenges to theBody Worlds exhibition in Germany, in the Summer of 2004 Hagens announced that it would be leaving the country. From 2004 onwards, the exhibitions toured North America, returning to Europe in 2007 with an exhibition in Manchester, England, and ending in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2011.[26] Starting in 2009, Hagens also exhibited in Germany again and opened permanent exhibits in Berlin in 2015 and in Heidelberg in 2017.
Hagens has accepted bodies into his collection whose origins he could not verify.[27] Hagens stored 647 bodies at his business inLiaoning province, China. Two bodies with bullet holes in their skulls were sourced fromDalian University and some have speculated that these bodies could have been executed prisoners.[28]
In 2002 there were legal proceedings against a senior pathologist and coroner inSiberia regarding a shipment of 56 corpses to Heidelberg. The police maintained that theNovosibirsk coroner, Vladimir Novosylov, had sold the bodies illegally to buyers outside of Russia. Hagens was not charged in the case, but he was called as a witness against Novosylov.[29] The authorities stopped the shipment of bodies and the agreement between Novosibirsk and Hagens was terminated.[30]
In October 2003, a parliamentary committee inKyrgyzstan investigated accusations that Hagens had illegally received and plastinated several hundred corpses from prisons, psychiatric institutions and hospitals in Kyrgyzstan, some without prior notification of the families. Hagens himself testified to the committee; he said he had received nine corpses from Kyrgyzstan hospitals, that none of them had been used for theBody Worlds exhibition, and that he was neither involved with nor responsible for the notification of the families.[31]
In 2003, an animal rights organization filed a complaint alleging that Hagens did not have correct papers for agorilla he had plastinated.[32] He had received the cadaver from theHanover Zoo, where the animal had died.[32]
In 2003, the University of Heidelberg filed a criminal complaint against Hagens, claiming that he had misrepresented himself as a professor from a German university in a Chinese document, and that in Germany he had failed to state the foreign origin of his title. After a trial, he received a fine in March 2004. On 25 April 2005, a Heidelberg court imposed a fine of €108,000 (equivalent to a prison term of 90 days at the daily income assessed by the court) for one count of using an academic title that he was not entitled to, but acquitted him on four other counts. On appeal, a higher court in September 2006 reduced the penalty to a warning with a suspended fine of €50,000, which under German law is not deemed a prior criminal conviction.[33] In 2007 the charge of title misuse was finally dismissed by theFederal Court of Justice of Germany inKarlsruhe.[34]
German prosecutors declined to press charges, and in March 2005 Hagens was granted an interim injunction againstDer Spiegel, preventing the magazine from claiming thatBody Worlds contained the bodies of executed prisoners.[31]
Hagens describes himself as anagnostic, believing that the human mind is not constructed to answer such a question as the existence of God, and he instead puts all his faith into the human body.[35][36]
Hagens is married to Angelina Whalley, the creative director of theBody Worlds exhibitions.[1] He has three children from his first marriage and also retains his first wife's surname, "von Hagens".[10] When appearing in public, even when performing anatomical dissections, Hagens always wears a blackfedora (a reference to the hat worn inThe Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp byRembrandt).[37]
Hagens has said that his grand goal is the founding of a "Museum of Man", where exhibits of human anatomy can be shown permanently. He once commented that after death he planned to donate plastinated wafers of his own body to several universities, so that in death he can (physically) teach at several locations, something he cannot do while alive.[18]However, he later changed his mind about this.[38]
In January 2011, Hagens announced that he was suffering fromParkinson's disease and that after his death his wife would plastinate his body and put his preserved corpse on display as part of theBody Worlds exhibitions.[39] In October 2018, before the opening of a Body Worlds exhibition in London to put plastinated human body parts on permanent display, Hagens said he wanted his own remains one day to be posed in the entrance, with his hand outstretched to greet visitors.[38]
In 2005, Channel 4 screened four programmes entitledAnatomy for Beginners, featuring Gunther von Hagens and the pathology professorJohn Lee dissecting a number of cadavers and discussing the structure and function of many of the body's parts.[40]
A four-part follow-up series entitledAutopsy: Life and Death was aired on Channel 4 in 2006, in which Hagens and Lee discussed common fatal diseases (circulatory issues, cancer, poisoning from organ failure, and ageing) with the aid of dissections.[41]
He made a guest appearance in an episode of the 2004 BBC seriesRegency House Party.
In November 2007, another series of three television programmes was broadcast entitledAutopsy: Emergency Room,[42] showing what happens when the body is injured, and featuring presentations by the British Red Cross.[43]
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