Plastinations

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dont you want to work with real bodies? cmon, thats an experience.
 
😱
 
Ething said:
dont you want to work with real bodies? cmon, thats an experience.
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did you interview at buffalo? They took you to this room filled with dead people...and people are disecting it. It smells like dead people, . it was an experience, alright!

OMG! "i saw dead people"
 
xxxTheDonxxx said:
i guess it's bad at first but once you got your hands dirty...it's okay! I mean they did cover up the face, the fingers, and the toes
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Wait until you actually start dissecting. Your hands will smell like crazy for the entire day or so. And gloving doesn't help. Some people will also have nightmares. 😉 . . .plastination might actually be better.
 
Dissecting is an experience everyone should have! Yeah, you smell pretty bad, but how much it helps you learn anatomy is insane. and yes, they keep the face covered up, only until you get to the facial part of anatomy, then you have to dissect that too. that can get a little personal.
 
When you die, would you donate your body to be cut up? Just wondering.
 
DakotaDentist said:
Dissecting is an experience everyone should have! Yeah, you smell pretty bad, but how much it helps you learn anatomy is insane. and yes, they keep the face covered up, only until you get to the facial part of anatomy, then you have to dissect that too. that can get a little personal.
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I fully understand the value of the dissection ... but I'm definitely looking forward to it the LEAST of all dental school activities. Something about dead bodies just creeps me out ( ... no offense to any future forensics out there).
 
at the interview at nyu the lady said they were the only school to implement this so far, the technique was developed by some guy who is faculty there so thats whats up.
 
While working with cadavers in undergrad, I wore a pair of bubble gum scented gloves that I took from the Orthodontic office I worked at. The smell of bubble gum, formaldahyde, and cadaver was a weird mix. It was kind of funny b/c no one knew where the bubble gum scent was coming from either.
 
KOM said:
Not even in the name of science?
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While a lot of educational value can come from donating your body to science, and i greatly appreciate the donors i had for my anatomy class, it's just not for me.
 
I would donate organs, but I wouldn't want my body being carved up by some students. I would rather save a few lives if I could.
 
DakotaDentist said:
I don't think I would donate my body when I die.
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My physician brother would always tell me stories about medical school. You guys just can't imagine how much many of those bodies get abused by students. It just makes you want to cringe thinking about what would happen to you if you were the cadaver.

Oh, also, he mentioned that dissection is such a big waste of time. You spend the majority of your time taking away fat and cleaning individual anatomic structures just to see a few structures.
 
mmasurf said:
at the interview at nyu the lady said they were the only school to implement this so far, the technique was developed by some guy who is faculty there so thats whats up.
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http://www.bodyworlds.com/index.html

http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/gunther_von_hagens/life.html

Gunther von Hagens' life reads like an archetypal scientist's resume—distinguished by early precocity, scholarship, discovery, experimentation, and invention. It is also the profile of a man shaped by extraordinary events, and marked by defiance and daring.

Von Hagens' two year imprisonment by East German authorities for political reasons, his release after a $20,000 payment by the West German government, his pioneering invention that halts decomposition of the body after death and preserves it for didactic eternity, his collaboration with donors including his best friend, who willed and entrusted their bodies to him for dissection and public display, and his role as a teacher carrying on the tradition of Renaissance anatomists, make his a remarkable life in science.

Anatomist, inventor of Plastination, and creator of BODY WORLDS—the anatomical exhibitions of real human bodies—von Hagens (christened Gunther Gerhard Liebchen) was born in 1945, in Alt-Skalden, Posen, Poland—then part of Germany. To escape the imminent and eventual Russian occupation of their homeland, his parents placed the five-day-old infant in a laundry basket and began a six-month trek west by horse wagon. The family lived briefly in Berlin and its vicinity, before finally settling in Greiz, a small town where von Hagens remained until the age of 19.
As a child, he was diagnosed with a rare bleeding disorder that restricted his activities and required long bouts of hospitalization that he says, fostered in him a sense of alienation and nonconformity. At age 6, von Hagens nearly died and was in intensive care for many months. His daily encounters there with doctors and nurses left an indelible impression on him, and ignited in him a desire to become a physician. He also showed an interest in science from an early age, reportedly "freaking out" at the age of twelve during the Russian launch of Sputnik into space. "I was the school authority and archivist on Sputnik," he said.
In 1965, von Hagens entered medical school at the University of Jena, south of Leipzig, and the birthplace of writers Schiller and Goethe. His unorthodox methods and flamboyant personality were remarkable enough to be noted on academic reports from the university. "Gunther Liebchen is a personality who does not approach tasks systematically. This characteristic and his imaginativeness, that sometimes let him forget about reality, occasionally led to the development of very willful and unusual ways of working-but never in a manner that would have harmed the collective of his seminary group. On the contrary, his ways often encouraged his fellow students to critically review their own work."

While at the university, von Hagens began to question Communism and Socialism, and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from Western news sources. He later participated in student protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. In January, 1969, in the guise of a vacationing student, von Hagens made his way across Bulgaria and Hungary, and on January 7th, attempted to cross the Czechoslovakian border into Austria and freedom. He failed, but made a second attempt the very next day, at another location along the border. This time the authorities detained him. "While I was in detention, a sympathetic guard left a window open for me so that I could escape. I hesitated and couldn't make up my mind, and that decision cost me a great deal," he says. Gunther von Hagens was arrested, extradited to East Germany, and imprisoned for two years. Only 23 years old at the time, the iconoclastic von Hagens was viewed as a threat to the socialist way of life, and therefore in need of rehabilitation and citizenship education. According to the prison records for Gunther Liebchen, "The prisoner is to be trained to develop an appropriate class consciousness so that in his future life, he will follow the standards and regulations of our society. The prisoner is to be made aware of the dangerousness of his way of behaving, and in doing so, the prisoner's conclusions of his future behavior as a citizen of the social state need to be established."
Thirty-six years after his incarceration, Gunther von Hagens finds meaning and even redemption in his lost years. "The deep friendships I formed there with other prisoners, and the terrible aspects of captivity that I was forced to overcome through my fantasy life, helped shape my sense of solidarity with others, my reliance on my own mind and body when denied freedom, and my capacity for endurance. All that I learned in prison helped me later in my life as a scientist."

In 1970, after West Germany's purchase of his freedom, von Hagens enrolled at the University of Lubeck to complete his medical studies. Upon graduation in 1973, he took up residency at a hospital on Heligoland-a duty free island where the access to cheap liquor resulted in a substantial population of alcoholics. A year later, after obtaining his medical degree, he joined the Department of Anesthesiology and Emergency Medicine at Heidelberg University, where he came to a realization that his pensive mind was unsuitable for the tedious routines demanded of an anesthesiologist. In June 1975, he married Dr. Cornelia von Hagens, a former classmate, and adopted her last name. The couple had three children, Rurik, Bera, and Tona.

In 1975, while serving as a resident and lecturer-the start of an eighteen year career at the university's Institute of Pathology and Anatomy-von Hagens invented Plastination, his groundbreaking technology for preserving anatomical specimens with the use of reactive polymers. "I was looking at a collection of specimens embedded in plastic. It was the most advanced preservation technique then, where the specimens rested deep inside a transparent plastic block. I wondered why the plastic was poured and then cured around the specimens rather than pushed into the cells, which would stabilize the specimens from within and literally allow you to grasp it."

He patented the method and over the next six years, von Hagens spent all his energies refining his invention. In Plastination, the first step is to halt decomposition. "The deceased body is embalmed with a formalin injection to the arteries, while smaller specimens are immersed in formalin. After dissection, all bodily fluids and soluble fat in the specimens are then extracted and replaced through vacuum-forced impregnation with reactive resins and elastomers such as silicon rubber and epoxy," he says. After posing of the specimens for optimal teaching value, they are cured with light, heat, or certain gases. The resulting specimens or plastinates assume rigidity and permanence. "I am still developing my invention further, even today, as it is not yet perfect," he says.

During this time, von Hagens started his own company, BIODUR Products, to distribute the special polymers, equipment, and technology used for Plastination to medical institutions around the globe. Currently, more than 400 institutions in 40 countries worldwide use Gunther von Hagens' invention to preserve anatomical specimens for medical instruction. In 1983, Catholic Church figures asked Dr. von Hagens to plastinate the heel bone of St. Hildegard of Bingen, (1090-1179), a beatified mystic, theologian, and writer revered in Germany. His later offer to perform Plastination on Pope John Paul II foundered before serious discussions.

In 1992, von Hagens married Dr. Angelina Whalley, a physician who serves as his Business Manager as well as the designer of the BODY WORLDS exhibitions. A year later, Dr. von Hagens founded the Heidelberg-based Institute for Plastination, which offers plastinated specimens for educational use and for BODY WORLDS, which premiered in Japan in 1995. To date, the exhibitions have been viewed by almost 20 million people, in cities countries across Europe, Asia, and North America. His continued efforts to present the exhibitions, even in the face of opposition and often blistering attacks are, he says, the burden he must bear as a public anatomist and teacher. "The anatomist alone is assigned a specific role-he is forced in his daily work to reject the taboos and convictions that people have about death and the dead. I myself am not controversial, but my exhibitions are, because I am asking viewers to transcend their fundamental beliefs and convictions about our joint and inescapable fate." Apparently determined to exhaust the limits of living in freedom, Dr. von Hagens has made a concerted effort to travel and propagate his interests around the globe. He accepted a visiting professorship at Dalian Medical University in China in 1996, and became director of the Plastination research center at the State Medical Academy in Bishkek/Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, he founded a private company, the Von Hagens Dalian Plastination Ltd., in Dalian, China, which currently employs a staff of 250. In 2004, Dr. von Hagens began a visiting professorship at the New York University College of Dentistry. He is currently in the process of designing the first anatomy curriculum in the United States that will use plastinated specimens in lieu of dissection.

Gunther von Hagens' BODY WORLDS exhibitions are currently showing in North America. "The human body is the last remaining nature in a man made environment," he says. "I hope for the exhibitions to be places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self recognition, and open to interpretation regardless of the background and philosophy of life of the viewer."
 
he meant to say go see body worlds, and who has time to read all that!

cadavers are useful.. read Stiff by Mary Roach... it is a book about what happens to those cadavers that are donated to science and things like that.

I will donate my body to science. Then again, the kind of dentistry I want to do involves all of my pateints to be.. well... dead... and barely recognizable.
 
CSI Dentist said:
he meant to say go see body worlds, and who has time to read all that!

cadavers are useful.. read Stiff by Mary Roach... it is a book about what happens to those cadavers that are donated to science and things like that.

I will donate my body to science. Then again, the kind of dentistry I want to do involves all of my pateints to be.. well... dead... and barely recognizable.
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Good for you. You are a brave woman.
 
DDSY said:
Good for you. You are a brave woman.
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thank you. 😳

Dead people should not be scarry. It is not the person anymore, just what ever is left of.. but I can see how it can make some people uncomfortable.

I know it sounds bad, but if you like to cook, just think of how chicken meat feels.. it is the same thing... almost. :idea:
 
I'd much rather donate my organs to be used to save some other person's life than to be cut up by some punks 😀
 
CSI Dentist said:
I know it sounds bad, but if you like to cook, just think of how chicken meat feels.. it is the same thing... almost. :idea:
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common' now! you don't have to go that far! Thanks a lot, I can't eat my chicken anymore. I'm having beef tonight 👍
 
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