Getting under our skin

This past Sunday I volunteered at the Arizona Science Center through my job. The center currently has Body Worlds 3 on display and this weekend was the final showing, so to get as many people through the exhibit as possible they decided to stay open 24/7 until Monday at 12:00am.

If you're unfamiliar with Body Worlds, please visit their home page to get an understanding of what it is.

I'm not really interested in anatomy or science. I like to blow stuff up and know how to do that fairly effectively. I know what a deltoid is. I know how to make humans and, although I haven't specifically TRIED to make one, I suspect I know how to do that fairly effectively, too. That's about all I need to know, really. And I can honestly say that after seeing this exhibit I'm no more turned on to anatomy or science than I was before. That being said, it was VERY much worth seeing. The exhibit is a mix of the history of anatomy, macro-specimens ("entire" human bodies in various positions mean to show how the musculoskeletal, nervous, and cardiopulmonary systems are operating when specific actions are taken), and micro-specimens (cross-sections or examples of both healthy tissues and comparable diseased/disformed tissues).

The bodies were cool enough, I guess. I reallyl liked the javelin thrower, the archer, and the en pointe dancer. What was most interseting to me, though, were the samples of bones, joints, and tissues, both healthy and not. I'd never seen an artificial hip or knee. I'd never seen what liver cancer looks like. Or breast cancer. Or lungs with emphesema or cancer. It provides a completely new perspective on what some of these conditions do to our bodies.

(Oh, just remembered...one of the most unique "bodies" there is a human with basically just the veins/arteries/capilaries exposed. It was a male body. A father/uncle and a littler girl were passing by when the girl says, "Daddy why is his penis full of blood?" A legitimate question, but one you certainly don't expect to hear from an 8ish year old girl, and an even more legitimately funny scene when you see the dad's eyes widen and drag his daughter away without a resopnse.)

There was a section specifically dedicated to bones and bone slices at which point I submitted Hayden's resume. They like to slice brains, too, and if parents weren't careful then their kids left with a wrong impression of what a brain is. Many of the human bodies represented had their brains depicted in three slices only. Kinda weird.

Anywho, if you get a chance to see it I recommend going. It's different from anything else you've ever seen unless you're a Discovery channel addict, a coroner, a surgeon, or disgusting.