Well the first and third links are not von Hagens, but are troubling. I was not aware another company was doing touring plastination exhibitions.
The second link is about von Hagens, and does raise concerns about the sources of bodies that are plastinated and sold to medical schools as opposed to those put on display in touring exhibitions. Even so, his company’s claim about will legal consent may be questionable if the paper trail for any of those bodies later sent to medical schools is not all perfectly in place, which the article suggests may be the problem.
A key passage is this:
Five years ago, customs officers intercepted 56 bodies and hundreds of brain samples sent from the Novosibirsk Medical Academy to von Hagens’ lab in Heidelberg, Germany. The cadavers were traced to a Russian medical examiner who was convicted last year of illegally selling the bodies of homeless people, prisoners and indigent hospital patients.
Von Hagens was not charged with any wrongdoing, and says his cadavers are obtained only through proper legal and ethical channels.
Still, NPR has learned there’s no clear paper trail from willing donors to exhibited bodies. People donating their bodies to von Hagens send consent forms to his Institute for Plastination. They pay to have their bodies transported to a plastination facility. There, their donor forms and death certificates are checked.
That paperwork is then separated from the bodies, which can be used for displays or sold in pieces to medical schools. No one will know for sure, because each plastinated corpse is made anonymous to protect its privacy.
Hans Martin Sass, a philosophy professor with a speciality in ethics, was hired by the California Science Center to investigate Body Worlds before the show’s U.S. debut in 2004. He matched over 200 donation forms to death certificates, but he did not match the paperwork to specific bodies von Hagens has on display.
(Of course, that was 2006 and he’s long since dead now. I’ve no idea who is running the company these days and how their ethics stack up.)
