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South Los Angeles resident Erlyne Toney-Alvarez, 67, had always planned to be cremated when she died. Simple. Inexpensive. Graves, she said, are a waste of land occupied by the dead. Then she saw the intricately plastinated bodies at the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center -- bodies that had been stripped of their fat, filled with plastics and shown off in all their muscular, organic and anatomical glory for the world to see in traveling shows. Now that, she thought, is the way she wants to go. "I was so excited," she said of seeing the exhibit with...

NEW YORK, May 30, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The New York State Attorney General’s office has ordered the owners of a “plastinated” body display in New York to post signs at the entrance of the exhibit telling visitors that it is not possible to confirm whether the bodies displayed were those of executed Chinese prisoners who may have been victims of torture. The order came last Thursday after the company, Premier Exhibitions, admitted it had no way of knowing the exact origin of the bodies, all of which were obtained in China, a country that executes more of its citizens...

(NEW YORK) — The doctor behind the "Body Worlds" exhibits that show cadavers in different poses says he has stopped using bodies from China for fear that some of them may be executed prisoners, ABC News reported on Friday. Dr. Gunther von Hagens told ABC's "20/20" that he had to destroy some bodies he had received from China because they had injuries that made him suspect they were execution victims. The doctor invented a liquid plastic process that preserves bodies. He has put many of them on display in museum exhibits that show them in poses like playing poker or...

(SACRAMENTO) -- Cars packed the parking lot of a shuttered CompUSA store one recent weekday afternoon as schoolchildren, health professionals and the just plain curious paid $24 apiece to stare at a score of plasticized, dissected human cadavers and roomfuls of preserved body parts. The cadavers are displayed dramatically, with layers of skin and muscle peeled back to reveal internal organs, bones, blood vessels and nerves. The exhibition, with bodies posed as if playing a violin, swinging a golf club or performing other tasks, provoked plenty of hushed comments.   "Where do they come from?" a young woman asked a...

Exposing Shocking Horrors Inside Sujiatun Concentration Camp By Ji Da Epoch Times Staff Mar 11, 2006 A reporter from China who worked for a Japanese television news agency and specialized in Chinese news recently escaped to the United States after being wanted in China for reporting on controversial issues. (The Epoch Times) High-res image (1200 x 900 px, 72 dpi) [ Warning: graphic photos below ] Falun Gong Practitioners a Cheap Source of Black Market Organs In recent years, international organ buying and selling markets have had extreme shortages. As the world's most populous country with the death penalty, China...

THE market in body tissue in the US is believed to be worth more than $500 million (£288 million) a year. (snip) Heart valves are said to fetch up to $7,000 each in the US, and skin $1,000 per square foot. A body could be worth about $150,000, according to Art Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. (snip) In some cases people in charge of willed-body programmes have profited illegally. In 2002 Allen Tyler, the head of the cadaver programme at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, pleaded guilty to 66 counts of illegal mutilation....

DURING 15 years of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, Dimitri Gerasimenko was starved and repeatedly beaten. The indignities did not end with his death five years ago at the age of 30.Staff at the ramshackle asylum 50 miles from Bishkek, the capital, have never told his mother Raisa, 65, how he died. All her attempts to retrieve his remains have been met with prevarication, compounding her grief. “First I was asked for money if I wanted the body back,” she said. “Then I was told Dimitri had been sent to a medical academy. When...

BERKELEY, Calif. - Shaken by scandals involving the black-market sale of body parts, University of California officials are considering inserting supermarket-style barcodes or radio frequency devices in cadavers to keep track of them. The high-tech fix is one of a number of reforms UC is proposing to reassure people that bodies donated to science will be used as intended and treated with respect. "We want these to be programs that really do work so we can maintain the public trust and know that we are doing everything possible to maintain and respect the great donation that these gifts represent," said...

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Shaken by a corpse-selling scandal, University of California officials are considering tracking cadavers by barcode or radio frequency devices. The high-tech fix is one of a number of reforms UC is proposing in an effort to assure people that bodies donated to science will be used wisely. It's an important safeguard for a vital, but little-regulated area of modern medicine, experts say. "There's more regulations that cover a shipment of oranges coming into California than there is a shipment of human knees that are going from a body parts broker in one state to Las Vegas,"...

Over the centuries, dissecting the human body has evolved from a criminal offense to a vehicle of mass entertainment to an initiation rite. In the Middle Ages, human dissections were forbidden. In 17th century Europe, medical school dissections were open to the public and often attracted unruly crowds cracking obscene jokes. By the 20th century, dissection had become the exclusive purview of scientists and a mandatory rite of passage for all doctors. The scandals reported this month with donated cadavers at the University of California, Los Angeles and Tulane University are simply the most recent in a field long beset...

For education and discussion only. NEW ORLEANS -- Army medical officials in San Antonio confirmed Thursday that Fort Sam Houston used seven human bodies donated to a medical school to conduct land mine tests on the post. Brooke Army Medical Hospital officials told KSAT 12 News that the cadavers were blown up in tests for protective footwear against land mines in January 2003. The bodies were donated to the medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans, which were then sold to the Army for between $25,000 and $30,000. Tulane University officials said they sold the cadavers to a company...

<p>When Tulane University found itself with a temporary oversupply of cadavers that had been donated to science a few years ago, the school did what it usually does: It called a cadaver broker.</p> <p>Tulane said it assumed the broker would ship the bodies to other universities, where medical students would dissect them.</p>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The University of California at Los Angeles shut down its scandal-plagued donated cadaver program -- possibly for good -- on Tuesday amid a criminal investigation into the sale of body parts. Officials at UCLA put the program on hold as lawyers for family members of body donors obtained a court order barring the prestigious public university from further work on the cadavers it had in cold storage. "It was decided it would be in the best interests of the public, in the best interests of UCLA and in the best interests of the College of Medicine...

Over six years, a UCLA medical school official sold 496 cadavers for $704,600, according to invoices that provide the first evidence of the scope of the scandal in the school's body donor program. Reuters Slideshow: Lawsuit Alleges UCLA Sold Body Parts The invoices on UCLA letterhead, covering transactions from 1998 through 2003, were shown to The Times by the law firm representing Ernest V. Nelson, the entrepreneur who purchased the body parts and resold them to large research corporations. Among the companies that bought the body parts from Nelson was pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, according to correspondence sent by...

<p>LOS ANGELES — Officials at the University of California, Los Angeles (search), acknowledged Monday that parts of bodies donated for medical research there had instead been sold, and apologized for a failure in oversight.</p> <p>Donors' families, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming the director of the university's Willed Body Program (search) had been selling body parts illegally for years with the knowledge of other UCLA officials. UCLA has denied knowing about the sales.</p>

FRANKFURT JOURNAL A New Spine-Tingler From the Impresario of Cadavers By MARK LANDLER Published: February 3, 2004 A magazine report that Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the organizer of the Body Worlds traveling exhibition now drawing crowds in Frankfurt, bought the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners for his exhibits has brought him new notoriety. "Muscleman with his skeleton" is part of the Body Worlds traveling exhibition. FRANKFURT, Feb. 2 — As Gunther von Hagens hurried out of his exhibit here the other day and hopped into a waiting van, fans thrust programs through the open door, beseeching him for an autograph....

<p>A former autopsy assistant allegedly stockpiled 157 pounds of human remains, including two well-preserved heads, because he was curious and wanted to conduct his own research in anatomy, police said Saturday.</p> <p>David Lawrence Beale was arrested Friday after a tip led police to a shed near his home and a storage locker he rented in this quiet college town about 75 miles northeast of San Francisco, Lt. Jim Harritt said.</p>