Body of Evidence

Feb. 24, 2008

An investigative report on the television news show 20/20 last week put a tiny Traverse City laboratory in the bulls-eye of controversy.
The 20/20 report called into question the ethics of displaying plasticized cadavers as entertainment and alleged that some of them might be prisoners executed in a Chinese prison.
The controversy relates to two traveling museum exhibits that showcase an array of organs and actual dead people coated in plastic. The people are playfully posed — one is kicking a soccer ball, another is conducting an orchestra. In one show, a plasticized pregnant woman lies in repose with her nearly formed baby pushing aside her organs.
So what does that have to do with Traverse City?
The 20/20 piece begins with an interview of a French couple, Franck and Ludivine Larmande of Grand Rapids. Last year, they were unpacking a table they had ordered on eBay and discovered two bubble-wrapped packages of body parts. Franck opened the first package and guessed correctly that it was a liver. He began to open a second package and stopped abruptly when he saw an ear. It turned out to be a severed head.
The plasticized body parts came from China and were en route to Corcoran Laboratories on Garfield Avenue in Traverse City.
According to the 20/20 report, Corcoran Laboratories is part of a “worldwide cadaver network.”

HUMAN SPECIMENS
In fact, Corcoran contracted with Premier Exhibitions to process and preserve human bodies for its
“BODIES … The Exhibition,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in April 2005.
Daniel Corcoran, president of the company, did not answer Northern Express phone calls or an email. Corcoran Laboratories is one of several businesses nestled in a strip of office buildings on Garfield, south of South Airport. The door was locked last week, but a white-haired man could be seen working in a backroom.
Perhaps feeling the heat of publicity from the 20/20 report, Corcoran Laboratories shut down its Internet home page. But it’s still possible to get to the lab’s secondary pages
(cor-labs.com/specimens.htm) through re-lated websites.
Corcoran’s website offers a wide range of plasticized human specimens, including fetuses of all ages and bodies in life-like poses — one man is swinging a bat, another is crouched in a thinking pose. There are also individual body parts such as eyeballs, and severed heads of Chinese men sliced either vertically or horizontally.
It appears that the specimens are of Chinese descent, and therein lays the controversy. Corcoran supplies human specimens to Premier Exhibitions, an Atlanta company that admits to using “unclaimed” bodies from China — people who have no next-of-kin and would never miss them.

DR. DEATH
To understand the connection between Corcoran Labs and Chinese corpses, it’s necessary to go back in time.
Gunther von Hagens is the German wunderkind behind the plastination of human bodies. He is a showman, an inventor, and an anatomist. He’s rarely seen in public without his trademark fedora. In Europe, he is known as Dr. Death.
Von Hagens studied at the University of Heidelberg and invented the multi-step plastination process in 1977. It involves removing the body’s fat and then dehydrating it in baths of acetone. The final step replaces the liquids and fat with a polymer.
The Chinese connection comes in with a man named Sui Hongjin, a graduate of Dalian Medical College in China, who studied under Dr. von Hagens for many years. Sui replicated the plastination technique at Dalian Medical University, which has been a major supplier of plasticized Chinese people and a hotspot of controversy. Von Hagens is — or at least once was — a guest professor at Dalian Medical University.
Von Hagens originally used plastination to create anatomical models for medical schools, including Dalian. Far more profitable, however, has been his wildly popular “Body Worlds” show that premiered in Toyko in 1995 and has toured more than 30 cities since then. Sequels feature new and engagingly different cadavers in “Body Worlds 2” and “Body Worlds 3.”

THE MICHIGAN CONNECTION
Five years before “Body Worlds” hit this country in 2005, a modest, plasticized exhibit made its debut in America. It was put together by Daniel Corcoran, who then lived in Bay City, and Roy Glover, a University of Michigan professor.
The exhibit would showcase 10 human corpses in scientific museums, according to an April 3, 2000 Scientific American article.
Corcoran told the magazine that his display would be “less spectacular” than von Hagens’ “Body World” show in Europe.
Their exhibit was scientifically focused and showed diseased organs next to healthy ones — a clean lung placed side by side with a cancerous lung and an asbestosis lung, for example.
Dr. Glover, at the time, was an associate professor of anatomy at the University of Michigan. In fact, he opened the plastination lab at U-M in 1989. Von Hagen’s patent had expired, and the University of Michigan was working with Dow Corning on a faster and cheaper plastination process. An added bonus: the new process could be done at normal room temperature instead of sub-freezing conditions, according to a March 7, 2000 New York Times article.
Until 2000, plastination in the states was confined to cadaver parts and organs. The University of Michigan effort succeeded in plasticizing an entire body for the first time in North America, according to the New York Times article.
The Times article gave praise to the effort, but raised an unsettling point:
“When a person dies in Detroit and no one claims the body, an interesting thing may happen to it. The cadaver may wind up being donated to the University of Michigan Medical School’s plastination laboratory and turned into an eternity-ready version of itself,” Mary Roach wrote.

QUESTION REFUSES TO DIE
As work was going on at the University of Michigan lab to improve the plastination process, Sui parted ways with von Hagens and threw his lot in with Arnie Geller of Premier Exhibitions, famous for its exhibit of the Titanic sinking.
Geller put together a competing exhibit called “BODIES… The Exhibition.”
In 2006, Geller gave Sui a $25 million grant in exchange for a steady supply of bodies, according to human rights activist Harry Wu.
There have been lawsuits and acrimony since then between the two exhibitors. (In one such lawsuit filing, it says the “polymer preservation” process is patented by Dow Corning and licensed exclusively to Corcoran Laboratories for the preservation of human bodies.)
Despite years of ethical outcries, both groups are attracting elbow-to-elbow crowds and raking in millions of dollars.
Yet there’s that nagging question: Who are these people and did they have any idea they’d be gawked at for their eternal lives?
Von Hagens appears to be something of a reformed bad boy in the 20/20 report. He admits that he once used “unclaimed bodies” from China, but only for Chinese medical universities.
Von Hagens said he stopped using Chinese bodies when bullet wounds led him to believe the bodies had been executed. He cremated those bodies instead of plasticizing them, he said on the 20/20 show.

ILLEGAL SALE
He made no mention on the 20/20 report, however, that 56 bodies and hundreds of brain samples on the way to his German lab were intercepted six years ago. The cadavers were traced to a Russian medical examiner who was convicted in 2005 of “illegally selling the bodies of homeless people, prisoners and indigent hospital patients,” according to a 2006 NPR report.
Von Hagens was not charged with wrongdoing, but did testify to using nine bodies from a Russian hospital — none for “Body Worlds,” the NPR report said.
What he did say to the 20/20 reporter was that an underground Chinese black market still exists and it supplies bodies to Chinese companies that ship them to the United States and Europe.
Von Hagens was indirectly pointing the finger at his nemesis, Arnie Geller.
Geller freely admitted on the show that he uses unclaimed bodies from China, but not executed prisoners.
Who are these unclaimed prisoners?
Groups such as the human rights Laogai Research Foundation have charged that the category of unclaimed bodies in China includes executed political prisoners, a 2006 NPR report said.

‘GHASTLY INDUSTRY’
A New York Times reporter published an investigative story on August 8, 2006 about the “ghastly underground mini-industry” that’s emerged in China.
“There in China, determining who is in the body business and where the bodies come from, is not easy. Museums that hold body exhibitions in China say they have suddenly ‘forgotten’ who supplied their bodies, police officials have regularly changed their stories about what they have done with bodies, and even universities have confirmed and then denied the existence of body preservation operations on their campuses,” David Barboza wrote in his New York Times report.
In the 20/20 report, Brian Ross interviewed an anonymous man who said he took photographs of executed prisoners five years ago while assisting Sui Hongjin of the Dalian Medical University. He went to courts all over China to organize the purchase of the executed prisoners, paying an equivalent of $200 U.S. dollars for each body. They were then taken to the Dalian Research Institute for plastination.
The 20/20 show flashed grisly photos of the prisoners — young men and women lying prone, their limbs bound, and bags covering their heads.
Ross and a 20/20 camera team traveled to the Dalian plastination laboratory, 30 miles away from the university down a dirt road. They filmed a series of ramshackle buildings, littered with rotting garbage. Inside a shadowy building, techs dressed in blue uniforms worked under fluorescent lights on corpses of humans and animals. You can hear a buzz saw in the background.
Human rights activist Harry Wu wrote on his website that in the last half of 2007, he received nine photographs in the mail. The photos are posted on his website (the same photos used in the 20/20 documentary). The condition of one corpse is telling, he wrote.
“According to our information, most judicial police use special bullets that shatter the skull, sometimes even obliterating portions of it. This prisoner has only a small exit wound near his nose, indicating a more ‘civilized’ execution in this case. It would appear that someone was planning further use for this particular body.’”

TAKES NO PRISONERS
In an open letter on the Internet, Premier Exhibitions blasted the accuracy of the 20/20 report. It acknowledged its relationship with Dr. Sui and Dalian Medical University, but denied any of the bodies were executed prisoners.
The letter alleged that “a competitor contributed to manufacturing these baseless claims to suit his own agenda…” in obvious reference to Dr. von Hagens.
Premier said it has an anatomist, a biological anthropologist, and a forensic pathologist on staff. They examine the specimens to “ensure that they bear no evidence of trauma, serious body injury, execution or torture, “the Internet press release said.
Premier said the “sensational allegations are without any factual merit” and has asked 20/20 to provide them with all documents in their possession related to this story.
“All of these specimens died of natural causes and despite extensive investigation, Premier has found no credible evidence to suggest otherwise. … We are absolutely committed to ensuring that the content of ‘BODIES … The Exhibition’ is educational, ethical, and legally correct.’”

NO ONE’S TALKING
Dr. Glover has since retired from the University of Michigan and is now working with Premier Exhibitions as its spokesman and chief medical advisor.
Interestingly, he wasn’t available in Premier’s Atlanta office. The receptionist gave Northern Express an Ann Arbor phone number. Dr. Glover didn’t return phone calls.
Dr. Ameed Raoof of U-M’s division of anatomical specimens is now in charge of the laboratory and didn’t return phone calls either.
But the University of Michigan plastinated laboratory is still going strong, supplying medical specimens to universities and schools. They are durable, dry and have no smell.
The University of Michigan plastinated lab website said that the laboratory — with help from Dow Corning — has reached out to Michigan’s secondary schools to provide plastinated frogs for study.
And what about Daniel Corcoran?
Besides selling bodies and body parts from his website, a Google search shows that Corcoran is seeking out clients for modern-day mummification.
Corcoran pitched the idea of plastination to funeral home owners in a letter posted on “Funeral Wire — Your Leading Source for Deathcare Industry News.” His company is called Eternal Preservation Incorporated.
Corcoran explained that Dow Corning chemicals are the only ones that can achieve plastination with the skin and organs intact. It’s a five-step process that “will be taught to every laboratory that is working under a license agreement from Eternal Preservation, Inc.”
Corcoran makes the case that plastinated clients will translate into sales of nicer coffins. He offers the funeral owner $5,000 for each individual that would want and receive this service.
If just 10 percent of the 2.8 million people who die annually were plasticized, that would amount to $140 million in revenues annually, he wrote.

NO INTEREST
If you happen to visit Harry Wu’s website and view the pictures of the executed prisoners, you’ll find it hard to disconnect from the images of the rows of bodies lying bound up on the ground with the playful poses of the plasticized cadavers.
But do they have anything to do with Premier Exhibitions?
The only thing anyone really knows is that despite years of troubling reports, the exhibits remain immensely popular.
Gene Jenneman said he’d jump at the chance of exhibiting plasticized cadavers at Dennos Museum in Traverse City (although he takes seriously the issue of where the bodies come from). Good art evokes a strong emotional response, and this is no different, he said.
Ludivine Larmande, the French woman who watched her husband open the surprise package of the severed skull, said in a phone interview last week that she won’t be going.
“I’m not interested in looking at dead people,” she said.