Examining and abusing the human body.

Last weekend JFJ and I did two things that could be fun or could be crazy, depending on your perspective.

On Saturday, we went to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum. This special exhibit is the display of real human bodies (you know, dead bodies) that have been preserved using a process called plastination. The soluble fat and bodily fluids that cause the body to decompose are extracted and then some kind of vacuum plastic injection thing happens and - voila! Real/plastic body. In order to better illustrate how the human body operates, the bodies are posed into "active" poses, such as hitting a baseball with a bat, ice skating and even balancing on one arm with a skateboard prop.

Apparently the exhibit is controversial because some people think it is disrespectful to show the dead body in this manner. JFJ admitted he was a little weirded out by the fact that he was looked at the skinless, preserved body of an actual person. But I could never really personalize it. I made a conscious effort to try to engage on that level, by looking at a body and thinking, "This was a real person. They had hopes and dreams and a whole life and then they died and their body cells were filled with plastic resin and here they are." But I just never felt like they were anything more than a scientific tool, with no more emotional resonance than a plastic skeleton. Hopefully this doesn't make me a psychopath. But if it doesn, at least I'm already in the right profession.

This is an amazing way for everyone, but especially kids, to learn about the human body. For a (non-squeamish) school-age kid who was learning about anatomy or who had expressed an interest in a career in medicine, this would be such an enriching experience. Even for the Average Joe, the exhibit helps promote healthy lifestyles by showing what happens to the body when it gets abused.

I would challenge any smoker to go through the exhibit and not resolve to quit immediately. The example of the regular lungs and the smoker's lungs is like a Scared Straight for cigarettes. Yikes. Same thing with the cirrhotic livers and the aortas that had built up calcification. Actually seeing what unhealthy habits can do to the body really makes you realize how important it is to take care of yourself. When you don't see that buildup on the inside of your aorta, I'm sure it just seems like the doctor is just lecturing you about cholesterol, yadda, yadda, yadda. But seeing it right there in front of you... let's just say I haven't had red meat since Saturday.

You can find out more about Body Worlds at the official site.

On Sunday, we did the Silicon Valley Marathon and Half Marathon event. He did the full, I did the half. JFJ blew his previous time out of the water by almost a half-hour, coming in at just over 3 1/2 hours! I didn't expect him to finish so quickly, so I was still re-parking the car after my half-marathon when he crossed the finish line. Poor Otter, though, all that pushing the redline, he ran out of steam at mile 25 and had to be helped for the last mile by a guy who he called the "race angel." As soon as he finished he had to have three cups of electrolyte replacement drink poured down his throat by the folks from the medical tent. See what I mean about some people might think that's crazy?