A controversial exhibit featuring preserved corpses opened Saturday at the St. Louis Galleria, near the automatic doors that lead to Restoration Hardware and the Sunglass Hut.
The 16,000-square-foot "Bodies … The Exhibition" features more than 250 preserved body parts, including 10 full bodies in different poses, said Ray Glover, the chief medical director for the exhibition.
One dives for a volleyball. A nearby body, its right side exposed to show organs in the chest and abdomen, kicks a soccer ball.
Another holds a tennis racquet as though in mid-serve.
The exhibit stresses the educational value of seeing real bodies and promotes people's getting close to view the detailed inner workings. Water in cells and organs has been removed and replaced with silicone rubber. Visitors can even hold a preserved brain.
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"Everybody has a body, and everybody is entitled to learn as much about it as they possibly can," Glover said.
There is also a walled off gallery featuring fetuses — Glover said that display was too emotional for many people who would rather avoid it.
Five tiny embryos, from 4 to 8 weeks old, sit on a table in glass tubes. A calcium-binding dye was used to color bones in other fetuses ranging from 9 to 15 weeks.
All were stillborn and donated to the exhibit by their parents, said Glover, a retired professor of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Such exhibits have been popular around the country, but this one has generated controversy for how it obtains its cadavers. It uses unclaimed corpses obtained from Chinese police, and the company has said it cannot be certain those bodies did not come from Chinese prisons.
U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Town and Country, objected to the use of the bodies, saying that political oppression in China should not be rewarded financially.
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster required organizers to alert visitors that the bodies were previously the property of Chinese police.
A similar exhibit put on at the St. Louis Science Center a few years ago was operated by a different company and drew more than 100,000 people. The bodies in that exhibit came from donors who consented to their display.
Glover said that his company, Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, legally obtained the bodies and that all had died of natural causes. He also said steps were taken to ensure the deaths were not related to torture or trauma.
The assurances were not enough for Jane Kosinski, who was born and raised in China and moved to Chesterfield in 2008 to live with her husband.
Kosinski practices Falun Gong, a spiritual movement outlawed in China. She is concerned that bodies used in the exhibit are from practitioners who died as political prisoners.
She said such prisoners would not have told authorities the names of their families to protect them from persecution, so their bodies would not been claimed. Many practitioners have disappeared, and she supports boycotting the exhibit.
"American people have great hearts and stand for justice and freedom and supporting people who have been persecuted," said Kosinski, 45.
"How could they come to enjoy and be educated by these bodies?"
People who attended the exhibit on Saturday seemed very intrigued. Ryan Holt, 19, brought his girlfriend to see it. He's a sophomore college student in Arkansas and hopes to become a doctor.
"In the medical sciences, you have to have bodies," he said. Holt encouraged people to come to the exhibit to view the complexities of the human body.
But the price of a ticket was more than Audrey Jackson, 53, was willing to pay.
"I didn't know it was $22," said Jackson, of St. Louis.
She had come to the mall just to see the exhibit but opted to skip it and do some Christmas shopping instead.