San Diego: ‘Body Worlds 2′ opens Thursday

If you missed “Body Worlds 2 & The Brain” in Los Angeles in 2005, you now have another opportunity to catch it in Southern California. Opening on Thursday, the eye-popping, mind-blowing exhibition of human anatomy and physiology will be at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

If you’ve ever experienced Body Worlds (the most recent in L.A. was “Body Worlds 3 & the Story of the Heart” in 2008), you know that these exhibits of our own inner workings are unique, educational, utterly fascinating and sometimes shocking, ranging from the likes of full-body specimens of athletes to that of a pregnant woman with a fetus in her womb. A display of a real smoker’s lungs remains indelible in my memory.

“Body Worlds 2 & The Brain” offers special features on the “incredible marvel of engineering,” as anatomist Gunther von Hagens has referred to it, known as the brain.

The displayed human bodies — more than 200, in this exhibition — have been preserved via a process called “plastination,” developed by von Hagens; read his explanation of the process on the Body Worlds website.

All of the displayed cadavers and organs belonged to people who requested that their bodies be donated after their deaths “for the qualification of physicians and the instruction of laypersons,” according to the Body Worlds site.

Cost: Advanced-purchase tickets cost $25/$27 (depending on the day of the week) per adults without museum membership.

Contact: San Diego Natural History Museum, (619) 255-0217.

– Susan Derby, Special to the Los Angeles Times

[Photo: A plastinated body at the California Science Center, Los Angeles, April 2008. Gabriel Bouys / AFP / Getty Images]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 1:44 pm by Susan Derby and is filed under Arts & Culture, News, Tips & Advice, San Diego, Weekend Getaways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.