Tour of Chinese cadavers raises serious questions

Providence Journal: A riveting and popular exhibit of skinned cadavers preserved with polymer has been generating awe and controversy wherever it goes -- awe because, as Msgr. Laurence Higgins said, "(w)e can see the work that God has put into the body, so maybe it's a good thing." Higgins is on the board of the Tampa, Fla., Museum of Science and Industry, where "Bodies ... the Exhibition" (www.bodiestheexhibition.com) opened in this country, last August. The show is now at the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan.
But the exhibit is also controversial, and not just because some consider it gruesome. The 20 cadavers, from fetuses to adults -- arranged in a variety of poses (one seems to kick a soccer ball) -- are displayed with no documented consent from the dead people or their families.
Disturbing reports
Adding concern is that the cadavers come from China. Recent reports that China is harvesting and selling human organs from prisoners (some of them members of the persecuted Falun Gong movement) make questions surrounding the show especially troubling.
The exhibit's literature says that the cadavers are unclaimed bodies from morgues, dead of natural causes. Meanwhile, however, in March a Falun Gong newspaper charged that organs were being removed from prisoners at a hospital outside Shenyang, China; it said that the bodies, some still living, were then disposed of by incineration in the hospital boiler.
In most developed countries, the waiting list for people to receive transplanted corneas, skin tissue, kidneys, or other organs is usually months, if not years, long. By contrast, in China such operations can often be scheduled within weeks.
Falon Gong connection
The allegations about the Chinese organ harvesting, based on the eyewitness account of a doctor formerly associated with the program, have provoked widespread outrage. Last month, a Falun Gong adherent and reporter for The Epoch Times, the newspaper that broke the story, interrupted a White House Rose Garden press conference during the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to ask President Bush to "stop the killing."
Organ harvesting is truly monstrous. It may have nothing to do with "Bodies ... the Exhibition." Nonetheless, the Beijing regime is corrupt, and the show's apparently casual attitude toward mortality does little credit to its organizers, or to the Chinese authorities who cooperated in its creation.