Body Worlds Exhibit Closes Sunday
I was off work and at home today, so I headed over to the Science Museum to see the Body Worlds exhibit. It runs through Sunday (Dec 3), so take time this week if you haven’t squeezed it in yet. It’s open until 11pm every night this week, and it’s open round-the-clock from 8am Friday to the final closing at 11pm Sunday night. I don’t know if the Science Museum has ever done that before, but I guarantee the demand is there. Also, if you go on Thursday, you get BOGO entrees at The Liffey.
(Going in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday meant the Museum was full of senior citizens and high school kids. I swear, I wasn’t like that when I was a teenager. Complete disregard for the presence of anyone else in the entire place. I’m looking at you, Eden Prairie High School.)
The exhibit itself was… striking. Definitely not for the squeamish. The human body is extraordinary and extraordinarily complex. It’s a lot to absorb.
One of the most interesting parts to me was the circulatory system display. They inject the arteries et al with a polymer, let it harden, and then remove all the surrounding tissue. We’ve got a freaking lot of blood vessels, and this was a great way to really see just how extensive it is and how fine your capillaries are.
The other really neat part was the embryo/fetus/pregnant woman display. You can read and see pictures and imagine what’s going on inside a woman’s body, but it’s not quite the same as seeing the baby inside the womb. I imagine folks might be really uncomfortable with this part of the exhibit, but I thought it was fascinating.
I think the exhibit does a fantastic job of showing how all the organ systems interact and fit together. There’s a lot of stuff packed inside your body. They show the systems separately, and in various combinations, so you can see how your muscles are attached to your bones, and how your blood vessels feed your brain, and where your nerves go.
I didn’t see the Omnitheater film, so I can’t speak to that. Has anyone else seen it? I would hope it has some info how the plastination process works. That’s the only thing I was still wondering about when I left.
For an extra $4, you can rent a phone-like device where you punch in the numbers on the displays and it gives you audio commentary. I didn’t rent it, but I overheard numerous people saying it was worth it.
They strongly encourage you to purchase your tickets in advance online. If for whatever reason you can’t/don’t print your ticket off the website (I didn’t), make sure you take your confirmation number with you and you can still get in. Photo ID will probably do it, but they seemed happier to see the confirmation number.
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I told my friend’s kid about the show (I went in Atlanta). She looked at me and said, “I can’t believe they kill people for that.”
I did the movie, but I don’t remember it saying much, if anything, about the plastination process. It was about the body in general, and followed a pregnant woman through her pregnancy.
The best part about it for me was learning that the reason you can dunk babies under water is because they are physically unable to attempt breathing under water until 6 or 9 months. Their throat literally closes and any water they ingest goes into their stomach.
I probably wouldn’t watch it again, though… I think it was mostly a waste of the Imax format, and would have been just as useful on a TV screen.
Well I had no idea about dunking the baby. That’s a neat fact. Not that I expect I’ll be play ing dunk-a-baby anytime soon, but that’s good to know.
Also good to know I didn’t miss much by skipping the movie.
Just make sure you bring them up before the suffocate! :)
Thank you for the reminder! I grabbed a few tickets (for the movie, too - it should certainly be enlightening, since I have a wee creature growing inside me right now). As of last night, the only tickets available online were between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. for this weekend.
I heard that over 740,000 people saw the exhibit over the 7 months it ran.