Finally!

Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata pushes for stricter cadaver-exhibition rules

By Carly Flandro

Seattle Times staff reporter

Would you want your mother's dead body stripped of its skin and posed doing ballet for all to see?

Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata wouldn't, especially if she hadn't consented.

Licata is sponsoring legislation that would place citywide restrictions on exhibits such as "Bodies: The Exhibition," which display preserved human cadavers. The council will vote on the legislation Monday. If it passes, commercial body exhibits will be allowed only if the deceased or their relatives have consented to public display.

Licata pursued the law after community members approached him about the ethics of the exhibit, specifically because Premier Exhibitions, which sponsors the "Bodies" exhibit, says it can't verify where the bodies are from or that the deceased on exhibit consented to such display.

On its website, Premier said it obtained the bodies from a plastination facility in China, which received them from Chinese medical universities. The universities received them from the Chinese Bureau of Police.
"The manner in which these bodies were collected sheds doubt on whether there's an incentive to produce bodies rather than take care of living ones," Licata said.

Exhibition organizers could not be reached for comment.

Bettie Luke, a prominent local activist and sister of Wing Luke, who was the city's first Asian-American council member, said the display is a "real cultural affront."

"Chinese don't treat their dead like this," she said, adding that long ago when Chinese people came to the U.S. to work, they would ask to have their bones sent back to their homeland if they died.

However, she said it seems wrong for all people.

Ron Chew, a museology professor at the University of Washington and former director of the Wing Luke Museum, agreed.

"Whether the deceased bodies are Chinese or from persons of a different ethnicity is irrelevant," Chew said. "It's simply wrong."

In a newsletter Licata wrote about his proposal, he described seeing "billboards of bodies frozen in space and time, minus their skin." That was when the exhibit premiered in Seattle in 2006.

The billboard caught his attention, he said, but he questions whether the program is as educational as it claims.

"Does the public learn more from posed plasticized cadavers than from illustrations or simulations?" he said. "What some may consider a unique educational experience may be viewed by others as sensationalism at its worst, a collection of dead bodies stripped naked, carved up and placed on exhibit."

"It's not a show for science," said Daniel Graney, a biological-structures professor at the University of Washington. "It's a circus."

He said the average citizen likely doesn't learn much from the exhibit. It would be like looking at the wires inside your computer: you would see them, but you wouldn't understand them.

Graney said his students dissect embalmed cadavers, and that the university doesn't touch bodies until it has a signed donor document from the deceased or their families. When the university is finished with a body, it is cremated and returned to the family or buried in a cemetery.

If Licata's legislation passes Monday, the restrictions on body exhibits would not pertain to remains that are more than 100 years old or consist solely of human teeth or hair.

Violators would be punished with a $250 fine for each day of exhibition.