Saturday, November 12, 2005

Body Worlds Review

Today, my friends and I went to the Ontario Science Centre to view the Body Worlds exhibit. Cost of admission after 5pm was $20 for adults.

E. bought us our tickets at 5:20, and we had to line up for over half an hour before we actually got to enter the exhibit area. The first displays were all in glass cases. We saw muscles and bones, and neither of these bothered me. When we got to the display on the brain, that's when I started to feel nauseous. I don't know why that happened, and I did not expect it.

What I really wanted to see were the models of figure skaters, a cancerous lung, a tumor...and I think that's it. I got to see all of this, and more.

The figure skaters looked just as graceful as they would be in living flesh. The cancerous lung looked much like I anticipated it would look: black. What really struck me was the lung of a coal miner, which was covered in black and it was really BLACK! Tumors were hard to discern because I don't know how to differentiate between membrane tissue and tumorous tissue.

I think this exhibit was worth the $20, but the Science Centre should limit the number of visitors they allow into the area at one time. We had to wait a lot because there were several human traffic jams. That is just unnecessary. Limit the number of people passing through at one time, and then you won't have congestion. By the end of the 1 hr walk-through, my friends and I were all tired because we had to stand so long.

The thing that leaves the deepest impression on me is likely the fetus exhibit. The fetuses were all taken from aborted pregnancies. I always thought that in an abortion, the fetus died because of tissue being broken down, which flows out of the uterus in the form of blood. I didn't know that the body of the fetus would still be whole and intact. This was the most striking part of it.