MOSH's new BodyWorldsRX shows how amazing and how fragile the human body is

The human body is a wonderful machine, by turns incredibly versatile and terrifyingly vulnerable.

That's the message that Angelina Whalley, curator of Body Worlds RX, a traveling exhibit now at the Museum of Science & History, wants visitors to take away.

"I want people to get fascinated with what treasures they have inside their bodies," said Whalley, the Creative Conceptual Designer of Body Worlds exhibitions and director of the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany. "But I also want them to understand how fragile they are."

The exhibit includes more than 100 specimens, all of them from actually human donors. In 1977 anatomist Gunther von Hagens, Whalley's husband, created a process called plastination to preserve bodies or body parts. It stops decomposition and produces odorless and durable anatomical specimens without the use of glass barriers or formaldehyde.

More than 16,000 people, including 1,300 from the U.S., have donated their bodies to the Institute for Plastination, Whalley said.

A walk through MOSH's second floor gallery is a journey through the different anatomical functions of the body, a display of preserved organs and body systems that came from both relatively healthy and from profoundly diseased bodies.

One of the most striking sections, Up in Smoke, concerns the effects smoking cigarettes has on the human body. Next to a blackened lung that came from a long-time smoker is a cup filled with seven ounces of tar, the amount a human who smokes a pack a day absorbs in year. There's also a video demonstrative of the changes that can occur both inside and outside the body of a smoker.

Other ailments illustrated by the exhibit include back pain, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases like arteriosclerosis and heart infarctions and dementia.

Sections look at:

The major joints in the body including the knee, the shoulder and the spine; the cardiovascular system; the respiratory system; the digestive system; the effects of obesity; the reproductive organs; the kidneys; the nervous system; and the brain.

The section on the brain looks at two major diseases of the brain that develop in older people, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. A device visitors can strap to their hands demonstrates the shakes that are a symptom of Parkinson's, and make it difficult to sign your name.

The last human specimen encountered is the X-Lady, a complete cadaver that has been opened up to show all the internal organs, including the brain. It is visually striking.

The journey through BodyWorldsRX ends on upbeat notes. There's a map showing six places in the world where longevity seems unusually commonplace, including Loma Linda, Calif. And there's a hallway lined with portraits of people who demonstrate that being very old doesn't mean you can't be very active.

Charlie Patton: (904) 359-4413