With a signature, an afterlife in the spotlight could be yours -- or maybe just your liver's

How did a dead German woman wind up on display in a Portland museum? And why is she messing with an archer's bow, with her brain levitating above her skull?

She sought the spotlight. Like the other 23 preserved bodies that moved into the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry this week, "The Archer" asked to be preserved in plastic, knowing her corpse could be cut and pulled into some dramatic pose that lets thousands of strangers study her anatomy.

For 25 years, people have signed up to ship their bodies after death to the Institute for Plastination, the German workshop founded by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who perfected a way to make human flesh petrify instead of putrefy. Scores of donors, both severed and whole, travel the world in the institutes' three Body Worlds shows, which have dazzled -- and sometimes disturbed -- 20 million viewers.

Almost anyone can leave their body to the institute, including organ donors and amputees. You just have to die of natural causes, with your body relatively intact, and have survivors willing to ship your corpse to an embalmer within three days (10 days in winter, when flesh decays slower).

To date, 7,762 people have donated their remains, said institute spokeswoman Georgina Gomez. Most of them are still alive (7,290) and German (6,816). The full bodies displayed in the institutes' shows are also mostly Germans who died within the past 10 to 12 years, she said. (Many of the preserved fetuses and some organs with unusual shapes or diseases come from decades-old anatomy collections at universities or museums, the only items that may not come with consent forms signed by the donors.)

More than 400 U.S. residents have signed up to spend the afterlife on tour with the dead. The state with the most donors is California, where the public display of plastic body parts is a time-honored custom, and where Body Worlds had its 2004 U.S. debut.

With "Body Worlds 3" starting a four-month run at OMSI on Thursday, the institute is due to log its first Oregon donor any day: 98 percent of donors sign up after seeing one of the institute's three traveling anatomy shows.

Donors have a range of reasons to spend eternity in epoxy resin. Some want to help train doctors and nurses. Others find the idea of burial disgusting. One donor wrote of a desire to be "preserved for posterity" to travel and meet new people: "And it would not bother me if people at the exhibition touched my plastinated body, because I know how curious people are."

Signing on with the institute may be the closest people can get to immortality. If you give your corpse to a medical school, students will study it for a year, then return your remains for your relatives to bury. But von Hagens' plastic-preserved bodies "will certainly last longer than the old pharaohs," said Dr. Angelina Whalley, von Hagens' wife and director of the Institute for Plastination. "There's no grave for the family anymore."

There's also little chance families will recognize Uncle Zelig in the museum hall. The institute so overhauls the bodies that elderly epicures emerge as muscle-bound models of humanity. Only experts can tell how old the bodies were at death, by studying the preserved fingernails.

Not every body can become what the museum calls a "whole-body plastinate." Dissectors can trim away wrinkled skin and fat pads. But you need a good set of muscles underneath to end up as a star of the show. Anatomists inspect each incoming body and decide if it's best used whole or in parts, for the organs and body sections on display.

"If a body's very weak in muscles, for instance, we won't focus on the muscles," Whalley said. "We might focus on the nervous system, which indeed is even easier to get out if the muscles aren't all that strong."

Dissectors cut away skin, fat and other unwanted extras, then bathe the embalmed body in acetone, driving out the fats and water. A second soak replaces the acetone with a polymer, putting plastic into every cell left in the body.

"Then the artwork takes place," Whalley said. Workers carefully pose the body to best show off the featured muscles or systems. It's easy work with lone organs, Whalley said: "There's not too much to pose with a liver." But for the whole bodies, "that is really very intricate work. It often takes weeks or months to have a final specimen postured, really looking appealing and nice."

Body Worlds is known for striking artistic and athletic poses, including a man riding a horse and a pregnant woman reclining with her preserved fetus. (Yes, she agreed to donate herself and her child during a high-risk pregnancy. No, she's not included in the Portland show). But the institute wasn't always so concerned with aesthetics.

Von Hagens started preserving bodies with plastic to make better specimens for doctors and university students. At the institute's first public show, a small gig in 1989, a leg was the biggest thing on display. A 1995 Tokyo exhibit was the first to show whole bodies, frozen in standard anatomical poses.

"They looked like dead bodies, just standing up stiff," Whalley said. "The Japanese said, 'We like it. But we're a little frightened, because they look like dead puppets.' "

Whalley said anatomists decided to copy poses from Renaissance paintings and anatomy books, as well as "more dynamic specimens" -- often playing sports -- that look "frozen in time." They paid special attention to the face, leaving lips and eyebrows when other skin is removed and coloring the irises of eyes, which cloud quickly after death.

"People feel it much easier to look at if the face is beautiful," Whalley said.

Once a pose is picked, it's set with a chemical catalyst that hardens the plastic. The process takes about 1,500 hours and costs more than $50,000 for a whole body, mostly to pay the highly trained anatomists, Whalley said. Complex exhibits can take far longer: Anatomists worked on the horse and rider for three years.

The institute's anatomists are always perfecting new techniques, Whalley said, trying to find better plastic polymers or new poses to show the body in detailed and dramatic fashion.

"We are currently working on an elephant, which is a real challenge, because it is so big and so heavy," she said.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on OregonLive.com