‘Body Worlds’ returns Friday to Museum of Science and Industry

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If you never got the chance to travel the world, visiting museum after museum, there’s still time. A lot of time. An eternity, in fact — if you don’t mind doing it after your die.

“Body Worlds,” a traveling museum exhibition featuring an unprecedented look inside the human body courtesy of a cadre of odorless, skinless corpses, debuted in 1995. Since then, more than 32 million visitors worldwide have seen it.

About 12,000 were apparently so wowed by what they saw they signed donor consent forms to give their bodies, once death’s cold hand arrives, to the German medical institute that pioneered the plastination process and develops the museum exhibits. Sixty-two donors live in Illinois, 10 of those in Chicago.

“If you think of the alternative — degrading in the soil or by cremation — being on display in a museum in a very aesthetic way, that is the better choice,” said Dr. Angelina Whalley, the exhibit’s creative designer and wife of Dr. Gunther von Hagens, plastination’s inventor. The couple are both registered body donors.

“Body Worlds & The Cycle of Life” opens Friday at the Museum of Science and Industry, the first American museum to display the show. This is the South Side institution’s third “Body World” exhibit, more than any other museum. Ticket pre-sales have been brisk, and the last two exhibits were among the museum’s most popular attractions, bringing in 1.3 million visitors.

There wouldn’t be extra visitors to the Chicago museum — or any museum featuring “Body Worlds” — without the human corpses. In the “Cycle of Life” exhibit, bodies and individual body parts show the effects of obesity and smoking but also the flexibility and power used by the human machine in a variety of sports.

Donation is relatively easy — fill out a form found at bodyworlds.com, send it to an Oregon address and receive a donor card. If relatives don’t support a person’s plastination wish, Body Worlds asks for an attorney to witness a donor signature. And donors are just that — they won’t receive compensation for a body or its parts.

While it’s free to donate, donors or their survivors are expected to pay for the body’s trip to Body World’s California facility. Body Worlds picks up the airfare to Germany.

There are few limitations for donation. You can be any age and still be an organ donor to those in need. Amputees are welcome. You have to die of natural causes, cannot have a postmortem autopsy or be severely disfigured in an accident.

Donors to the Institute for Plastination aren’t guaranteed a spot in a museum exhibition.