Gunther von Hagens

Gunther von Hagens (born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen; 10 January 1945 – 24 July 2026) was a German anatomist, businessman, and lecturer. He developed the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination. Von Hagens organized numerous Body Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value. The sourcing of biological specimens for and the commercial background of his exhibits had been controversial.

Early life and education Von Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in Alt-Skalden (now called Skalmierzyce) near Ostrowo, Reichsgau Wartheland, in German-annexed Poland. Gerhard Liebchen, his father, was a member of the SS of Nazi Germany.

In 1970, the West German government paid the East German authorities DM43,000 for von Hagens's freedom, alongside several others, on the grounds that he was a political prisoner. He continued his medical studies in Lübeck and received a doctorate in 1975 from the University of Heidelberg. When he married his first wife, he changed his surname from Liebchen to that of his wife, "von Hagens". In 1982, von Hagens was appointed a lecturer in the Institutes of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Heidelberg, and in 1993 he founded the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg. By 2004, he had been in the city for 22 years. In 1996 he became a visiting professor at Dalian in China, where he ran a second plastination institute, and he also directed a plastination center at the State Medical Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

In its first twenty years, plastination was used to preserve small specimens of tissue for medical study. It was not until the early 1990s that equipment was developed to make it possible to plastinate whole body specimens, each specimen taking up to 1,500 hours of work to prepare. The first exhibition of whole plastinated bodies took place in Japan in 1995. Over the next two years, von Hagens developed his first Body Worlds exhibition, showing whole bodies plastinated in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy, and these have since met with public interest and controversy in more than fifty cities around the world. The exhibition, and von Hagens's subsequent exhibitions Body Worlds 2, 3 and 4, had received more than 26 million visitors all over the world .

To produce specimens for a Body Worlds exhibition, von Hagens employed around 100 people at his laboratory in Guben, Germany. The plastinated giraffe which appeared in Body Worlds 3 & The Story of the Heart and is now part of Body Worlds: Animal Inside Out was one of the most difficult specimens to create, taking a total of three yearsten times longer than it takes to prepare a human body. Ten people were required to move the giraffe, because its final weight, like all specimens after plastination, was equal to its original weight.

The Body Worlds exhibits were featured in a supposed Miami exhibition in the 2006 film Casino Royale, although the actual location for the exterior shots was the Ministry of Transport in Prague, Czech Republic. Von Hagens himself makes a cameo appearance in the film and can be seen leading a tour past where James Bond kills a villain.

He developed new body sectioning methods that yield very thin slices, which can then be plastinated and used for anatomical studies. He was also developing similar techniques for specimens as large as elephants. He worked in a concealed laboratory, with an entrance behind a movable staircase, where he developed his wafer plastination techniques.

Controversy Religious groups, including representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and rabbi She'ar Yashuv Cohen, have objected to the display of human remains, stating that it is inconsistent with reverence towards the human body.

In 2002 von Hagens performed the first public autopsy to take place in the United Kingdom in 170 years, before a sold-out audience of 500 people in a London theatre. Prior to performing the autopsy, he had received a letter from Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy, the British government official responsible for regulating the educational use of cadavers. The letter warned von Hagens that performing a public autopsy would be a criminal act under section 11 of the Anatomy Act 1984. The show was attended by officers from the Metropolitan Police, but they did not intervene, and the dissection was performed in full. The autopsy was shown in November 2002 on the British Channel 4 television channel; it resulted in over 130 complaints, an OFCOM record, but the Independent Television Commission ruled that the programme had not been sensationalist and had not broken broadcasting rules.

In 2003, the television production company Mentorn proposed a documentary called Futurehuman, in which von Hagens would perform a series of modifications on a corpse to demonstrate "improvements" to human anatomy. Controversy was sparked when the company, with von Hagens, appealed publicly for a terminally ill person to donate their body for the project. A donor was found, but the documentary was cancelled after the body donor pulled out.

In February 2004, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung confirmed earlier reports by the German TV station ARD that von Hagens had offered a one-time payment and a lifelong pension to Alexander Sizonenko if he would agree to have his body transferred to the Institute of Plastination after his death. Sizonenko, reported to be one of the world's tallest men at , had played basketball for the Soviet Union and was later plagued by numerous health problems until his death in 2012. He declined the offer.

After several legal challenges to the Body Worlds exhibition in Germany, in the Summer of 2004 von Hagens announced that it would be leaving the country. From 2004 onwards, the exhibitions toured North America, returning to Europe in 2007 with an exhibition in Manchester, England, and ending in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2011. Starting in 2009, von Hagens also exhibited in Germany again and opened permanent exhibits in Berlin in 2015 and in Heidelberg in 2017.

Von Hagens accepted bodies into his collection whose origins he could not verify. Von Hagens stored 647 bodies at his business in Liaoning province, China. Two bodies with bullet holes in their skulls were sourced from Dalian University and some have speculated that these bodies could have been executed prisoners.

Legal accusations In 2002 there were legal proceedings against a senior pathologist and coroner in Siberia regarding a shipment of 56 corpses to Heidelberg. The police maintained that the Novosibirsk coroner, Vladimir Novosylov, had sold the bodies illegally to buyers outside of Russia. Von Hagens was not charged in the case, but he was called as a witness against Novosylov. The authorities stopped the shipment of bodies and the agreement between Novosibirsk and von Hagens was terminated.

In October 2003, a parliamentary committee in Kyrgyzstan investigated accusations that von Hagens had illegally received and plastinated several hundred corpses from prisons, psychiatric institutions and hospitals in Kyrgyzstan, some without prior notification of the families. Von Hagens himself testified to the committee; he said he had received nine corpses from Kyrgyzstan hospitals, that none of them had been used for the Body Worlds exhibition, and that he was neither involved with nor responsible for the notification of the families.

In 2003, an animal rights organization filed a complaint alleging that von Hagens did not have correct papers for a gorilla he had plastinated. He had received the cadaver from the Hanover Zoo, where the animal had died. In 2007 the charge of title misuse was finally dismissed by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany in Karlsruhe.

German prosecutors declined to press charges, and in March 2005 von Hagens was granted an interim injunction against Der Spiegel, preventing the magazine from claiming that Body Worlds contained the bodies of executed prisoners.

He was married to Angelina Whalley, the creative director of the Body Worlds exhibitions. When appearing in public, even when performing anatomical dissections, von Hagens always wore a black fedora (a reference to the hat worn in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt).

Von Hagens said that his grand goal is the founding of a "Museum of Man", where exhibits of human anatomy can be shown permanently. He once commented that after death he planned to donate plastinated wafers of his own body to several universities, so that in death he can (physically) teach at several locations, something he could not do while alive. However, he later changed his mind about this.

In January 2011, von Hagens announced that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease and that after his death his wife would plastinate his body and put his preserved corpse on display as part of the Body Worlds exhibitions. In October 2018, before the opening of a Body Worlds exhibition in London to put plastinated human body parts on permanent display, von Hagens said he wanted his own remains one day to be posed in the entrance, with his hand outstretched to greet visitors.

Television appearances In 2005, Channel 4 screened four programmes entitled Anatomy for Beginners, featuring Gunther von Hagens and the pathology professor John Lee dissecting a number of cadavers and discussing the structure and function of many of the body's parts.

A four-part follow-up series entitled Autopsy: Life and Death was aired on Channel 4 in 2006, in which von Hagens and Lee discussed common fatal diseases (circulatory issues, cancer, poisoning from organ failure, and ageing) with the aid of dissections.

Von Hagens made a guest appearance in an episode of the 2004 BBC series Regency House Party.

In November 2007, another series of three television programmes was broadcast entitled Autopsy: Emergency Room, showing what happens when the body is injured, and featuring presentations by the British Red Cross.