You're invited to join the first-year class of Penn medical students, along with their Anatomy course Instructors and Teaching Assistants for an organized field trip to tour the popular Body Worlds exhibit at The Franklin Institute Science Museum.

John Weisel, PhD, Professor, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology

5:30 p.m. - Students and faculty tour the exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum, 222 North 20th Street

Approximately 7:45 p.m. - First bus returns to Penn

Dr. Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, which runs through April 2006 at the Franklin Institute, lets guests see inside the human body to learn about anatomy, physiology, and health. Guests view real human bodies that have been dissected in different ways to illustrate organ systems and three-dimensional relationships and then preserved through the process of plastination.

Invented by Dr. Hagens in 1977, plastination replaces the natural fluids in the specimen with liquid reactive plastics that are hardened and cured with gas, light, or heat depending on the polymer used. Before hardening, the specimens, or plastinates, are fixed into life-like poses, illustrating how our bodies internally respond to everyday movements and activities. This also preserves the specimens in their true-to-life form, without the use of glass barriers and formaldehyde. In this exhibit, more than 200 specimens and 25 whole body plastinates display healthy versus diseased organs, the body's complex anatomy and numerous systems, and chronicle the development of life in the womb. This trip will be a unique opportunity to experience anatomists, who are intimately familiar with the structure of the human body, and medical students, who are intensely studying this subject, interacting with these plastinated specimens.