Chinese Corpses Still on Display in the U.S.
Pennsylvania Legislators Debate Law to Ensure No Exhibits of Cadavers Without Consent
Premier says in its promotional material that it gets the bodies from Dalian Medical University plastination laboratories. Corporate records show that Premier loaned the bodies from Sui, a professor at the university.
When 20/20 called Dalian Medical University in February, the university's president said that the institution had never supplied any bodies to any American company, although the university did at one time supply bodies to Gunther von Hagens, the German doctor who invented plastination. Von Hagens says he no longer uses Chinese bodies for plastination because of the country's controversial human rights record.
ABC News traveled to Sui's plastination laboratory, about an hour's drive outside the city of Dalian, and found that bodies were being plastinated out of a private company's warehouse on a back alley in an industrial zone.
Wainger said at the hearing that Premier licensed between ten and 20 whole bodies and several hundred organs and body parts per exhibition. The company currently promotes 17 exhibitions. Wainger added that Premier likely will not need to procure more specimens since the plastinated bodies it already has will last forever.
Next week, Caltagirone and the other Judiciary Committee members will tour the Whitaker Museum in Harrisburg where one of Premier's shows is on view.
"We have to see the exhibit for ourselves before we come to a definitive conclusion," Caltagirone said.