Arts/Culture

Purloined Lung returned to Bodies Exhibition

The press were alerted and a $2000 reward was offered when a polymer-coated lung went missing this week at the Bodies exhibition, held at the Camacho shopping mall in La Molina. The lung was taken when the medical student on watch duty in a roomful of at least 50 visitors, was distracted by TV reporters.

A day later, however, an anonymous phone call to the exhibition’s general manager, Susan Hoefken, led to the lung, left in a black plastic on the ramp of the shopping mall’s parking lot. Hoefken said that the piece had suffered no damages. No one claimed the reward.

The lung is part of an exhibition of 12 real bodies, which were ‘plastinated’ when the persons died, to be used as educational tools. They are preserved using a technique invented by German scientist Gunther von Hagens in 1990. The bodies are received through a body donor program. This particular lung belong to a 45-year-old Asian who did not smoke but who showed signs of pollution from smog.

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