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[Roger]

The name: Guenter von Hagen.
The profession: Aheh, err... make that "artist".
The place; All over the world 9OK, maybe not in the USA just yet).

(Further sources: www.spiegel.de, but hurry - this is a daily news0.

Mr Guenter hagen is a german who shot to fame in around 2000. And, of course, fame goes hand in hand with wealth. How come?
He invented the technique of 'plastination'.
What's 'plastination'?

It's a modern art of preserving dead humans for the purpose of exhibiting them in art galleries!
Oh, nothing sci-fic. It's tried and tested means, and it works. Mr Hagen gives the bodies some desired feature, for example he might render the skin transparent so you can see the bones and sinews underneath. Or he uses the bodies of misshaped people to highlight their living conditions when they were alive. You see, his artistic end products serve the noble purpose of enlightening the public. And the public actually is less queasy than you would think. Have you ever seen a mummy? Or the body of that 4000-year old man found in an austrian glacier a few years ago? Nothing really shocking!

Mr Hagen has had a lot of attention over these years, so much that he had to set up a plastination, shall we call it; "factory" (?) in Dalian, China.
He is currently working to set up a permanent exhibition in Berlin.

but suddenly a snag has come.
Some of the dead have to be "exported" from one country to another. Not an insurmountable logicistal challenge, tehse days almost anything is possible.
Unfortunately, some dead that arrived somewhere from China were found to have bullet holes in their skull. Grisly!
since the dead were Chinese, the explanation was quite easy: ex-criminals, dispatched by judicial order.
Of course, Mr Hagen didn't like that. He had always used bodies of people who went to their final destination in the netherworld by natural cause or through disease. Never would Mr Hagen accept a roadside accident victim's body. Let alone...

so the arts scene is now in uproar. And when it was discovered that the Dalian University of something had bestowed upon Mr Hagen the tile of "Professor" in something, the scandal was complete.
In Germany you can do a lot of things, including marketing artistically enhanced bodies; but you can't sign any document with your name prefixed with a title such as "Professor" if that title is foreign (Chinese) in origin and obscure in other ways as well.

A lot to think about.

[been_there]

I saw the exhibit in London ("Body Works", I think it was named).

It's not just people, but pigs and chickens and a horse as well.

While I believe that his process lends itself very well to education (remarkable preservation of tissues, and the ability to single out any one system and remove it, intact, from the body), his attempts at "Art" (capital 'A') are of dubious quality and motive.

The best part of the exhibition was the books at the end where people could record their thoughts of what they saw. Everything from outrage (one whole page scribbled with a hateful diatribe), to facination to wry humor ("Anyone for a curry?") were expressed.

There was also a form you could fill out to donate your body at your demise. People who had decided to donate their bodies have a yearly convention. I always wondered what they talked about... What position they were to be plastinated in? If they could be plastinated together?