The Body Worlds exhibition that opens in London today should be compulsory viewing for every child of 10 or over. In an age beset by superstition and creationism, nothing would be more benefical to the nation's sheltered young than a good hard look at a few dead bodies.

This is what we're like inside, kids! It's cool! Forget about your meaningless road kills in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Disregard the yucky skeletal bits in Pirates of the Caribbean and the baddie in the last Batman movie whose face was burnt off - that was just Hollywood copying Body Worlds - and take a look at the real thing. That's you or me, with our skin removed: an incredible, intricate machine of tendons and sinews and pumps and processing plants. Not gory, not scary, just fascinating.

So all hail Gunther von Hagens, the inspired German anatomist who has turned death not only into entertainment but also into one of the most important educational crusades ever mounted on behalf of the scientific world.

And yes, of course he's a showman, and yes, he'll probably be loitering around the exhibition in the O2 arena in his black hat in the way he loitered around the one in Brick Lane five years ago, smiling that slightly creepy smile. But it doesn't detract from the power of his message.

This is about putting empirical evidence back into the ascendancy; about restoring Enlightenment to a world plagued by anti-science, religiosity and sentimentalism. No wonder believers portray Dr von Hagens as a latterday Burke and Hare, for his work disempowers God and Allah and all things in between. Far from being a grave robber, he has probably allayed more fears about death than an army of priests - as the queue of people wishing to bequeath their bodies to him verifies. He has taken much of the taboo out of dying. With his startling, “plastinated” bodies, displayed as wittily as art but with the precision of a textbook, he has offered 27 million people worldwide the chance to gawp, unfettered, at the wonder of what we are - and what we will be when the machine conks out.

Through his display of livers calcified to walnuts by alcohol, and lungs shrunken and mildewed by cigarette smoke, Dr von Hagens has probably turned more people off smoking and drinking than the most expensive government health campaign. As he puts it, when you understand death, you will live a healthier life and worship your life. His is a bold enterprise of cause and effect; of fundamental truths and inevitable consequences. In the new show there is also a dead giraffe. How can your children miss it?

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