'My work transforms people's attitudes to their bodies - they have the right toi enjoy anatomy'

Naturally, at the Cheltenham Festival of Science next week I will present the most controversial aspect of my work. People accuse me of presenting a circus, well that’s not wrong. Circuses are presentations which show something unusual — and I do the same.

Our show is a democratisation of death. Of the culture of death. Our latest survey reveals that 97 per cent of all the people who saw the BodyWorlds exhibition would like to donate their body to the exhibition after death.

People can relate better to their bodies after seeing my work. I’m very happy if they come in for sensational reasons. It draws people in and it transforms them. People see, for example, the fine arterial display in the head and think twice about going out and beating one other up. They have greater respect for each other’s bodies. No picture has the power that seeing an actual body has.

For more than 300 years there was a tradition of showing dead bodies as anatomical specimens. I call my specimens “plastinates”. A skeleton is not a dead body; nor is a plastinated body. It is not a corpse in the legal sense. A corpse is a body destined for burial and not display, a body whose identity is known, an object of mourning and individual emotions, not an object of education and enlightenment. Only in rare instances do I give the plastinates their identity; when, for example, I did the televised post-mortem examination in London in November 2002.

People have the right to enjoy the “edutainment” of anatomy. I am proud that I have made money from this. Culture and higher education should finance itself. Anatomy is very expensive. Cadavers for students cost at least €1,000 (£677). Who pays for this? The taxpayer. I earn money from those who like what I do. There is this argument that making money is not honourable. But we are in a free society, a democratic society, a free-market economy. We should not judge how the money is earned. And I am not talking to you from a yacht in the Mediterranean. I fly economy and take a salary of only €3,000 to €4,000 a month. It’s more than enough for me. I don’t even own a car.

Every person has a body and everyone pays for the health service. Everyone goes to a doctor, and everyone and has the right to know more. My work is especially important for those who aren’t educated and my exhibition is put together with those people in mind. For example, having witnessed the effect of smoking on a pair of lungs, many people have kicked their nicotine habit; after visiting the exhibition, about 60 per cent of people do more exercise; and 30 per cent are more ready to donate their organs.

Some 17 million people have seen my exhibition, which means that across the world, five million extra people are ready to donate their organs. I was a teacher at Heidelberg University for 15 years, but I have probably saved more lives via organ donation in response to the BodyWorlds exhibition than if I had continued my medical career in Heidelberg.

Would I plastinate myself? Of course; I would be proud to be plastinated. I put my body up for donation in 1978. I have three children. Would I plastinate them? Of course, I would. But, hopefully, nature will take its course and I will be plastinated first.

ROBERT WINSTON:

'His show is not educational; it's commercially motivated and lacking in real scientific merit'

I don’t utterly condemn Gunther von Hagens’s work. I just don’t rate it as being very important. First, the process of plastination is not, in concept, anything new. This kind of tissue preservation had been going on well before Dr von Hagens was born, and with real scientific merit. His advances are not important. If they were, they would have been internationally adopted by anatomists in medical schools.

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