at public exhibitions. Plastination exhibitions For the first 20 years, plastination was used to preserve small specimens for medical study. In the early 1990s, the equipment was developed to make plastinating whole body specimens possible, each specimen taking up to 1,500-man-hours to prepare. The first exhibition of whole bodies was displayed by von Hagens in Japan in 1995. Over the next two years, Von Hagens developed the Körperwelten (Body Worlds) public exhibitions, showing whole bodies plastinated in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy. The earliest exhibitions were presented in the Far East and in Germany, and Gunther von Hagens' exhibitions have subsequently been hosted by museums and venues in more than 50 cities worldwide, attracting more than 29 million visitors.. Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibitions are the original, precedent-setting public anatomical exhibitions of real human bodies, and the only anatomical exhibits that use donated bodies, willed by donors to the Institute for Plastination for the express purpose of serving the Body Worlds mission to educate the public about health and anatomy. To date, more than 10,000 people have agreed to donate their bodies to Institute for Plastination. In 2004, Premier Exhibitions began their "Bodies Revealed" exhibition in Blackpool, England, which ran from August through October 2004. In 2005 and 2006, the company opened their "Bodies Revealed" and "Bodies...The Exhibition" in Seoul, Tampa, and New York City. The West Coast exhibition site opened on 22 June 2006 at the Tropicana Resort and Casino Las Vegas. , BODIES... The Exhibition is showing at the Ambassador Theatre (Dublin) in Dublin, Ireland. The exhibition was in Istanbul, Turkey, until the end of March 2011. Plastination galleries are offered in several college medical schools, including the University of Michigan (said to possess the nation's largest such lab), Vienna University, and the JSS Medical College Gunther von Hagens maintains a permanent exhibition of plastinates and plastination at the Plastinarium in Guben, Germany. See also Freeze drying Écorché Moulage References Further reading First published as Ottone NE et al. (2015). New contributions to the development of a plastination technique at room temperature with silicone. Anatomical Science International 2015; 90(2):126–35. Ottone NE et al. (2018). E12 sheet plastination: Techniques and applications. Clinical Anatomy, 31(5):742–756. Ottone NE et al. (2020). Extraction of DNA from plastinated tissues. Forensic Science International, 309:110199. Ottone NE (2020). Micro-Plastination. Technique for Obtaining Slices below 250 µm