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| B O D Y W O R L D S 3 | June 5, 2007 | Portland Tribune and Community Newspapers

A Life in Science

Dr. Gunther von Hagens

< The Rearing HOrse With Rider, 2000

Dr. Gunther von Hagens works on positioning the mega plasti-nate. Compared to the horse, human musculature is rather puny, but the larger human brain permits significantly higher intelligence.

Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ life reads like an archetypal scientist’s resume— dis-tinguished by early precocity, scholar-ship, discovery, experimentation and invention. It is also the profle of a man shaped by extraordinary events and marked by defance and daring.

Anatomist, inventor of Plastination, and creator of BODY WORLDS, Dr. von Hagens (christened Gunther Ger-hard Liebchen) was born in 1945 in Alt-Skalden, Posen, Poland—then part of Germany. To escape the imminent and eventual Russian occupation of their homeland, his parents placed the 5-day-old infant in a laundry basket and began a six-month trek west by horse wagon. Te family lived briefly in Berlin, before fnally settling in Greiz, where von Ha-gens remained until he was 19.

As a child, he was diagnosed with a rare bleeding disorder that restricted his ac-tivities and required long bouts of hospi-talization. At age six, von Hagens nearly died and was in intensive care for many months. His daily encounters there with doctors and nurses left an indelible im-pression on him and ignited his desire to become a physician.

He also showed an interest in science from an early age.

He entered medical school at the Uni-versity of Jena. While there, he began to question communism and socialism and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from Western news sources. He later participated in student protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops.

A failed attempt to cross the Czechoslo-vakian border into Austria and freedom in January of 1969 caused 23-year-old von Hagens to be arrested, extradited to East Germany and imprisoned for two years.

In 1970, after West Germany’s purchase of his freedom, von Hagens enrolled at the University of Lubeck, where he completed his medical studies in 1973. A year later, after obtaining his medical degree, he joined the Department of An-esthesiology and Emergency Medicine at Heidelberg University. In June 1975, he married Dr. Cornelia von Hagens, a former classmate, and adopted her last name. Te couple had three children, Rurik, Bera and Tona.