The work titled The Tightrope Dancer at the exhibition Body Worlds Vital. Photo: PA WireThe work titled The Tightrope Dancer at the exhibition Body Worlds Vital. Photo: PA Wire

A world-famous exhibition exploring the wonders of the human body is on show in the UK for the first time.

Body Worlds Vital, one of seven exhibitions in a series that has been seen by more than 38 million people around the world, has arrived at the Centre for Life, Newcastle.

A series of full body plastinates are on display, showing individual organs and transparent body slices.

Some of the displays include a relay runner posed mid-handover, a pair of footballers jumping to head a ball and a gymnast posed mid-air in a spread-eagle jump.

Visitors will also see healthy and diseased organs alongside each other showing how lifestyle choices may affect the body.

Linda Conlon, chief executive of the Centre for Life, said: “Body Worlds Vital celebrates the living human body in its optimal state, healthy, vibrant, vigorous, and in motion.

Not only is it a visually stunning experience but it offers such a rare insight into our own bodies that you can’t fail to be anything less than amazed

“To see the exhibition is to be moved, inspired and struck by the miracles of the human body that we take for granted every day. Not only is it a visually stunning experience but it offers such a rare insight into our own bodies that you can’t fail to be anything less than amazed.”

This will be the first public anatomical exhibitions of plastinates, designed by Gunther von Hagens, where real human bodies have been preserved through plastination.

This process halts the decomposition of the body by replacing fluids with plastics such as silicone rubber, polymers and resins to permanently preserve the specimens.

• Body Worlds Vital brings together a collection of real human bodies, specimens, organs and body slices which have been willed by donors and preserved through Plastination, a ground-breaking pre­servation process invented by Gunther von Hagens in 1977, while he was working as an anatomist at the University of Heidelberg.

Since the beginning of the exhibition series in Japan in 1995, more than 38 million visitors in over 90 cities in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa have seen Body Worlds, making it the world’s most successful travelling exhibition.

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