It would make sense to both get payed immediately and have a percentage of the future revenues sent to your family.

Although this opens another can of worms, and seems in general a repulsive business to me.

I'm amused by the idea of donating my body to science, especially to medical colleges for teaching purposes, but I would want to make some kind of connection with that future. I would want people to at least know my name, see my face, have some idea that I am a person, that I want them to use what's left of me to go out and do some good in the world with it.

We're all just made out of meat, but that shouldn't dehumanize us. On the contrary. And running roughshod over human rights to put on a show does not treat its subjects humanely. Worse, that harms the audience, who gets inured to that inhumanity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

https://archive.ph/2025.06.23-112139/https://www.newyorker.c...

Not just human bodies, but living animals as well, and until relatively recently living humans also. Western scientific culture has a utilitarian "ends-justify-the-means" problem, even when the ends are as dubious as testing a new kind of lipstick that is one cent cheaper to produce.

"We used to too; although others still do it too."

I don’t know how the exhibition is received in other territories, but I feel like it’s Americans, Brits, and Europeans who I hear raise this specific set of concerns that plastinated Bodies exhibitions display executed prisoners. Often mixed in with some degree of insinuation about Chinese justice systems and political practices.

Whereas it seems to me that dark delight in bodily violence is a much more essential aspect of the human condition—Rene Girard’s notion of a scapegoat mechanism comes to mind—and that for all the pearl-clutching, the event promoter probably would still sell tickets if they catered to it upfront.

It does seem like one framing that comes up a lot when people try to explain why they support capital punishment.

But I’m more or less with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, who likes to phrase it “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” (Come to think of it I believe noted nightclub philosophers Sofi Tukker went on to borrow that formulation too...)

All the drama/allegations around executed bodies started popping up during transition period. Mostly around Dalian which became hub of plastination. I think collection went from like 20-200+ bodies over that period. IIRC von Hagen had to return a few bodies he thought was sus. Falungong made claims these were prisoner bodies - there was big FLG round up in late 90s.