“Bodies” exhibit: a personal experience

by Jamie Rhein on

About two years ago, I saw the “Bodies” exhibit when it was in Cleveland. As I found out when reading Jaunted, there is a problem with the New York City exhibit. Perhaps, some of the people who were turned into plastic sans skin didn’t have a say in the matter.

In the exhibit literature I saw, there were many assurances that the people on display had agreed to be a museum piece before their deaths. There were detailed explanations about how the bodies were preserved. In general, I felt partly fascinated and partly uneasy. I was fascinated because this was a wonderful way to see how the body is put together and how the muscles and skeleton actually work.

The uneasy part came from human bodies being turned into sculptures. It’s not as if there was a check off list where the donor could make a request to be turned into a skateboarder or a ballet dancer. I’ve never been that flexible. It’s odd to think I could be made to look that way down the road and people could walk around me to catch a glimpse at all angles. One body where it looked as if the body had been exploded into hundreds of pieces, the pieces hung from fine threads from a metal frame, also gave me pause. My first thought was, what a nightmare to move. Can you imagine what it’s like to avoid tangles? It was cool for sure, but weird. I have to admit, I did like it.

People do have an interest in weirdness. We like being fascinated and slightly repulsed at the same time. In this case, big money has been made, and the integrity of the exhibits, perhaps, are not as pristine as we would hope. There are nine more besides the one in New York City.

I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for people to get to the bottom of where exactly all these bodies have come from–although it may be one or two tainted bodies have slipped in from China through the cracks in an otherwise well thought out system. Just like some toys and toothpaste from China were found to be dangerous, not all. But, like toothpaste, a body may be questionable. The majority of the bodies, however, may be legitimate, and a chosen few get to look in death as if they could soar over buildings in a single bound.

Photo of the Day (05.27.2008)

by Martha Edwards on


I’m an urban girl at heart. I grew up in the city and that’s where I feel most comfortable: surrounded by blaring horns, blazing lights, people as far as the eye can see. Neon signs and the noises of strangers are seared into my psyche in a way that is inescapable.

So it goes without saying that I love night photography, particularly when it captures the lights of a busy urban nightscape. This photo of Nanjing, China by Matt Hintsa captures that perfectly. It’s a little grainy, a little blown out, but so is the city. So is any city.

Got a cityscape to share with us? Submit it to the Gadling Flickr pool.

Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 2 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of this story here.

The excited cry of a park ranger pierces the stillness of a bamboo forest high in the Min Mountains. Zhan Xiangjiang, an ecologist who I’m hanging out with for the day, bounds through waist-deep snowdrifts to investigate. Catching up with the ranger, he kneels down and points at a small, round object that, at first glance, looks like a greenish yam. “Smell this!” he says to me.

The not-unpleasant odor of fresh bamboo wafts up. Along with other clues–chewed bamboo stalks, paw prints, and urine-marked trees–the fresh scat is the latest evidence that Zhan’s monitoring team is hot on the heels of a giant panda.
Their quarry may be elusive, but Zhan is upbeat. “Pandas are making a comeback here,” he declares. In the mid-1980s, poaching and a mass bamboo die-off sent China’s flagship animal into a tailspin: The country’s wild panda population plummeted to about 1200, landing the species on the endangered list. Experts decried its imminent extinction. But with a logging ban in all panda habitats since 1999, the species appears to be on the rebound.

It is a hotly debated question, however, whether panda populations are just beginning to regain lost ground or are already healthier than they have been for many years. Virtually nothing about the iconic mammal is without rancor. Another controversy swirls around China’s program to breed giant pandas in captivity. Last year, the effort produced more than 30 cubs–a record–as well as the first captive released into the wild. Some conservationists say the breeding program can bolster wild populations. Others are skeptical.

Zhan, or as I like to call him, Chuckie (asI kept forgetting his Chinese name), cups some scat in his bare hand and grins as it shimmers in the sunlight. “The shiny layer is mucus,” he says–and it’s full of DNA. To gauge how many pandas are prowling Wanglang, he spent much of 2003 and 2004 combing the area for precious panda droppings. His zeal almost got him killed–in 2004, he slipped and broke his spine and had to endure a bumpy 400-kilometer ride to a hospital in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. He was not paralyzed, however, and returned to work after a 3-month-long convalescence.

Panda experts agree that the species needs all the help it can get. Tourism and development are nipping at the reserves. Tourists leave garbage, and villagers lay traps for game animals that inadvertently snare pandas. One wildlife NGO, Conservation International, is testing a new community-based conservation model that will give villagers financial incentives to protect panda habitat outside the reserves. Three villages abutting Wanglang have signed on, and negotiations are under way to add 100 more sites in the next 3 years.

The central government, too, is taking action. Its Wildlife Conservation Protection Program seeks to bring 90% of wild pandas under the reserve system, from 75% today. In the 1980s, there were fewer than 20 reserves for pandas. Now there are 60.

Down from the mountain, Chuckie’s monitoring team encounters a pair of blue-eared pheasants, their most dramatic wildlife sighting all day. No black-and-white bamboo eaters–but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he says. It means the pandas are somewhere in the highlands, deep in the bamboo forest, and safe from humans for another day.
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The Olympic torch: A continuing saga

by Jamie Rhein on

For the next three days, the Olympic torch is going no where. Starting today, it’s journey to Beijing was put on hiatus while China is having three-days of mourning to commemorate the losses caused by last week’s earthquake. After the torch’s trip up Mt. Everest–and its altered jaunt through San Francisco after being hustled into a van in Europe when protesters put it out a few times, the torch certainly seems to be capturing the highs and lows of the human struggle to survive and excel.

According to the news, just like the path the torch has taken, the Olympics might not look like what the Chinese originally planned. There may be a version with less hoopla.

As China struggles to deal with the catastrophe dealt by the earth’s movement, some shoddy building construction and bad luck, the torch’s symbolism seems all that more poignant. It might seem like who should care about a flame in the throes of such a disaster, but in a way, if the torch does make it to Beijing to signal the start off the summer games, it could be seen as representing more than its original intention.

When the torch changed hands in Australia on that sunny day the end of April, there wasn’t any inkling that the news in China would be so devastating three weeks later. When the torch appears in Beijing to light the big Olympic flame, perhaps it might have switched from a symbol of China’s might to one that highlights the perserverance of humanity despite the forces that might put us out.

Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 1 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

On a single-lane dirt road wending between misty crags deep in Sichuan Province, traffic has slowed to a crawl. Hundreds of dump trucks and steamrollers are expanding the only road to Wolong Nature Reserve into a modern freeway. Conservation biologist George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City was the first Westerner to study giant pandas in China when he came to Wolong, about 500 kilometers southwest of Wanglang, in 1980.

Now, more than 100,000 tourists every year flock to Wolong, the country’s most famous panda reserve, to see its 120 captive-bred pandas, the largest such population in the world.

On a March afternoon, there are so many pandas in the “kindergarten pen” here that it’s hard to keep track of their antics. One is attempting a handstand while three others are playing king of the hill. These carefree cubs, a record 19 from Wolong’s breeding season, are part of the dramatic comeback for a symbol of conservation: the giant panda.
The toddlers may one day follow Xiangxiang, the first captive panda released into the wild in April 2006, as part of the campaign to prop up the wild population, estimated at 1,600 in 2001. China’s central government has increased the number of reserves from 13 a decade ago to 59 this year, with two to three coming online every year. The reserves cover 50% of the panda’s habitat and 75% of the population. The government has also banned logging of natural forests and started a “Grain for Green” campaign to encourage farmers to restore the native habitat.

Wolong will soon build a new captive breeding facility that can house 300 pandas, a goal that would ensure the survival of the captive population for 100 years and maintain 95% of its genetic diversity.

Almost two-thirds of captive panda births each year happen at Wolong, thanks to the reserve’s obsession with perfecting artificial insemination over the last 15 years and discovering in 2000 how to keep twins alive by removing one of them from the mother.

A decade ago, the captive birth of a single cub would cause a huge media sensation. Back then, if a mother bore twins, she would invariably abandon one and raise the other. In 2000, breeders figured out how to raise twins by allowing one cub at a time to stay with the mother and raising the other by hand. They frequently swap cubs so both learn survival lessons from mom. Now Wolong is trying to outdo last year’s record number of births by artificial insemination.

The reintroduction campaign took a serious hit recently when a rival male badly injured Xiangxiang. Because of his mild manners from a captive upbringing, he has been having a difficult time fitting in with the wild crowd. And earlier, rangers lost track of him when his GPS battery died.

The size of that population, it turns out, is a bit controversial. One Chinese research team recently published a study claiming the population might be double the estimate of 1998’s Third National Survey. Using DNA fingerprints collected from fresh feces, they were able to identify 66 individuals in a key reserve. The Third National Survey found just 27 in 1998.

If this controversial study turns out to be accurate, pandas would be off the international list of endangered species. But perhaps they’re not out of the woods–or shall we say bamboo forest–yet. Read part 2 tomorrow to find out why, as I go panda tracking with a Chinese guy named Chuckie.

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