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UPDATE: For the latest news, please visit Boycott Bodies the Exhibition

Summary: ABC News 20/20 report states that Premier Exhibitions, the company producing the Bodies the Exhibition currently shown at Museum Center may be using executed prisoners.  New York’s Attorney General has opened an investigation.  Subpoena’s have been issued today.

From Kansas City Star: More questions raised about origins of bodies on exhibit

However, the focus of the “20/20” report, airing at 9 tonight on KMBC-TV, is on discoveries that Ross made during a recent visit to China. In an interview Thursday, Ross said that university officials in Dalian told him that, contrary to Premier’s assertions, they were not the sole supplier of cadavers to “Bodies: The Exhibition.” That show is Premier’s highest-profile anatomical exhibition and has just begun a seven-month run at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

“We found in fact they don’t come from the university but from a company on the outskirts of town in a series of ramshackle warehouses on a dirt road,” Ross said. “It’s run by somebody who’s a professor at the university, but it’s not the business of the university. The question is, where does he get the bodies?”

Ross said he visited the compound briefly, before officials ejected him and his crew, and interviewed a former employee who said that at least a third of the cadavers he processed were bodies of executed prisoners. That’s an allegation human rights groups have made about anatomical traveling shows and one that Premier has repeatedly denied. In 2006, Arnie Geller, the CEO of Premier, told The New York Times, “We traced the whole process. None of these would be executed prisoners.”

Ross said that’s what a Premier official told him, too. But he said the ex-employee is certain of the corpses’ provenance, “because he was involved in going around China picking them up.

From WCPO Channel 9 Cincinnati 11:00PM 2/14/08 News:
“The Bodies exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center has drawn thousands of curious visitors since it opened this month but a new ABC investigation reports an underground black market is providing the bodies.”

From Good Morning America 7:30AM 2/15/08
New York Attorney General is probing Premier Exhibitions and has issues subpoenas today.

From ABCNews.com: Exclusive: Secret Trade in Chinese Bodies

In an interview to be aired Friday on the ABC News program “20/20,” Dr. Gunther von Hagens also says an underground black market is providing bodies to Chinese companies that export them to the U.S. and Europe, despite a 2006 Chinese law prohibiting the export of human bodies for commercial purposes.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was investigating the allegations.

Von Hagens says he had to cremate several bodies he received in China after detecting injuries that led him to suspect they had been executed prisoners.

“There is now no way for me any more to work with specimens in China,” said von Hagens, who says his company in China now only deals with animal specimens.

Knight Rider debuts this Sunday February 17, 9:00PM on NBC.

If these clips are an indicator of the quality of the new Knight Rider, you’d be best off setting your expectations low.  Real low.  The acting in the third clip is particularly cringe worthy. 

I think it would have been funny if they had just brought back a drunk David Hasselhoff and the original KITT Trans AM without updating anything.

UPDATE:  See the video of the 20/20 Investigative report here.

I was told on Monday that ABC’s 20/20 is airing this Friday, February 15 at 10:00PM (Channel 9), an investigative report on Bodies Exhibits including the Bodies the Exhibition that is being shown at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

This story has been described to me as “remarkable”.  Brian Ross visited China to determine the origin of the bodies.  I am told that it will be one of the best stories on 20/20 in a long time.

This has the potential to be something quite embarrassing for the Cincinnati Museum Center.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the controversial exhibit that is showing at the Cincinnati Museum Center, you should tune in.  Should be interesting!

UPDATES: Most recent on top

UPDATE: Preview of the 20/20 Episode will take place on Good Morning America 2/15/08 around 7:30AM.  WCPO Channel 9 will be interviewing the reporter Brian Ross at noon.  The six o’clock news will have interviews of Ross, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, CEO of the Museum Center, and myself.

UPDATE: Description of the 20/20 Episode

Plasticized bodies — every vein, muscle, organ and bone of what was once a real person, carefully preserved in ways that were not possible before — have become blockbuster attractions across the country. Millions of people have paid to see the bodies that are put on display in a full range of poses, such as running with a football or dancing.

But with the growing popularity have come troubling questions about the bodies. Whose bodies are they? Where do they come from? And is it educational and scientific, as some people say, or are these cadavers just being used for entertainment?

A three-month “20/20” investigation into the business of bodies tracked the ghoulish process to its origins — from a body processing factory on the German-Polish border, to Internet sites that offer the plasticized bodies for sale, to a rundown warehouse in northern China where “20/20’s” undercover cameras saw what has, until now, been kept well hidden.

UPDATE: Now listed on the ABC’s 20/20 Page

Friday, Feb. 15 at 10 p.m.: Brian Ross Investigates: Millions pay to real human bodies on display in exhibits. Whose bodies are they and where do they come from?

LINKS:
Boycott Bodies the Exhibition Cincinnati
Bodies: the Exhibition in Cincinnati. Unethical.

So, what does the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Tropicana Casino have in common? They’re both currently showing Bodies the Exhibition!

It’s funny how at the Tropicana it’s listed as “Entertainment”.  So, now you can play some slots and then check out some dead people. 

So, is Bodies the Exhibition really about education or is it about entertaining and profiting off of the dead? 

From Time.com: Are Plastic Baby Bottles Harmful?

If a new report is to be believed, an entire generation of children has grown up drinking a toxic chemical from their earliest months: bisphenol A. A consortium of North American environmental and health groups released a paper Thursday showing that many major-brand baby bottles leach bisphenol A, and is now calling for a moratorium on the use of the compound — used to make polycarbonate plastic — in food and beverage containers.

More scary stuff to think about for parents to be.  This is like the previous story about sugar sugar substitutes.  Are all the products and chemicals that we create benign?  Are there real potential risks or is this something our bodies can cope with and is no big deal.  It’s interesting because we really don’t know.

From Time.com: Can Sugar Substitutes Make You Fat?

What they mean is that like Pavlov’s dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, animals are similarly trained to anticipate lots of calories when they taste something sweet — in nature, sweet foods are usually loaded with calories. When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows.

Our bodies are experiments for all sorts of chemicals that we’ve created.  But, how much do we really know about what we’re eating.  The long term impacts of eating processed foods are just beginning to show themselves and we may not like what we’re finding.

From BBC World: Kilmer ‘will voice’ Knight Rider

I was wondering why Val Kilmer would take the job as the voice of KITT on the kind of bad looking Knight Rider remake, but it looks like the “Iceman” has let himself go a little.