Wonders of the body on display

I'm not much of an exhibit stroller. For me, a night at the museum is about 27 minutes, and that includes parking the car. I once did The Louvre in half an hour.

So it was completely out of character last week when I came to a sudden stop at the "Body Worlds" exhibit currently on display at The Leonardo in downtown Salt Lake.

I had been whizzing through, doing my usual LaDainian Tomlinson impression, speed-reading the information panels, passing school groups like they were backing up, when, suddenly, I stopped in my tracks.

I was in front of a javelin thrower, a man also frozen in place, his skin removed to show every blood vessel, tendon, ligament, muscle, joint, bone and nerve ending working together. The "Body Worlds" exhibit is filled with these specimens — actual people who donated their bodies to science and are now preserved forever, sans skin, through a process called plastination. Some bodies, like the javelin thrower, are completely intact. Other displays show specific body parts, such as the brain, the lungs, the circulatory system, the nervous system and spinal column, and describe their functions.

The exhibit starts with the heart, the organ that is "formed first and is the last to stop working" and orchestrates a cardiovascular network of arteries, veins and capillaries that add up to a configuration that is 60,000 miles long, a distance equivalent to twice around the earth, or 600 trips from Ogden to Provo.

Within this incredibly compact transportation system, fitted inside a container about 6 feet by 2 feet, the heart pumps 1,800 gallons of blood a day (and you thought your Tahoe used a lot of fuel), sending oxygen via red blood cells that circumnavigate the entire body in less than 20 seconds. These cells travel 12,000 miles a day, and they then get up the next day and do it again.

In the meantime, nerve cells, or neurons, send signals back and forth from the brain at speeds of 250 mph — allowing that man to throw that javelin and do just about anything else he sets his mind to.

This entire body system, another exhibit shows, begins when a zygote — formed when a male sperm cell fertilizes a female egg cell — begins to immediately divide and multiply. Within eight hours it has already become 1,000 cells. Within two to six weeks of conception the entire cardio system is established.

"A work of staggering genius begins with a single cell," says the information panel.

That's what stopped me cold. That thought. That realization.

The human body is a construction beyond comprehension. The masterpiece of masterpieces.

I was walking through an exhibit looking at me. And I was amazing.