During my stay in Atlanta for the ASH-Annual Meeting I had the opportunity to visit the Georgia-Aquarium – one of the biggest Aquaria worldwide. In five wonderful “theme worlds” different natural maritime habitats and their inhabitants were presented.

Pictures from the Georgia Aquarium

yeah, after months of neglecting this page it’s time to give a live sign again… actually, i had some difficulties to remember my login ;-) So what happened in the last five or six months?! Went to work every day (even on saturday and sometimes sunday), ate and slept. last month i finally got my dissertation accepted – so now i’m entitled to sign my business card as “doctor med”. bought myself a water-bed, becaus if one has no spare time at all there is at least a bit of luxury in the night… and that’s it.

At 9:30am this morning my excursion to the body-worlds began. but first i had to pick up a friend of mine and we had a quick breakfast at his place. the drive to Frankfurt-Fechenheim was no deal but finding the event-hall in midst of an industrial park took us quite long. there were buses filled with crowds of highscool students awaiting us.. as if they had nothing better to do at 11 o’clock! even so it was not necessary to stand in line at the cash box (in mannheim visitors often had to wait 4h to get in!) … the admission charge was 9 Euro (reduced prize), catalogues and wireless info phones not included.

Unfortunately the exposition itself really was a big disappointment for me (maybe my expectations were to high?). the show room had only about 200 square meters, which is about 600 square feet, and there were only circa 25-30 full body plastinations and several smaller parts on display. Some of them were clearly designed only for cheap show effects and had no educational message at all, others i had already seen before. Just 1h later we were on our way back home & i had spent about 30 Euro altogether. btw. no cameras were allowed, so i don’t have any pictures for you. mind you, i would not show them anyway…

on the whole, instead of spending that much money for almost nothing, i would rather recommend to visit an anatomical institute at a university nearby. most of them have anatomical exhibits of their own and will surely let you see them (free of charge).

Hey, it’s snowing again! look at the picture! it is a wonderful winterly panorama. that weather makes it even harder for me to sit on my pc and re-edit my dissertation. i would rather be outside, having a snowball fight with my brother and sister or being sleigh riding… well, i guess i can take comfort in the thought that some of you out there don’t have snow at all ;-)

The notorious anatomical exhibition body worlds is back in germany again. it is supposed to have completely new and unseen preparations. back in the 90ies i have visited the showroom in mannheim and was quite impressed.
in the meantime the exhibition and his founder – the infamous “professor” von-Hagens, inventor of the plastination-method – has been the object of many scandals in regard to the aquisition of dead persons and other ethical questions (e.g. the correctnes of his professorship).
Von-Hagens, who has temporarily been a professor for anatomy at the university of heidelberg in the 80ies, is known to be a wacky/eccentric person. He has a strange, “artistic” approach to the prepararion of his anatomic exhibits, which i find quite inappropriate. He always said in defence, that the plastinated corpse has no identity any more, but becomes an article of virtue of it’s own, and noone will recognise the donator, anyway – thus the peace of the dead cannot not disturbed. Yet, lately von-Hagens plans to reveal the identity of each exhibit in order to rebut all reproaches linked to the alleged utilisation of chinese death-row-candidates for preparation! So, maybe every exhibit will soon be labled like that: “this has been klaus mueller from duesburg who died of heart failure”. How bizarre.
Nevertheless, i will visit the exhibition on wednesday, cause it is indisputable, that those plastinations are an invaluable source of anatomical education for medical students… if medical laypersons (even children) should be allowed to visit the exhibition, well, that’s another story!

Spirits will be high tonight as i’m going out for another gig! I’ll be playing at the annual winter-celebration of a local sport-club. this will be my last performance for now, for the next months or so i will concentrate all my energy to my new job in surgery. maybe i’ll be able to perform again in fall’04, noone knows… Currently i’m trying to learn the secrets of clean-css-programming. it’s like having to learn web programming from the scratch again. tables would be a lot easier – but also booooring i’m still wating for the right inspirational spark for my design anyway..

Hi @all, no big updates done – im quite a bit lazy at the moment. yesterday i spent my first time in the new lab at the surgery in heidelberg. i had to do the last brush-ups on my medical thesis, too. I’m suffering a lack of imagination and motivation for this homepage’s draft design.. so if you got some good ideas, feel free to share them with me. Oops, its late already. I’ve got to go now- we’re going to view “Lord of the Rings” for the second time tonight. *yipee*