There's a lot of nudging and snickering, but for the most part, the visitors are respectful. There are no looks of repulsion, no vomiting in the decorative rock gardens. They speak in funeral-parlor whispers and stare with slack-jawed awe. These are human beings they're staring at, after all, just turned inside out.

It's opening night of Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, the traveling exhibition that made its East Coast premiere last week at the Franklin Institute. On display are some 25 dead bodies posed in varying degrees of anatomical undress and more than 200 smaller specimens, all preserved by way of plastination. (For the non-Ph.Ds in the crowd, plastination is a process whereby the natural fluids that cause a dead body to rot are sucked out and replaced with polymers.)

Northface jackets and stroller-pushing dads abound on this rainy night, and a few of the visitors are on a genital hunt, heads cocked to one side as they search each plastinate for its respective sex organs. Two Dep-gelled twentysomethings have made a game out of it. "Here's your favorite part," one crows, crouching behind a chess player whose back is split open to reveal his spinal cord. Her friend ambles over, Timberlands clunking heavy with each step, and kneels beside her. "Duuude, you are messed up," he snorts. She's pointing at the plastinate's asshole.

OK, most of the visitors are respectful.

The media's desire to creepify von Hagens is irresistible, but he does the mad scientist thing just fine on his own. When I first encounter him, he's marching through the exhibit dressed like the Crocodile Hunter in a 30-pocket fisherman's vest and jungle-explorer hat, a Chinese shawl draped around his neck. An entourage of fast-talking Germans trails him, their stern voices boomeranging off the high ceilings. Von Hagens looks strange — like a lipless Hugh Grant with cheekbones wrenched tightly around screws hidden behind his ears. When he passes notes during the press conference, he scribbles furiously and dots his i's like he's stabbing an animal. His eyes pop like he's forever seeing a ghost, and his hands grip the podium until his knuckles bleach white. It's no stretch to imagine this man hacking up human bodies on what amounts to an industrial-sized deli slicer.

The exhibit of his macabre work starts gently with elbows, ankles and ligaments but segues promptly into sagittal body slices illuminated on light boards the way amethysts glow in gem shop windows. They look smooth and, I imagine, cold to the touch. I shudder.

Burgundy scrims hang throughout the exhibit, each printed with a quote by the likes of Nietzsche, Kant and Goethe. (In a move of unparalleled modesty, von Hagens also quotes himself.) The concession stand for the nearby Tuttleman IMAX is shilling hot pretzels and liquid cheese, but it's the nauseating scent of buttered popcorn that wafts through the exhibit.

A pig-tailed girl in a red jumper skips toward her father, chirping, "Did you see that body chopped in half, daddy? It's really weird and gross and cool!" She freezes before a plastinate of a dribbling basketball player. His taut muscles are sandstone pink and have the texture of an overcooked pot roast. I imagine he'd taste a bit like beef jerky.

Behind me, a yankee cowboy rubs the shoulders of his blond girlfriend and kisses the back of her neck as she stands in utter revulsion before a skeleton with a Halloweenish glass eye gaping from its socket. "Holy moly," he murmurs.

A boy wearing an orange Jaws of Life T-shirt — clearly the son of a NASCAR fan, judging by Mom's haircut — bounces from plastinate to plastinate, laying his sausage-link fingers everywhere there's a Do Not Touch placard. He points at one guy's dangly penis before grabbing at his own crotch through Hawaiian board shorts. "That's right, baby doll," Mom says absentmindedly as she rummages through her purse.

Across the room, a graying man pores over a glass case juxtaposing the tar-black lungs of a smoker with a set of peachy-whites. His face reveals nothing as he fingers the cellophane on the unopened pack of Marlboros peeking out of his shirt pocket.

"Yo motherfucker, check this shit out! That's some motherfucking sick-ass shit right there," a guy dressed in head-to-toe green like a St. Paddy's Day blimp hollers into his cell phone. A bling cross swings from his neck like an albatross as he saunters from one body to the next.

A young girl and her mother mosey toward a digestive system stretched out like a garden hose. Mom points at the tongue and makes a whizzing sound while dragging her finger down the length of the esophagus and intestines. "And then you poop," she concludes triumphantly, finger on the anus.

It's at this moment I'm struck by a minor epiphany: Though every specimen in von Hagens' exhibit is accompanied by a detailed explanation, there's little room for learning when 70 percent of its visitors fancy themselves insta-doctors. "The nice thing about the cerebellum…" starts one guy, who can only be described as a Swedish tourist dressed like Joey Fatone. It's clear this man has zero clinical training beyond whatever impress-a-chick facts he retained from his high school anatomy class, and yet his date, a well-endowed brunette teetering on bird legs, nods with the selective bias of a bobblehead doll.

Upstairs, a smartly worded sign warns visitors of grotesque child deformities and the mother-with-baby dissection that lie beyond red curtains in the prenatal display. "Oh my word!" gasps one 700 Club mom, leading her shocked daughter to a nickel-sized embryo floating in clear liquid.

"You can see its fingers!" the daughter exclaims.

"That's right," 7CM says, eyes darkening. "And the law says you can abort that beautiful little thing. Would you believe that?"

Body Worlds grand finale features a rider straddling a rearing horse, but the Really Fucking Disturbing Award goes to — drum roll, please — the plastinate holding his own skin in his hand. Look closely and you can see the fine lines in the knuckles, the pores on the forehead and the hairs sprouting on the big toe.

Then, it sticks: These are human beings. They were alive at some point. They had first and last names, husbands and wives, maybe even children. They worked day jobs and had sex and read newspapers just like this. Fuck, they probably even waxed poetically on the nice things about cerebellums.

Which leads me to the same questions the other 17 million people who've seen this exhibit have no doubt asked: Is Body Worlds an educational endeavor or just a morbid sideshow? Is von Hagens one of the greatest physicians of all time or a crazy psychopath who happened to get his permission slip signed?

I search for answers amid the gushy praise and Biblical quotes in the guestbooks near the exit.

"Not suitable for 8-year-olds," reads one scrawly note. And directly underneath that: "Science is suitable for any age."

1. So you want to be famous, eh? Forget it. With the exception of one tattooed plastinate, all donated bodies are stripped of their names and identifying characteristics.

2. You get no money for donating your body. Not a red cent. Further, your family foots the bill to ship your dead ass to an embalming facility.

3. The foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to, um, nothing? Read the fine print: Very few specimens get the full-body treatment. Most folks are reduced to a fatty liver, arthritic knee or other "problem" part.

4. Immortalization is badass, right? Thing is, you have no control over how you'll be immortalized. If the thought of your exposed brain forever donning a pimpish Fedora and/or your body being contorted for all eternity in a What's Happening!! pose that begs to be high-fived by petulant preteens even remotely disturbs you, think twice about plastination. Going out on a limb here, but I doubt the gal with the massive constipation thought this would be her legacy.

Still interested? Detailed information on the donation process is available at www.plastination.com.