Von Hagens has organized numerous Body Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value.

[4][5] Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in Alt-Skalden (now called Skalmierzyce) near Ostrowo, Reichsgau Wartheland, in German-annexed Poland.

[6] When he was five days old, his parents took him on a six-month trek westwards, to escape from the advancing Red Army and the imminent Soviet occupation.

The family lived briefly in Berlin and its vicinity, before finally settling in Greiz, a town which was allocated to the Soviet occupation zone, so that Hagens grew up in East Germany.

While there, he began to question Communism and Socialism, and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from non-communist news sources.

[citation needed] Hagens has developed new body sectioning methods that yield very thin slices, which can then be plastinated and used for anatomical studies.

In 2002 Hagens performed the first public autopsy to take place in the United Kingdom in 170 years, before a sell-out audience of 500 people in a London theatre.

[22] Prior to performing the autopsy, he had received a letter from Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy, the British government official responsible for regulating the educational use of cadavers.

[23] In 2003, the television production company Mentorn proposed a documentary called Futurehuman, in which Hagens would perform a series of modifications on a corpse to demonstrate "improvements" to human anatomy.

Sizonenko, reported to be one of the world's tallest men at 2.48 m (8 ft 2 in), had played basketball for the Soviet Union and was later plagued by numerous health problems until his death in 2012.

Hagens himself testified to the committee; he said he had received nine corpses from Kyrgyzstan hospitals, that none of them had been used for the Body Worlds exhibition, and that he was neither involved with nor responsible for the notification of the families.

On appeal, a higher court in September 2006 reduced the penalty to a warning with a suspended fine of €50,000, which under German law is not deemed a prior criminal conviction.

[10] When appearing in public, even when performing anatomical dissections, Hagens always wears a black fedora (a reference to the hat worn in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt).

[38] In 2005, Channel 4 screened four programmes entitled Anatomy for Beginners, featuring Gunther von Hagens and the pathology professor John Lee dissecting a number of cadavers and discussing the structure and function of many of the body's parts.

[40] A four-part follow-up series entitled Autopsy: Life and Death was aired on Channel 4 in 2006, in which Hagens and Lee discussed common fatal diseases (circulatory issues, cancer, poisoning from organ failure, and ageing) with the aid of dissections.

In November 2007, another series of three television programmes was broadcast entitled Autopsy: Emergency Room,[42] showing what happens when the body is injured, and featuring presentations by the British Red Cross.