Paul Apodaca and Dave Wells have presented views which I am not in complete accord with; they will likely not agree with my views. That's fair. Paul Apodaca does not believe that children should be exposed to corpses in a museum context. He wonders whether or not autopsies and medical exams should be displayed if corpses are displayed. If memory serves, there is a museum of wartime pathology in amongst the cluster of Smithsonian buildings in Washington, DC, and I seem to recall that there were children there, looking at brain sections demonstrating the effect of various munitions on soft tissue, and other displays too numerous to detail here. One of the cable channels I receive on my television plays medical videotapes of operations. And then there are the bodies from Bosnia and Rowanda on the news and in the weekly news magazines. Dave Wells believes that the act of archaeology is desecration. I could not disagree more. Science is not tainted by hewing to a philosophy; a philosophy is nothing more than a framework within which a body of knowledge may be built. When the framework is no longer able to support the body of knowledge, the framework is changed. This has happened often enough in the past to assure me that it will happen in the future. But without addition there will be no change. To return for a moment to the original question, there are reasonable solutions to the technical problems of displaying human remains. The Getty Conservation Institute has been working on this problem for some years now and have developed some good solutions. The Canadian Conservation Institute has also developed some good solutions to the problem of creating and maintaining micro-climates. Jack C. Thompson Thompson Conservation Laboratory Portland, OR [log in to unmask]