For centuries, the human body has been a marvel whose inner workings have been largely unknown to each individual owner, unless he or she is acquainted with science or medicine.

Not any longer. The body beautiful has been dissected for all to see in museums across the land. Lots of people pay big money to see the graphic inside story of what makes them tick.

It will doubtless be the same when the Carnegie Science Center hosts "Bodies ... The Exhibition" in October for a seven-month presentation. Peeled of their skin, preserved in a special treatment called "plastination," set in different poses, 15 full-body human corpses will be on display along with 200 other body parts, including embryos and fetuses.

As educational as this will be, it is dubious and rather creepy territory, and it has prompted Elaine Catz, an 11-year employee of the Carnegie Science Center, to resign in protest. Does she have a point?

The exhibition is one of three such shows that have been drawing crowds around the world. As the Carnegie Science Center is in the business of educating its visitors about science in entertaining ways, this display is a natural.

Nevertheless, if organizers and future visitors are honest with themselves, they might concede that the educational experience is inspired in the first place by morbid curiosity. After all, the frisson that attaches to these shows wouldn't be the same if the corpses on display were mere mannequins. No, they were once living, breathing people and that is part of the fascination.

That should sound a warning to anyone who cares to reconcile the show's educational value and its ethics, a challenge made more sensitive by the fact that such exhibitions are put on as commercial enterprises. Precisely because human cadavers are used, and respect for the dead is an ancient human instinct, a fine line exists between education and exploitation.

In an opinion piece she wrote for the Post-Gazette on Sunday, Ms. Catz was particularly troubled by the fact that the corpses came from China and were people who in life had never consented to being used this way in death. The bodies were unclaimed or unidentified and were delivered by police to Dalian Medical University, the partner of the company that puts together the show, Premier Exhibitions of Atlanta.

China is a major trading partner of the United States and a country with which Americans wish to maintain friendly relations. That doesn't mean that a blind eye should be turned in its direction. China remains a communist autocracy with a record of abusing human rights and executing prisoners with scant due process. It may be that everybody in the chain of delivery acted in good faith, but it would be naive to the point of moral obtuseness to ignore China's reality.

Still, if the deceased had consented in life to the fate of their bodies after death, it would be another matter. The problem is not that dissected bodies are put on display. Respecting the dead here turns on what the dead would have thought about it. Consent ought to be the standard protocol for such shows, whether from China or not.

Elaine Catz has a point, one that would-be visitors to this exhibit should think about first.