Body bits bought; in accociation with NHS north of type.

A BRITISH university is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on body parts preserved by the controversial German professor Gunther von Hagens.

Medical students at the University of Warwick will be given the opportunity to study more than 200 body parts preserved by von Hagens with his patented plastination technique.

Drvon Hagens' method involves removing fat and water from the body part and impregnating it with a polymer. His laboratory in Guben, Germany, has a ready supply of donors who wish to be immortalised in plastic.

The University of Warwick has paid pounds 400,000 for the haul of human parts after receiving a pounds 1.1 million grant from the area's Strategic Health Authority to develop the department as a centre of excellence in anatomical surgical study.

However, the Polish-born professor, who is rarely seen without a fedora felt hat, even during dissection, has attracted controversy. Six years ago he performed a live autopsy in the UK, the first since 1830, and after Channel 4 televised the event, more than 100 complaints were registered.

His Body Worlds exhibitions -in which plastinated cadavers, stripped of flesh and exposing muscle and sinew, are exhibited in natural human poses - have also provoked debate over whether his work is art, science or bad taste.

But Warwick Medical School's chairman of clinical anatomy, Prof Peter Abrahams, said the specimens were essential for anatomy teaching.