Days before we finally left Kenya, we took a short flight out of Nairobi's Wilson Airport en route to the Masai Mara. The flight path took us over Kibera, and the slum took our breath with its sprawling size: 630 acres packed with over one million inhabitants. The bird's eye view revealed shared roofs of corrugated metal, held in place with large stones; narrow red tracks of packed dirt serving as roads; houses wedged tight together, their foundations made of compressed trash that wouldn't serve to hold them in the next heavy rain.

In watching The Constant Gardener, I don't know that we could say we had missed the slums themselves, but we did miss the people we'd met there. We enjoyed the scene in which Tessa Quayle makes her way through Kibera, greeted by broad Kenyan smiles and the chorus of "How are you?" That had been our experience in Kenya too. And so watching The Constant Gardener was, in some ways, a revisit to the country we'd learned to love over our short stay.

But the film also raises troubling issues, of course. Dysentery, malaria and tuberculosis plague those living in the slums, and the film centers around the behaviors and misbehaviors of a pharmaceutical company "testing" their drugs in Kibera. We watched Justin Quayle slowly uncover the mystery of his wife's murder, and the parched, desolate landscapes reflected the moral wasteland that this discovery exposed.

Yes, the bad wolf Big Business is at it again in Gardener, this time using and abusing the abundance of "expendable" people in Kibera to increase their profits. It's an outrage what these executives have plotted; it's a crime what their directors, doctors and lower management have willingly carried out. Justin's grief over his wife's death provides a tender foil to the idea of the person's expendability: Tessa haunts and comforts him with her playful smile. When a well-meaning associate encourages him to give up his quest for justice, Justin's response is telling: "I can't go home," he says. "Tessa was my home."

Expendable, indeed.

It's a relief, isn't it, when we watch movies like this one, to know that we are not the bad guy. We would never regard human life so lightly; we would never devalue an individual so irreverently. Things like this--they happen in Africa, or in Germany during the Second World War.

But time and distance deceive us; an altered context prevents our seeing that we might, in fact, share this disregard.

As an example, I offer the immensely popular "Bodies... the Exhibition," currently enjoying a lengthy stay at our local mall. This nine-room exhibit offers a detailed and educational look at the workings of the human body. Each room features a different system--digestive, reproductive, nervous, circulatory, muscular, respiratory, urinary--as well as rooms on fetal development and a variety of health problems. Low and well-designed lighting accents the various aspects of the various systems; printed cards name and describe what you are seeing.

The exhibitions themselves are visually engrossing. Here we have the nerves of a human body stretched out and placed between sheets of glass. We are amazed, looking on, at the fine intricacy of these delicate red lines, of the invisible web that lies just below the surface of our skin. And here we have a soccer player in full action: one leg bent and weight-bearing, torso parallel to the ground; the other leg in full vertical extension, soccer ball at the tip of his toe. Dispossessed of his skin, the figure offers us close study of the taut musculature of his legs and stomach, the way the muscles seem to wrap around and fix themselves to the bone.

Sounds good, doesn't it? A great, educational way to spend an afternoon. The only problem is that these aren't models, meticulously recreated by artists with plastics and silicone in the hopes of educating a knowledge-hungry American public. No. These are real human bodies, dissected and then preserved with meticulous care by scientists in the hopes of a healthy profit.

Make no mistake. I am not against dissection. I am not against profit. I am, in fact, decidedly for both of these things, for their disparate and excellent benefits.

But I am not for the disregard of human life, or human dignity. And this, I fear, is the ugly underside of this exhibit.

These bodies were "harvested" from morgues in China. They were unclaimed bodies, unidentified persons who, for whatever reason, would not have dignified burials in which their lives were honored or celebrated. And while the use of such bodies might be of some use to science, their owners--the people whose souls inhabited them--did not give permission for this dissection and exhibition to a paying public.

I realize that this might serve as an excellent reason to use these very bodies. The fact that they are unclaimed might, one may argue, make them "public" property. But it is this very fact--their lack of identity--that exposes our thinking in this regard. If we knew who they were, we would not do this to them. And why would we not do this? Because this is not respectful, not honoring, not, frankly, decent.

You doubt me? Ask yourself this: Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales, whose untimely death ten years ago this month is being revisited often of late: would this ever be her fate? To have her skin peeled off so that you might see the workings of her circulatory system? Or the royal womb that bore the next King of England?

Our scientists are capable, I am sure, of reproducing in model form the various systems of the human body. Many schools, in fact, have such models for their students' study. But an exhibit of models wouldn't raise much revenue, I fear. I'm quite sure that such an exhibit couldn't afford the rent in so fashionable and shiny new a space in our local mall. People come to this exhibit because these are real bodies.

In one room, the body of an overweight woman is cut lengthwise three times, so that one can see the breadth of her body in cross-sections. The fat around the outside is a thick layer; the shape and substance of the various organs are indiscernible in their sliced state. This exhibit warns of the dangers of excess weight, or maybe it serves to show a different angle on digestion. I don't remember exactly what its point was.

The advertisement for Bodies... The Exhibition reads that the exhibit serves to "unite us all as humans," but I don't think it does that at all. Instead this exhibit serves to make somebody a sweet profit out of the public's morbid curiosity. One can't regard the skinned and posed figures as human beings at all. That would be--and is--horrifying. Instead, they are merely an afternoon's entertainment.

Perhaps the connection between the "Bodies" exhibit and the deaths in The Constant Gardener seems a bit far-fetched to you. But honestly, the only difference between them is that, in the case of "Bodies," all the victims were already dead. In fact, the thinking behind the exhibit might have been frighteningly close to these lines, spoken by a lawyer at the end of the film: "No, there are no murders in Africa. Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization, benefits we can afford so easily... because those lives were bought so cheaply."