Monkey Business: The Mad Science of Serge Voronoff & Ilya Ivanov

tell me everything. You don't tell me that, whereas exactly you're looking for more of like a passing acquaintance, where you go how are you? And they go, I'm good? How about you? And you go I'm great, same old, same old, and like, see you next week absolutely or sometime. I promise I'll call. You can't tell me. There's not somewhere in between those two things, how are you? I'm all right, I'm okay and of sand and I'm hoping to get this done pretty quickly, I guess, so I

can move on to other work that I have to do. Wow, okay, and I'm wasting time here. I feel a little stressed out. How you're doing? So that's how I feel all right? Now? That got to see that got a little too much? What's stressing you out, Diana? I just need the perfect answer. God, um, what are we doing well? How are you? I'm good? I'm good. I was gonna say, we can share with everyone we've seen some good movies finally, because we saw some some stinkers, we'll we'll leave those out. I don't

need to be shipped talking, but I want to. But it doesn't matter. We're here to feel good. Nope was super good. Nope was awesome. Yes, I really loved Nope, very very much. A subversion of my expectations, very Spielberg, very Jordan Peel. I mean it was it was both of those. It was just like, it was great so far, really fun and I love their chemistry, and it was just yeah, fantastic, really good movie. Go see it and then I'm never going to stop talking about Pray Pray

on Hulu, the Predator prequel. It takes place in like on a Comanche land where the Predator shows up long before the movie Predator took place. Yeah, and it's so good. I can't stop talking about it because it's just such a tight movie. It's so narrow and focused and it just moves. You just always know what's happening, and there's not a bunch of extra bullshit. This movie couldn't have been any shorter than it was at like an hour forty minutes. It's so good. Yeah, please give me a

ninety minutes movies again. Yeah, every movie is like two and a half hours now, and sometimes they deserve it and sometimes they don't. Right, I'm fine with it if it needs it, you know, I'd hate for a movie to feel rushed. So if you got a two hour story to two and a half hour story, give it to me, but don't give it to me if you don't need to call an editor, call an editor who tells you to cut things you don't want to cut right, and then listen to him like Marsha Lucas. Yeah, I

need a good editor in your life. Here we go into an show, yes, um, but yeah, those are the two that really stood out for me. We're also watching The Sandman and Sandman Is. We both read the comics like many years ago. I loved them. Dave McKean amazing art from those comics also, and I think he did another project with Neo Game and that was really cool to Dave McKean. Uh. Yeah. He directed the movie Mirror Mask. Mirror Mask, which is one of my favorite movies. Um,

just for its effort. It's so beautiful, it's so unique, and it looks like one of his drawings come to life and it's just a little Alice Wonderline story and I love that as a template. So good. He does have some really cool, like surreal artwork, just very awesome, perfect artists for sand Man obviously, but so far that the TV show has been really good. I was very worried because I liked sand Man a lot, so I was like, oh, how can you possibly translate this? But

I've really enjoyed it so far. We're like three episodes in or something, I think. So I don't remember the comics at all. I read them in college, so my memories are gone from that era. Um, so I'm watching it. I'm like, I know I've read this, but absolutely nothing is coming back to me. And I'm loving it. So anyone who hasn't read the comics, I think you'd love it too. Totally agreed. Yeah, agreed, and that's our little pop culture catch up. Yeah, but we've been watching. Yeah,

I did it did what we've been watching? UM so excited to come here today with a story. I want to talk right off the bat before we get into it, because we're gonna, i think probably in the title of this episode already we're kind of interchanging the word monkey and ape. It's true, which, of course, you know, they're totally different things. The rule of thumb is apes never have tails. Monkeys almost always have tails, and apes are smarter. Most apes have tool usage of some sort, and monkeys

are dumb. You know, shit at you when you see like those videos. I love these videos in India where monkeys are just like a pest. They're like squirrels or something, just like you're just mind your business and all these monkeys just climbs in your window and steals your breakfast, like what the fun? Like, Oh my god, are there's four hundred monkeys in the road blocking traffic. I love that except that, Yeah, I would much prefer like a seagull to steal my sandwich than a monkey. Monkeys will

like bite you and fight you really like crazy. They're crazy out here. These are monkeying around. But apes, on the other hand, are slowly plowed at our demise. And to take over the world, and I for one welcomed them. They can't do a worse job, doubtful. Although you know, if we evolved from apes and they evolve, did they just become us? I would I would consider it a take two. Okay, they've they've seen so we we didn't have that luxury of having seen a failed version. Yeah,

that actually two point oh. They're like, okay, I see all the problems that we went with a lot of glitches on that last Yes, let's do a full reboot. Well, when they find this podcast half buried, half buried in the ocean, by the ocean, half buried by the ocean, they'll be like, what this love? I love it. There is a single unit of this podcast, a physical copy, half buried by the ocean, which I assume means it's half not buried by the right right because part of it. Otherwise,

how do you know it's there. You'll be able to see it sticking up out of the water. Well, so we're talking about apes today. We are talking about ape today, specifically apes balls, one particular part of the ape, So get ready for that. There's some surgery in this episode that made me very uncomfortable heads up on that could say, there's a lot of wrinkles to this story, but why would you? What did I? Why would I not tell

him what it's about? All right? So listen. When Charles Darwin published Origin of Species in efty nine, he threw the scientific world into a fervor trying to either prove or disprove his theory of single origin evolution. Then in a German scientist named Hans Friedenthal did a blood cell analysis and he proved that chimps, gorillas, and orangutans were

closer biologically to humans than we had originally thought. So all eyes were on apes after that, and apparently the Soviet Russian government in particular tries some weird ship with primates, and one Russian scientist, Serge Vordenov, thought monkey balls would make you live forever, and he grafted testicle tissue from monkeys onto human men's scrotums, saying that it would, you know, help you look younger and live longer, and stuff like, legit,

Oh you're looking so dooy and fresh this morning. Thank you. I just had the monkey balls scrafted to my scrotum. Well you can tell it looks you look amazing another guy. Oh yeah, Ivanov was called Red Frankenstein for his experiments trying to impregnate chimps with human sperm and vice versa.

And when these files were declassified by the Kremlin in the nineties after the fall of the USSR, headlines like the Sun in London suggested that this work was really about creating super strong hybrid soldiers for quote Stalin's Mutant ape Army. I mean the original Captain America right. Basically, yes, they were in checked in serums, into things and hoping for the best. Obviously, this is like the dream prompt of a thousand fledgling sci fi writers. The idea grabbed

ahold of our imaginations for years afterwards. But what really happened with these sandbags scientists? Let's find out. It's time for some monkey business. Hey the French, come listen. Well, Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no matchmaking, a romantic tips. It's just about pardiculous relationships, a love. It might be any type of version at all, and abstract const a concrete wall. But if there's a story, were the second Glance ridiculous rolesque a production of I

Heart Radio? Should we do it cover the song that's just Us Going Beautiful. I hope you recorded that because I don't think we should, but I think we should share that. All complaints can be forwarded to iHeart me alright. The first guy that we're going to cover is Ilya Ivanov, our Red Frankenstein human z experiment er. He was born in eighteen seventy in Curse, Russia, and he graduated from

Kharkiv University in eighteen six. He concentrated his research efforts in bacteriology at the Institute pissed Her in Paris before he worked with the world famous physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Oh I just started drooling, okay. Now, Pavlov was hard at work on his experiments with digestion, conditioning, all that stuff, while Ivanov was helping to pioneer the brave new world of artificial insemination and using some of the same surgical

practices as Pavlov. Ivanov was able to successfully extract animal sex glands and develop techniques to artificially inseminate pure bred horses. He was able to prove that artificial insemination was more efficient than natural insemination. One stallion could possibly impregnate twenty to thirty mayors naturally, while Ivanov could use one stallion to inseminate five hundred mayors. Oh my goodness, that's a

lot more that stallion has. Too many little stallions runned, Nick Cannon, that's gonna say, or Elon Musk apparently right, it's not my child. I live to procreate the he's on horse, Mori, you are the father, alright. So this was hot stuff because pure bred horses. I mean, they're still worth a lot of money today, but back then, horses were like, hello, the main form of transportation. Also, they were like essential for farm labor, which was kind

of important. So from right exactly, So it was really noteworthy that this guy had a way to get five mayors pregnant with just one stallion. His theories were expanded to include more farm animals, and Ivanov became internationally famous as the leading expert on artificial insemination for the first AI. Yeah, a lot of the articles keep saying like he used his work in AI to DA and I'm like, wow, you just can't use this. You can't say that anymore.

It's a different things. That makes that Spielberg movie with Haley Joel Osmond very different. Artificial insemination starring Jude Law. I'll tell you what. It would sell out quick. Okay, a lot of people would probably select Jude Laws. There don'tor now. It wasn't long before this guy's scientific mind started wondering what else he could do with a whole

bunch of sperm. He thought that he could probably crossbreed closely related species to create novel types of domestic animals, like, you know, like the multipoo or or something like that. You know, it's like the first guy to go, what what if we take dog and make it slow it can no longer breathe? That sounds so cute. I would love to have one in my birth. Adorable crushed face, total respiratory ailment permanently. I love a Storis dog. But he did create the z dunk, which is a zebra

donkey hybrid and an awesome animal. Say totally hang out with z do right, So thank you Ivanov for the z donc He also created a zoobron, which is a cross between a European bison and a cow, and he made various combinations of rats, mice, s, guinea pigs, and rabbits. Now it is so illogical. Conference In nineteen ten, he first floated the idea that it might be possible. He's like, I did it with rats, I did it with zebras

and donkeys. I bet you I can make hybrid of human and ape, our closest animal relatives, Ivanov, I think you'll need another vodka had three bottles already. This is when I came up with the idea. But it wasn't until that Ivanov got the chance to put his theory to the test. Now, by then Russia had gone through two revolutions that had deposed the czar and established several political parties, and then they went through a very bloody civil war between the far left Bolshevik Party and the

other factions that had sprung up after the revolution. By the Bolsheviks had one and they reorganized themselves as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that we all know and love. They created a whole army of James bond Villain's there you going. Ivanov was at the Institute Pasture working on sperm disinfection when the institute offered him a great opportunity to try out his human hybrid theories. There's a few people whose sperm I'd like to where's all

that research. Now, the institute couldn't provide any cash money for travel or operational expenses, but they did have a bunch of chimpanzees available at a facility in French Guinea, which was the French colonized area of West Africa. Now, I have to point out that at this time, primate

researchers like Ivanov and others did not just stick with chimpanzees. Specifically, they ascribed to a polygenetic theory of human evolution, which believed that each race of humans evolved from different species of ape. Okay, so like your race, your skin color had something to do with your ape ancestor, so Asian

people were from some type, white people were from another type. Yeah, this they believed orangutans should be crossed with humans of the quote yellow race, guerrillas with humans of the black race, chimpanzees with the white race, and gibbons with quote the more brack is cephalic peoples of Europe, which probably meant Jewish people. Okay, so this was not just a very racist theory of evolution, but they were like, how can

we make this more racist through our terminology? It also really makes no sense because I was like, well, maybe has something to do with like the country of origin of the species of ape. Like you know, they're like, well, you know, guerrillas are from Africa, so they should be with African people and then whatever. But like orangutans in gibbons and stuff are all from Indonesia and Asia. So it's like, how it really just said? It makes no sense, Like it makes no sense of I'm checking my zoology

book here, and I don't believe chimpanzees are indigenous to England. Yeah, I don't. Scandinavia. Don't think they have a lot of chimpanzees swinging around Denmark. I agree. I agree with that. I will say that Charles Darwin himself, he was like, it's a single origin theory and not a multiple origin theory. He was like, I don't believe that the races have a different ancestor we all have the same ancestor we're all the same species. That is the dumbest should ever heard.

One guy named Doug kind Doug, that's my single origin. The picked up a stick and everything changed. So at any rates, there are a lot of different types of apes being used in these experiments. Um Ivanov specifically wanted to use chimpanzees. But at any rate, he figured without any money, he wouldn't get very far to get to

these monkeys. So he pitched his experiments to the Soviet Financial Commission and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, saying that he wanted to test the hypotheses as some of these existing scientific theories. Now Scientific American says that he wanted to build on Hans Friedenthal's nineteen blood cell analysis that we mentioned earlier. Hans had also said that the reproductive cells of primates and humans could possibly be compatible. So

Ivanov was like, let's find out for sure. If you could just fill this small cup for me, there are some magazines in the bedroom. Just let me know when you're finished. Clearly label your sample. Police, don't forget to lock door, because last time very embarrassing. We've had the

men the accidents. Doug was here, whole disaster um. There was also this Dutch zoologist and a German sexologist, and they had separately proposed experiments where they were going to win seminate chimpanzee females with human sperm to see if they would get pregnant. Now, neither of these two ever made it past the planning stages, and that Dutch zoologist actually got fired from his teaching position just for suggesting it.

The Danes were like, not here, we don't do that. Yes, we have recently decided that when there's something rotten in the state at Denmark, we are going to stomp it out quickly. Okay. But with Ivanov's pitch there was also this added political element because he also said that if he could prove that chimps and humans were biologically compatible, this would prove Darwin's theory of evolution and that would be a real disk to religion. And the Bolsheviks themselves

were atheist, so this sounded great to them. They were like, well, in terms of stumping up the Agin, this is kind of big win for us, right, Russian Orthodox Church was pretty big over there. That's a big, big change to try to make in your citizens. I think we're all watching The Great right exactly. Spindle guy has all sorts of plans, so many long tongue creepy beard. Also side note that actor who plays the head priest on The Great is the voice of the chimp on The Umbrella Academy.

So it all ties together a single, single origin and it's that guy, he's Doug. The Soviet government may have been interested in this proposal regardless of the religious angle, though, because New Scientist quotes Alexander Atkins, a Soviet born specialist in Russian history at the University of Cambridge, pointing out that high ranking Bolsheviks believed that science could help them

achieve a socialist to utopia. Edkins says, quote, politicians could change the political system, nationalized industries, and turn farms into vast collectives, but the task of transforming people was entrusted to scientists. The aim was to match people to the socialist design of Soviet society. So, yeah, Soviet science was really interested in what's called positive eugenics. Positive so positive with big smiley emojis. Yeah, just gotta be upbeat about

your eugenics. I'm more of a glass half full egist. Now, what what that means is that you're breeding for for certain characteristics, as opposed to the Nazis negative eugenics, which is where you sterilize or kill people with undesirable traits um so that they won't be able to reproduce those

traits um. So it's it just means you're breeding for or against positive still has the same eugenics problem of someone deciding what is a positive tread yes and this and saying if you aren't allowed to reproduce anymore than the world is better. It's quite a statement. Well, anyway, at this time, they were still all about eugenics, and the Soviets were really hoping to breed people who liked living and working communally. We're not competitive or greedy or

had any desire to own property. This kind of led some people to say instead of breeding a super strong mutant ape army, they were actually trying to create the perfect Soviet worker who was dumb, strong, and obedient. Edkins Anyway, Edkins thinks this is the main motivation for both Ivanov and the Soviet regime. So there's a lot of different reasons people think that they were into this idea, but he thinks this is the main one quote. Like many others,

Ivanov was swept along by the Bolshevik dream. So he kind of feels that they all deluded themselves into thinking that they could breed need a new society. Right, yeah, I mean you get what they're going for, right, living and working communally with no desire to own property and stuff like First of all, these aren't genetic traits. I don't think. I think a lot of them are learned traits. And sure you could say maybe people have a predisposition for it. I don't know, but it seems like these

are more environmental traits. I don't think you can breed out someone's desire to own property, because that's not a natural I don't think so either. Well, and I was like, and the main thing is that you're saying mammals. You know, these mammals are social creatures. They need each other they live, and that for safety and all that. But so are we, like, we are also social creatures. We have that already inherently

in us. It's just additional societal human things that we put on ourselves that make us want to own property and feel competitive with one another and all that. Right, They're just like no loaners, none of you weird kids who have lunch all alone, the corner of emo hair styles. Well,

whatever the motivation, Ivanov's proposal was accepted. He was given ten thousand dollars by the Soviet Financial Commission, and then, along with his son, he went off to a research facility in Western Africa to get going on his own experiments. But when he got there, he realized that all the big talk about this special scientific facility had been greatly exaggerated. He gets there and guess what, there's only two veterinarians

on staff. He also discovered documentation that around seven hundred chimpanzees had been bought from hunters since the station was founded in nine but more than half of them had died before they could be shipped to Paris to be

experimented on. Because like also, once it had been discovered that apes were our closest biological relative, all the scientists were like, oh my god, get me some apes, because they became the preferred species which to test things that, you know, to make sure they were safe for humans, like vaccines, other medicines, French lipstick, fumes, those big poofy collars. Uh, new sitcoms. They would show him sitcoms and be like they weren't laughing. Better put Kevin James in there. See

if we can't add to it. They all clapped. When he's all clapped Kevin, it's like he's one of their own. For Kevin James, what did he do to serve Paul Blart? That's what he did. I wish he'd make a movie about this and we could call it Paul Blart Ball cop Ball cop Oh my god. Okay. So, on top of everything else, Ivanov learned that the chimps that were still alive had been kidnapped as infants. They were still

too young to breed. Also the whole reason I can't write. Also, the staff of the research station were openly hostile to ivan Off because they thought that he was going to report back to Institute paste about all the terrible conditions, which I kind of hope he did. Jeez. So, according to an article in New Scientists by Stephanie Paine, Ivanov actually went back to Institute Pasteur for a few months to study various ways to capture and subdue chimps. I

guess that's pretty important. And he also worked with Serge Waranoff, our monkey ball rejuvenation guy. We're going to talk about him in a little bit, but they spent their summer together making headlines by transplanting a human woman's ovary into a chimp called Nora and then inseminating Nora with human sperm. So kind of Nora to volunteer for this, I'm sure,

I'm sure she raised her hand real quick. Those documents around. Yeah, I guess it did not work, unsurprisingly, but because by November he was heading back to try again with these young chimps in French Guinea. This time he inseminated three chimpanzees with human sperm and waited hopefully for a man a hybrid egg to attach itself. Listen, I gotta ask who is supplying all of this sperm because he's got sperm coming out of his nose. Oh, that's a whole

other medical problem that he needs to check out. Where did they graft the monkey balls hoops? See knife slipped speculation station. I think Ivanov himself would bring in a little sample every day I'm trying to create my son. But he's also a scientist, right so they feel, you know, you can't just use one source. You have to try many, right, right,

you need a control group? And yeah, so do you think that he would ask all his lab assistance like, hey, before you sit down, you know what you gotta do. Morning cup of coffee, Morning cup of And they were all like, this is the best job I've ever had. Well, anyway, no dice, not a single chimp person into Ivanhof with a hairy baby to call his own, and there weren't

enough chimps available to continue the experiment unless oh yes. Unfortunately, Ivanov had the worst idea of his life when he decided, Hey, if I can put the human sperm intut chimps, I can put chip sperm into humans. It works both way, the transitive property of human apes barn, you go up the stairs, you go down the stairs, they both, they do both, and so ivan offous thinking, well, I kind of can't assume that any human woman out there would

ever volunteer for this. So I just picked some random African women from nearby area and pretend we're doing a routine medical examination, then pump them full of chimp spurn without their knowledge or consent. Easy peasy. He pitched this idea to a local hospital, and of course you got to imagine medical professionals would be like, absolutely not. I swore an oath do no harm, I will not allow such experiments. But no, they completely agreed and he got

permission to do it. Fortunately, the general governor of French Guinea, Paul Porra, stepped in and said no, absolutely more no to this bullshit, and that left ivan Off without any money or options, so he and his son decided to

make like Meryl Streep and get out of Africa. Now, okay, this is where all the sources start to diverge on what happened here, because in Scientific American they say that he asked for women to volunteer to be impregnated with chimp sperm, and he found at least one to participate. Now in New Scientists, it says that only three of the chimps survived the journey to Russia, and by the time he had five volunteers ready, the only male among them died of a brain hemorry, so he didn't have

any chimp sperm to work with. Yeah, he sent them all letters like sorry waiting for sperm, please hold. But then an article from Brown University's Laboratory Primate Newsletter says that the research facility quote received letters from individuals of both sexes volunteering to give themselves to the research, but no claim as to specific events or individuals was ever forthcoming. Right, so did he get one volunteer five volunteers? No volunteers

like volunteers, but they never showed up anything? Right, or like it's so funny that it's both sexes to like, why what. Dude was like, yeah, I'm pregnant me. Do you not have any idea? What the fuss going on? And they're like, let's see if we can put a chimp uterus into you and killed ourselves a junior situation. Oh my god, would love a man ape junior situation.

Can we please have that movie when Kevin James is James is the ape who gives their uterus up to Arnold Sports, So I thought he would have the baby. I thought James is gonna but I thought Kevin James might play the baby. Oh he's he's the he's the hybrid. Yeah, they just CG. That's like the really bad CG from what we do in the Shadows. So they put his face a little chimp baby. I'm ready for this. I mean, I don't know why we don't have a studio or

we can produce once again. HBO. Max has been listening to the show. They are in touch regularly about giving us all kinds of deals. I mean when I say in touch, they haven't actually emailed us, but I imagine that they have drafts. I feel like they thought about They've got so much going on over there right now, we just got away for the dust to settle, and then there will be plenty of shows. They're actually they're changing it all up so they can make room for

our program kind of. I mean, you know some n d as we're not supposed to talk about it too much, but HBO is just making room for us. Is actually as you're not a afiliated with me, all right. But then Ilya Ivanov was caught up in revolutionary politics. The scientific faction, including Herman Mueller, who supported Ivanov's experiments. They were hoping that his genetic discoveries would help Soviet scientists figure out what qualities to select for in their positive eugenics.

So he's like, this is going to be really important work. He's telling Stalin, like this guy is awesome. Meanwhile, there's an opposing scientific faction who believed that any genetic research at all ever, would lead straight to fascism, and Stalin believed the latter. That led to a huge purge among scientists in primate research. Herman Mueller had to flee Moscow after advocating for Ivanov. Several of his colleagues were rounded

up and shot. Scientific Americans says that an investigation into Ivanov uncovered his idea to inseminate African women without their consent, and they had concluded that his behavior quote might undermine the trust of Africans in European researchers and doctors and make problematic any further expeditions of Russian scientists to Africa.

But of course Ilya was not in Africa anymore. Um So this kind of sounds to me like, oh, we came up with a really good excuse to get rid of somebody who we already wanted to get rid of. It just didn't have a good excuse. But here's a great one. But at any rate, Ivanov was caught up in this purge. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in nineteen thirty They said, you have no choice but to Stan's Diana does gen z hum. Yeah, that's medium TikTok stuff. Anyway.

He worked there in Kazakhstan for a zoological institute until his death from a stroke in nineteen thirty two. And he actually was absolved of all the claims against him a few years later, and Pavlov wrote his obituary Pavlov is a really big anti communist, and be as he was so respected, they let him get away with saying a lot of crazy shits about them. Now. In two Dmitri Shostakovich even sketched out an opera called Orango about these experiments, and it had a libretto written by Tolstoy,

real whose of Russian writers. Only about forty minutes of it exists and it was wholly abandoned by everyone involved. But in two thousand eleven it was actually staged by

the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I wish I'd seen it. The l A Times describes the plot as this quote the rise and fall of Orango, a k a. Jean Or, a human ape hybrid who becomes a virulent anti communist and newspaper baron through a combination of sleazy journalism, stock exchange swindles, and ruthless blackmail, before his corrupted humanity causes him to revert back to his best deal nature. He has then put in a cage and displayed as a

cautionary tale. So this sounds like the basis for Dunstan checks exactly hit Orangutan comedy of I want to say, Jason Alexander and a monkey in a hotel ape excuse me, Orangut. It's interesting how they're like, as soon as the ape became human, he became an anti communist, even though the whole point is to make people who want to be communists because of their ape tendencies. And then I love the idea of an ape doing stock market. I just want a m on the wall street, like bye bye bye.

He's got the little tie and glasses. He's sitting in a big yeah, throwing papers everywhere. So you know, that's just one crazy Russian scientist and his ape experiments. But we also have our friend, says Voronov, to talk about, and he thought monkey testicles could make you live forever. So let's take a quick break and come back with that right after this. Alright, apes and monkeys, welcome back to the show. Yea, and Serge Voronov is the name

and monkey balls of the game. Now. Serge Voronov was born in Russia in eighteen eighty six, but when he was eighteen he moved to France and he became a citizen in eight So people are like, he's a French scientist. Russian science are the two countries fighting for him being connected them or against Well, the Russians are like, no, he's French scientists. I think depends on which part of

his life we're talking about. He studied originally under transplant pioneer Alexis Kerrill, which is what got him interested in the possibilities of using animal to human hormone transfers to restore people to youth and vigor Then, in eighteen eighty nine, he started working with a seventy two year old experimental physiologist,

Charles Edouard brown Sequard. This guy also thought that animal glands had something to offer human beings, and now he gave a lot to science about how the spinal cord works. He was the first to theorize the existence of hormone,

but unfortunately he's best known for this little experiment. The same year Voronov started working with him, Brown Sequard injected himself with a serum made up of crushed up matter from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs and told an entire scientific meetings worth of people that it helped with rejuvenation and prolonged life. He said that it renewed his own muscle strength, and then he even told them that he had passed to the final test by quote.

Paying a visit to his young wife just hours before this lecture, which I love the idea of him mean, like and fellows, I God laid before I showed up here and Dick worked great, all exactly. I love this. The idea of this guy too, going to his wife, Honey, are you ready? I just injected myself with guinea pigs testicles? She's like, oh la la, now this this like this serum was not very well received by the scientific community.

It became known derisively as the Brown Sequard elixir. One newspaper jokingly likened it to post Leon's search for the Fountain of youth. Another said quote, the lecture must be seen as further proof of the necessity of retiring professors who have attained their three score and ten years little ages. But I mean, like this old man needs to go light out. At a certain point, you just start trying to justify your job in the industry, making some crazy

sh up doing the most right now. The widespread ridicule of the serum and the fact that it did not really have the anti aging properties that they were hoping for, made Voronoff decide that tissue grafting would be a much more effective treatment than injections. So in eighteen ninety six,

Voronov moved to Egypt and started studying eunuchs. According to a two seven scientific paper, he quote noted their obesity, lack of body hair, and broad pelvis is, as well as their flaccid muscles, lethargic movements, memory problems, and lowered intelligence. I'm thinking back to several stories we've done about a real smart eunuch. Hear the whole places bids. I'm just like, whatever you say. But Voronov blamed all these things on their lack of testicles, which he assumed deprived eunuchs of

all important glandular excretions. God, I'm no geneticist, but I can tell you that's false. Um. In his nine book, Life A Study of the me Means of Restoring Vital Energy and Prolonging Life, which is a terrible title, not an English major, I guess now he's like, I just need to lay out the fact. So in this ridiculously titled book, he wrote, quote, the sex gland stimulates cerebral

activity as well as muscular energy and amorous passion. It pours into the stream of the blood, a species of vital fluid which restores the energy of all the cells and spreads happiness. A healthy sexual gland tissue grafted onto the testicles of an aging man basically injected us with the vitality of youth. But not only that, he also believed that it could cure impotence, sinility, and schizophrenia. He also thought it could radically prolonged lives and improve your

sex drive. Truly a miracle cure step right eye. The question is what can't it do. It'll your baldness, It'll it'll make you grow an extra arm. Whoa who doesn't

need one of those? It'll try up your sinuses and He spent fourteen years working and studying at an Egyptian hospital before he returned to France, and then around nineteen seventeen, he started to receive funding from a wealthy American named Evelyn Bostwick, which gave him his chance to start experimenting on transplants on animals because they were expensive to get. You know, get the actual apes and put them somewhere and take care of them and all that. Evelyn also

translated that terribly titled book into English. She's just a real big fan of his work. I love monkey balls. She's She's like, figure out what I need to smear on my face. I looked young again. Voronov performed over five hundred operations where he transplanted testicular tissue from young horses and sheep to older horses and sheep and was like, look now they're they're back to their old strength again. They're neighing louder, they're running faster, they're bigger than they

used to be, all that kind of thing. And during the course of all these experiments, he decided that primates were the perfect transplant option for humans thanks to all those biological similarities we talked about, And in nineteen fifteen, he implanted a chimpanzee thyroid gland to a mentally disabled boy in France and claimed that over the course of a year, the boy's mental faculties returned to normal. He was no longer mentally disabled, which not a lot of

proof to back up that claim. It was just a picture before and after, and the kid looks a little older. I don't know, and it doesn't look like much changed, but okay, wow, now okay. Vordov started his testical transplantation with human to human tests. At first, he used the

tests of executed criminals and transplanted them into aging millionaires. Honestly, I'm surprised at this point the millionaires weren't like, no, I don't want to become a criminal, like you know, like like like what's that Simpsons where Homer gets the hair transplant from snake and the hair connects to his brain into a killer, which actually people did think that. I did too. He thought that it could. He wanted

to test it anyway. He was like, maybe that will give you certain characteristics of the donor, right, um, But I guess it was just the balls he could get his hands on. At the time. Well, this became a very popular experiment. I guess a lot of rich folks thought this was a great idea, and the demand for the procedure soon outstripped the supply of dead criminals balls. So Vornov knew he had to find a new source of nords for his marbles magic, so naturally, he turned

to apes. His first official implantation was June twelfth of nineteen t He he took giving you this paragraph. He took. He took thin slices of testicles from chimp, from chimpanzees and baboons, and he implanted them inside the patients scrowed um. Right. Yeah, he believed that the thinness. God, he believed that the thinness of the tissue would help the body fuse with it instead of rejecting it. I mean, at least he thought of that. It's just like, oh, oh, I feel

so much younger. There's a thin slice of eight balls in my scrowed um. God, I know, very craft. I mean the discomfort, like, there's no way this isn't weeks of recovery. Right. It does not say, but I would assume that. I mean, it seems like quite a thing to do to cut your scrotum open or cut it in any way. All right, let's stop, let's stop. There's a big here for four and off. Because he also married the American heiress and his biggest supporter, Evelyn Bostwick,

same year. What a what a time. Wow, He was like, I need to celebrate my first tectical transfer with a nice wedding night. But Evelyn sadly died only a year later, and her daughter, who was a gender nonconforming lesbian speedboat racer named Marian Joe Carstairs who is definitely getting her own episode at some point. She maintained for the rest of her life that Vornov had killed her mother for the money, and there was no evidence to back this up.

But Evelyn did leave Vornov a considerable inheritance and a large income for the rest of his life. So you know, speculation station he killed that woman, he killed her. I mean, I don't know, what do you think. He doesn't strike me as a killer. But but he needed that money, need that money needed to buy those monkey balls. Monkey balls aren't cheap. He's like, listen, I know that you pay for everything. I'll ready, But like, what if I

could just use it however I wanted. I guess that's my question, is like he she was already covering his expenses, right unless that year of time she started to get real, like particular about how he was spending his money or something the money or something like maybe, but otherwise she seemed to be so into it. What would be the point? All right? Well, anyway, by four and Off was the director of the experimental laboratory at the College de France.

Seven hundred of the world's leading surgeons at an international conference in London applauded his work rejuvenating old men. I mean, this guy was internationally respected for the work he was doing, and his work was so in demand that a facility in Africa was set up solely to capture and maintain apes for gland transfers, and that could actually be the exact same facility in French Guinea that Ivanov went to, because there weren't that many of these like primate reserves

already existing at this time. They were starting to get set up over these years, but um, there weren't that many, so it could be the exact same hospital. Also, one of the rumors around Ivanov's work was that the Bolsheviks sent him to French Guinea just to bring back monkeys for gland transfers, because they were like aging, you know, and they want to be rejuvenated for the betterment of

the people or whatever. Um. But our guy Atkins from that New Scientist article doesn't think that that makes much sense. In the article, he says, quote, if you want to cover up a bizarre scheme to rejuvenate aging politicians, then you wouldn't choose an even more bizarre project that's going to attract a lot of publicity, which is a fair point.

And also at this conference, Voronov announced that he was close to figuring out how to use his treatments to help women with rejuvenation and anti aging, because you know, women don't have testicles to graft things on. So he's like, I really got to get to work on that, and he promised at that conference to quote turn Randmother's into debutante. Throughout the nineteen twenties, the surgery was incredibly popular. It even inspired other scientists to get into the gonad game,

for example, Eugen Steinock in Vienna. He decided that a simple twenty minute procedure could do everything Varonov promised and more. McGill University's Office of Science and Society rights that quote. At the time, researchers had determined that there were two types of tissues in the testicles. Seminal tubules produced spermatozoa, but there were also cells between the tubules that released

sex hormones. Seinock's idea was that the two types of tissues compete for nourishment, and that stifling the sperm producing tissues would boost the production of sex hormones. So essentially, he would give men a partial vasectomy, and patients, who included Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yates, would call quote getting stein I've been stein Hey, you got Steinocked. Yet

we look great. He wrote that this damning of the seminal canal quote changed my patients from feeble, parched, dribbling drones two men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day, dragged loads of up the two hundred and twenty pounds, and even indulged in such youthful follies as buying land in Florida. I love that idea. Only a young man would buy land in Florida. Oh, I would buy land in Florida. But it's a young

man's game. What is it about Florida specifically? That's so. He also claimed that he had thrice rejuvenated himself, which as he is Austrian, right, which has McGill University just making sure I'm doing the right voice here, as mckill university points out, is a very strange claim because quote, once the duct is tied off, it's tied off. Whatever improvements Steinock and his patients felt was probably due to wishful thinking, because, as we now know, vasectomes do not

boost hormonal output by the testes. Sorry Steinock. Stein. Also, by the way, thought that he could cure homosexuality by transplanting a heterosexual man's testicle into a homosexual man's body for quote remasculinization. But fortunately nobody ever volunteered for this experiment for some reason, I don't even think they let him get to the point of asking. They were like no Steinock all right. But for Enough was going strong

throughout the twenties. He grafted over five hundred men himself with his hands, and his techniques were used on thousands more. Now we already know that for Enough ranched out a little when he worked with Ilya Ivanov to graft a human woman's ovary into a monkey and then tried to impregnate it with human sperm. Around Apparently he also transplanted monkey ovaries into human women as well, though it's not clear if he actually tried to inseminate them or not.

Likely the ovaries were just I assume rejected by the body so he never got that far, or they just didn't feel like mentioning it. I don't know. But for Enough also claimed to use his grafting techniques to create a flock of super sheep in n He said they were bigger and stronger, than non grafted sheep, and from that he hypothesized that a super human giant could also possibly be created through graphic Seriously, they're trying to make a Captain America here. Yeah, and it's so they're just like,

all you needed two balls and a dream. Why they came up with this whole problem with serum and the m c U when it could have just been sewing some balls out of the guy? Do you Roger's head had quickly agreed if they had said it done all it is a small operation, whatever it takes. He said, that's true. I could do this all day. And he's super strong, but he has a real hard time running because he's got four balls. Popular culture was rife with

references to this treatment time. The poet E. Cummings described war Enough as quote the famous doctor who inserts monkey glands into millionaires. A new cocktail called the monkey Gland, which is made of gin, orange juice, grenadine and Absinthe became the hottest new beverage. That is, so, why did you have to put grenadine in it? Because now with orange juice and grenadine, the color you're getting looks to me and I'm sorry for anyone's drinking this right now

while you're listening to our podcast. But it looks like a surgical fluid, you know, like I'm picturing that pinkish orange kind of thick that is. I'm sorry, it's something that came out of a Yeah. Sorry. They were like, we want to achieve a color that's really close to a monkey mall. It came into my head. I had to share it with everyone. That's what Boro said, all right,

if you would just keep these things to yourself. Also in Paris, a popular home decre item where ashtrays depicting monkeys protecting their private parts with the phrase no baronof you won't get me painted on. I want one of those ashtrays, so svariously, if any if there is one out there in the vinted the world, I would die towne it. That's hilarious. So good. No far enough, you won't get me with him covering his balls like there's the fourth one. Oh my god, alright, says let's I

get it. Let's go take a look at see what you can find. We'll take a quick mercial break and be right back. Welcome back to the show. Still haven't found the ash tray? But when I do, I promise I will post about it. Okay, So it seemed like the world was Varnov's rocky mountain oyster. But which is which? Is that a ball reference? Yes, that is a reference.

Apparently I only know this reference because one time I was at a at the farmer's market with my mom as a kid, and they had rocky mountain oysters for sale, and I immediately was like, how do they have oysters from the rocky mountains? Because oysters are living the ocean and I'm I'm a smart kid, and I know there's no ocean in the mountains. And Mom had to explain to me, with a very embarrassed smile on her face, that that meant bowl testicles. And apparently, yeah, it's rocky

mountain oysters or prairie oysters. Now we know, we all know. Uh, so you won't accidentally think you're eating mountain oysters. Sometime You're welcome. So Ornov is doing well. He decided to kick it up a notch by opening his own monkey farm in the Italian Riviera in ninety five. It was called Castle Vornov. He built a primate enclosure in the garden and hired a former circus animal keeper to run it.

And he also had a small hospital built on the ground so that he could do operations right there, truly a farm to testicle operations. He was charging around ten thousand francs for this operation, just a little hard to convert to today's currency dollars, but according to Atlas Obscura, that was a year's salary for a chorus member at

the Paris Opera. So some you know, just so you have a reference that you can make sense of, because we all know Um, with his inheritance from Evelyn and all this money coming in from the expensive operations, Voronoff lived in serious luxury, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous. Yeah, here's the monkey ball doctor living in his beautiful home, paid for by the testicles of hundreds of monkeys, maybe eight thousands. Thanks monkeys. They're selfless sacrifice.

I'm being told they were apes actually, which are far more intelligence even better. Wow. This guy occupied the entire first floor of one of Paris's most expensive hotels. He was accompanied by a bunch of chauffeurs and personal secretaries. He had valets, he had two mistresses. Was really living it up. He was making dough. But all this could not last forever. Oh serially, up said about that, you

can't go get that surgery right now. No. In the early nineteen thirties, many of Wornof's patients were surprise showing signs of aging. See that's the trick with anti aging stuff, is that people, it works for you for about ten years and then and then you see what's happening exactly. And that gave the many skeptics around the world a lot of ammunition for their arguments against and that. I will say that he was very popular. You know, pop culture was all over it. There were still a lot

of people who were like that don't sound real. But for enough explained that to his frustration, the gland graphs seemed to die off and stop being effective after three to five years, and while he could re rejuvenate his patients with another ten thousand franc operation, of course, it's always a solution that didn't work. Will just come play me to do with the get and then it'll work

three or five years. Um No, he said, listen, I'm working on a longer lasting technique where he would test the blood of the monkey and of the patient and make sure they were compatible blood types, I guess, and he felt that if he could work that out, he claimed that his graft would help someone live to a hundred and forty years old, which is a very specific

long number. But by scientists had isolated and identified testosterone, which Boredov had kind of been waiting for because he believed, you know, as we've talked about, he believed that the testicular gland secreted some kind of substance and once they figured out what it was, grafting surgery would no longer be required. They would have the substance they could use instead. So he kind of expected the discovery of testosterone to

back up his theories. He said, if patients were given injections of testosterone, they would become young, strong, and virile. But when his hypothesis was tested, of course, testosterone injections were not found to prolong life or help with anti aging. They just kind of boosted up some secondary sex characteristics. But that's kind of it. So what ironically, given Voronof's obsession with ball sacks, it's actually estrogen that has wrinkle

decreasing properties. Oh, he was looking in the wrong place for his anti aging. So Voronov's grafting theories fell out of favor and he stopped performing surgeries, but he continued to work at Castle Varnof, trying to cure other human ailments that he refused to name. Voronoff did have to flee the Nazis before the outbreak of World War Two, but then he was called back to France in nineteen

thirty nine to become a surgeon. Once the war was over, he went back to Castle Varnoff, but it had been decimated by bombing, and you know, unfortunately no word on what happened to the monkeys. Like to think. I like to think that a bomb landed like Pirates of the Caribbean style, just busted a hole open and didn't kill anyone. They just were able to scape. Yeah, and they've traveled to Rome and they overthrew the Italian government. They've been

ruling there ever since since. Now. Vorenov wanted to rebuild his castle, but he never did. In nineteen fifty one, he died in Switzerland from complications from a fall, possibly from pneumonia or a blood clot that might have traveled to his brain, which was just like how Margaret wise Brown died throwback. Now he was wealthy, but he had been discredited. Yeah, he never did rejuvenate himself, even though he said he would when he needed to. But I guess I guess when the needle got too close to

his balls he decided. You know, I'd rather be old. I never all thought from this angle, and I don't like it. I can't believe you will let me do this so many times. You're insane. Voronoff was outlived by his third wife, Gertie Schwartz, who was believed by some to be the illegitimate daughter of King Carol of Romania. For all you, King Carol stands out there, King Carol, I love. I don't know why, but it makes me think of the King Vitamin's cereal box. I don't know why.

But vitamin cereal did you talking about? Well, I don't. I don't know if anyone else knows what it is. It might be a generic like dollar store cereal, but we used to have it in our house. Um knock off. I guess King Vitamin anyway, unimportant. And now most newspapers when Borough died, they kind of acted like he had never been taken seriously. They didn't. Many papers didn't report on his death at all, which is sort of shitty because they were the ones being like, look at this

great guy. And in the ninety nineties, some scientists tried to say that Ornof's experiments actually transmitted the HIV AIDS virus from monkeys to humans, like it was all his fault, but a paper by Peter Bogick, Stephen Selman, and Michael A. Rees debunked that claim. They said, quote consent sys among virologists holds that HIV most likely originated from a chimpanzee virus known as Simian immuno deficiency viruses, which many agree was transmitted to humans during the hunting of primates in

the early nineteen hundreds. HIV isolate studies show that s i v was most likely transferred to humans from a chimpanzee species different from those used by war Enough. Again, horrible irony there that while we were hunting for primates to do all of our experiments on, we gave ourselves

a terrible virus, you know what I mean? Anyway, McGill University says that the doctor's experiments might be laughable, but actually he did make important contributions to modern endochronology, biology, and hormone replacement therapy, but quote his monkey transplants, however, join the ranks of medical oddities the scientific community would

rather forget. So, you know, we all have good and bad things we've done, right, it's just a good you know, it's a really interesting story to look into because of how much people believed this science and how much the scientists were believing it. You know, the Scientific American article was basically talking about Ivanov specifically to point out bad science when when science goes bad, because they were kind of like, this guy was funded by political political machine

to reach a certain conclusion. That's what they wanted him to get to his hypothesis, rather than disprove it, rather than you know, really maybe really look at research that disproved it. They're like, we want you to make it work exactly and and towards a political end. So they were talking a lot about what happens when science gets caught up in politics, who's funding what and why all that kind of contributing to bad science. And this is a really good example, both of these guys. They're a

really good example of that. But Voronoff, I get, I get the impression. I don't know if you feel this way or not having researched all this, that Vornoff wasn't necessarily snake oiling here. Like I think he believed what he was doing. Yeah, and and so like you said, like that pursuit, which he probably I don't know how he could have had more knowledge than he did on it, because you know, we learned afterwards. Well, that was a

dumb idea. There's a lot of hindsight and science that makes stuff look stupid and silly, like what were you thinking? But somebody had to try it, um, you know, to learn and and I while I think that the idea is ludicrous, and I'm not happy with the idea of the rampant animal abuse um and the embedded racism and eugenics behind a lot of it and everything like that. Uh, you know, there are some really gross sounding science things that have ended up being tremendously beneficial. Know. First one

pops into my head is like eating termites. You know, they're like cultures that are like if you came to me and said, I wonder if I could eat this bug, I would say that's an insane thing. Why would you experiment with that? Don't do that? But somewhere for a long time people been making making healthy meals. True bugs all on crickets and stuff follow on crickets. So, I mean that's a good point too, is that you're like, you know, it's really easy to laugh now, but at

the time they really didn't know. I mean, they had just learned that there was even any kind of connection between primates and humans, and they were trying to figure out what that really meant for us. So you have to try a lot of weird ship. So and I think Ivanov similarly, it was not necessarily snake oiling. I think he really did believe, like there's something useful here

for my country, for my my for humanity overall. You know, I don't I don't think there's a lot of malice in either of them, but it anyway, yeah, hard to say. I'm very fascinating. Felt a little more his felt little, I mean, not not intentional malice, but that kind of eugenics idea of like, well, if I just made everyone a little stupider by breeding them with apes, that we'd have a better society because people would stop wanting things

for themselves. Yeah, totally got a better world, well for whom, which, again, I mean just kind of tells you, like how politics influences science sometimes in a very very bad way. It doesn't, it doesn't give us anything. You know, that didn't contribute much to anyone, but we got our giant super cheep out of it, at least, thank god, that's what everybody was really look at for. Just create a Soviet army

of super sheep. Well, and then also, I will say scientific American because he did have that gross idea to insciminate those women without your consents, and that's really gross, and they Scientific American pointed out. Quote, while there was apparently no overt racism in his research, his decision to inseminate African women without their knowledge or consent can only be understood in the context of a racist and sexist

colonial attitude. So again, if you're looking at science in history, you kind of have to look at the overall everything else going on in that, you know, That's why it was. I guess it wasn't super relevant, but it was important to know. Like, not that long before all, this was when Charles Darwin was publishing his Theories of Evolution that just like blew everyone's mind. So it changed everything. And poor monkeys of poor apes, they suffered a lot, and

they still do. I will say that that we still experiment on apes all the time and they are treated very poorly. And there's I mean, there's that's a can of worms right there. Because there's a lot of questions about, well, where has it brought us in? How many people have lived much better lives because of it? You know, I'm I don't have a solution. I don't want to start experimenting on people because of course you're gonna pick poor people,

You're gonna pick desperate people, You're gonna pake criminals. I mean, you're gonna do horrible human rights violations or animal rights violations. You know. It's just there's no good way, it feels like. But I actually have a good way, and it's I take I take my two index fingers and I bring them up to the side of my head and then I put them into my ears and I make this sound. La la la la la la la la la la la la la. Oh my god, that is helping I

feel so much. It's like all the solutions are there. We can assume what a better world? What a better world? Well, yeah, so that is our that is our bal Sack story. For today our scrotum story. Yeah, thanks for and for this one. You know, it's one of those things where it's sometimes sometimes there's a true love story here. Other times it's the story of sex and reproduction and how how we navigate those as a species or as multiple

species the case. Maybe I also I want to know what about the twenties specifically where all these old guys were like, I'm gonna live forever. I want to be young again, Like was it just something like coming out of a world war? They were like, I you know what I mean, I want to go back to my youth like different or I don't know. Yeah, on one hand, maybe there is that like I missed my youth and I want it back, or everything's booming right now, so I will yes, I want this forever. I can get

land in Florida. But I will argue that I don't think. You know, there's science crazes at different points in history, but I don't think this ever really goes away. I think there's always rich people, I mean all people. I'm not rich, and I think of it all the time, like how could I live forever? You know, I got my night cream? You know, anti wrinkles. I'm interested. I would. I think we've talked about this, like you know, the vampire quandary about like, oh you'd live forever but lonely,

you know you'd be lonely. I'm lonely. Now, I'll do it. I'm here, I am sitting right here. I want to see some stuff. I want to see this stupid Marvel Marvel series to its end, which you know is going to outlive us all true, true, we have to watch its inevitable decline. Right, Yeah, yeah, I'm down for that. I'd rather see it than not, right. I like, you

can be like the original first ten years was great. Yeah, that's I would love to have a hundred and twenty years from now be saying you guys will never have anything as good as The Winter Soldier like Jesus Boomer. I mean it will be millennial, millennial, millennial, this millennious, thousand year old millennials still going on about the Infinity saga. Jeez, we're all over it, old man. I guess that's what

I Potter reboot, that's what we're excited about now. Well, I guess that's what I wonder is if you live forever, A do you not feel I mean, because that's part of aging, right, getting older. It's not just that your body gets older, but like your mind does and you start to feel like the world's moving on and you'r Isn't that what we do in the Shadows is all about, is that they're sort of like cannot modernize themselves because that's just how it is. To just got to keep

it fresh, like I do. You know, you just gotta stay funky. You just got to be in touch with the kids and the lingo, you know, be groovy, like you can walk around. Yeah, that's going to be yea, you know, the kids and me, like we're on the same page. Oh yeah, any kids listening, please, let's let's tell you. I know, if y'all are on the same poo and they're going to be like, what's a page? True, I'm just kidding, y'all know what pages are? Yeah? Microsoft program?

Well anyway, do let us know what you think about this, if you would like to live forever or not. I would be interested in your opinions, because I do feel that people would get bored with the world. But maybe you're right. Boredom is maybe a sign of low intelligence and not trying that hard. So if you really were out there learning pottery and doing ship like you could live forever and be very happy. What do you think?

I'd love to know your thoughts about all this nut sex stuff, So yeah, send us an email riddic Romance at gmail dot com or hit us up on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Oh great, it's Eli. I'm at Dynamite Food and the show is at ridic Romance And we really appreciate you listening. We love spending time with you and hearing from you, and I hope you enjoyed this story. That's right, well, catch all the next one.

So long, friends, it's time to go. Thanks so listening to our show, tell your friends names uncles, and this is to listen to what's so ridiculous? Well mans,