Humanzee: Breaking the Species Barrier

Most people's reaction to the idea of a species, a new species, I guess being generated from humans and apes coming together is discussed, right. Yeah, Yeah, that would probably be like the one in the two on the three. I would probably just stand there awkwardly while the hybrids did their thing and would contemplate a lot of reservations about how this came to pass? Uh? Who who allowed

this to happen? Who made this happen? And uh? And how am I supposed to feel about myself as a human, as a person, How am I supposed to feel about them? It brings up a lot of questions and and not just for us. Uh. And this is an old stuff to blow your mind topic. In fact, there's a there's an episode from four years ago where you and Julie tackled the same topic. We're talking about human z s,

which is the possibility of hybridization between chimpanzees and humans. Uh. It's something that's been studied and experimented on for as far as we know, at least a hundred years, if not more longer. Uh. And is you know, I think it's stuff to blow your mind right, Like it's it's definitely something that most people didn't expect. I came across it when we were researching for the X Files. Episodes about the possibilities of alien human hybrids and human zies

came up in the research there. So we're revisiting it. Yeah, and luckily we have we have some better sources at our disposal this time around, for a you know, a deeper dive into a one particular case that we're going to spend a lot of time with here and uh and yeah, you mentioned the X Files, and I think that's that's great. We're gonna mention a little bit of horror fiction, a little bit of a comic book material here at the top, because it's a it's such a

mind blowing topic. It's a topic that it forces us to to rethink what we are and what it is to be human, what it is to be a person. It certainly worked for a turn to the century sort of chilling thrillers. Right. Oh yeah, but before we get into that, let's just remind the audience. So, hey, we do way more than just the podcast. If you've been listening to the podcast as many, We've been getting a lot of nice letters from people who have just started

listening to the show. Uh, we do more than that. We've got videos. Robert is on How Stuff Works Now once a week, both of us, right for How Stuff Works Now at least once we seek Joe is also

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we're on all of them soon. All right. So to start off, I want to talk with you just a little bit about an area of fiction that that always fascinated me, particular because you see, uh, several different individuals hitting the same topic around the same time in the same time frame. Um, the earliest being that of that explored by H. G. Wells in his novel The Island

of Dr Moreau. Yeah. Yeah, mostly known for the movie adaptations nowadays, although I imagine at the time that it came out there is a little bit of shock to the subject matter as well. Oh yeah, and apparently Wells wrote this, uh in large part as a as a protest against vivisection, the live dissection of of animals for research purposes, and um, you know, I think it's definitely

something that's lost in the film generations. But but I definitely remember watching the old Burt Lancaster version of this on like on a daytime horror show that was hosted by alum, what was your name, Grandpa Muster? Okay, yeah, okay, I hosted by Grandpa on TBS back in the day, and it was you know, it's kind of grimy and creepy and Harry and then of course we got that that wonderful Marlin one. Yeah, I saw that in the

theater in the nineties. Um, it's it's not good, but it's still I don't know, it has holds a warm place in my heart. There's some there's some stuff about it. I like director, but Richard Stanley, I believe, and I think there's a there's a documentary. I haven't seen it yet, but there's a documentary about the making of it. But yeah, for more more than just the fear of vivisection or human interspecies crossover, there's a lot of people who stay

away from that movie. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I'm thinking of two is that even before that, this isn't necessarily like a crossover. But murders in the room or post story spoilers for like a two year old story, but ends up being the murderer, ends up being an orangutang that you skipped from a zoo or a circus or something that was nearby and and comes in and it's a it's a locked door mystery and kills these people with like a razor blade or something. Yeah, that's

a that's a great one. Uh, And certainly I think is a part of this this sort of scene of weird ape short stories, like because another one that comes to mind, and this was a bit later, ine, but you had the Adventure of the Creeping Man by Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah, I haven't read that one. Well, the there's an interesting twist here because it seems like it's going to be a marauding, murderous ape, but it turns out that it's um that it's a human who has been taking um simion derived enhancement products and uh, you know, and it's actually either biologically or psychologically changing him into this uh this ape like guy that's a Dr Jackal mr Hyde kind of scenario. Kind of Yeah, huh.

I wonder if they're going to incorporate this into the next season of the BBC Sherlock, where Benedict Comberpatch will be uh dueling with this half apaf man. They should, man, I'm a big fan of the weirder Conan Doyle stories like that one and the Devil's Foot, which has a deadly psychede like poison that drives people mad. Yeah, that

stuff's great. Well, so, okay, you've also told me that there's a Lovecraft story, and this is outside of my knowledge of the Lovecraft readings I've done, so so what's it about. The title of the story is Facts concerning the Late Arthur German and his Family by BIOHP Lovecraft,

and its pretty early Lovecraft. Yeah, and it's uh, you know, I definitely wouldn't classified as being one of one of the great stories, but it's definitely worth exploring if you're interested in weird ape fiction, and if you're interested in the whole like racial context of of love Craft and his racial attitudes, because I can definitely see that kind of racial anxiety, to put it kindly, in this work.

I'm going to read a quick quote from it. It It it concerns, uh, you know, Europeans coming back from African expeditions, having encountered apes. Quote, science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species. If separate species we be, for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains. If loosed

upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur German did, And Sir Arthur German soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing. One So, as it turns out, classic Howard Phillips, Yeah, just you you immolate yourself and that's that's how you in the story. But basically what happened is this German character goes out on the more and burns and stuff after seeing the boxed object which had come back from Africa.

So basically the whole twist here is he finds out that that his his mother I believe, was a white apeak and his father was like an explorer or something like, yeah, who fell in love with the creature, and that he's the offspring. And yeah, so it's you know, maybe it's so horrified by his lineage that he commits suicide exactly, and you know, it's maybe it's a little Um. It's as close to the old admit, it's a twist on the old Lovecraft shadow over in Smith, it's very similar

kind of ending, except that guy that doesn't kill himself. Yeah. Yeah, and also similar a little bit too in Smith in that regard getting into you know, the racial horror, racial anxiety, and and but it it does tie in nicely into what we're gonna talk about today, into the real abhorrence, and into the some of the actual science that was

going on around this period. Yeah. In fact, so I've talked about this on the show before, but you know, the Silver Age of comic books, right around the end of the fifties beginning of the sixties, there was a fascination with this very topic of these of eight men basically uh, and they shut up all over the place in comics, and some of the big ones are still

around today. I mean the Flash TV show that's airing right now just had Guerrilla Grod, which is one of my favorite characters from all of comics history on it. He's a super intelligent eight Yeah. So these aren't necessarily eight human hybrids, but they're they're oh, they're either that or they're men that been turned into apes or they're

super intelligent apes. So like in the case of Guerrilla Grod, he comes from a city called Guerrilla City that's hidden in the wilderness somewhere where there's just all these super intelligent apes, and they're so smart that they've like built science that allows them to hide themselves from society. Uh. Cong Guerrilla is another one which I believe. I don't know the specific details, but I think Cong Guerrilla is like a guy who's been cursed or something like that

in the Congo to be a guerrilla. Same with Guerrilla Man. Uh, almost the exact same origin. There's a there's a villain called the Ultra Humanite that is like a scientist who's placed his brain inside a guerrilla's body. I believe it's like a big white gorilla um and that that will come into play when we talk later about the Chinese

experiments that we're being done around hybridization. There's Monster and Mala, and then the one uh that I that I immediately thought of when we were doing the research for this was the Red Ghost, which is an old Fantastic four villain, and he is like a Russian scientist who gets exposed. I think like cosmic rays or something like that, with three apes that he has with him. He has a gorilla, a baboon, and orangutank and they all developed superpowers and

hang out together. And his name, his real name is Ivan Cragoff. And the guy we're going to talk about the day, his name is Ivan ivan Off. So I wonder if, uh, that was the inspiration Ivan Ivanof was the inspiration for the red Ghost character. It might have been, you know, I'm also reminded of the hell Boy villain Herman from The Conqueror Worm, which is my favorite hell Boy adventure. Well, all right, real quick, before we get into the crazy science behind this, I'll give you a

little factoid. So it is a known thing within comics industry that if you put this is back in the day, if you put the color purple or an or and an ape on the cover of your comic, it would sell more copies. And so that was one of the reasons why there were so many of these characters that popped up at the time, is that they just they don't know, you know, somehow the things correlated together to higher sales. So they were constantly producing more gorilla grods

or cong guerrillas or whatever. So maybe there's somehow those covers were just cutting in almost subconsciously to this u to the post Darwinian um existential problem exact Man versus eight, not not only in physical combat where we're going to lose, but just in terms of identity. It's like, yeah, it was.

It's like the tabloid cover of its time that immediately kind of put click something in your head and makes you go, oh, I'm not quite right with that, but I need to figure out what what danger it poses to me. Yeah. Plus, I've also heard that in the post Darwinian world, the idea of our be steal nature, instead of being represented in the form of werewolves and um, you know, another type of beast man like the gorilla and the ape man, becomes the prime mold that makes

the steel human. Yeah, the fear of regressing back to your primal nature beyond your rational one. So what better for Superman. Superman has a valin. I believe his name is Titano, the super Ape. Is he made of metal? No, he's just a big ape with superpowers, I think? Or so well again, by that point, all the names are being used up. Yeah, exactly something So all right, let's dive into this. Let's dive into the Darwinism, the the

eugenics behind it, the fear too. There's just a palpable fear about this, so much so that scientists have actually filed patents to try to keep this from happening. So the filing of a of a patent just to make

sure nobody else actually engages in hybridization. Yeah, So in developmental biologists, Stuart Newman, who at the time was working at the New York Medical College in Valhalla, which sounds like a pretty cool place to work, together with a guy named Jeremy Rifkin, who is the president of the Foundation of Economic Trends, which is based out of Washington, d C. They submitted a patent for the chimera of a human zy. So we'll explain what a chimera is,

shortly made from embryonic cells of humans and chimpanzees. And the reason why they did this wasn't because they wanted to create a human zy. It was because they wanted to secure the patent because they wanted to prevent other people from ever making a human Z and exploiting it. In particular, they were worried about corporations, uh, somehow building these human zies and like using them either for artificial organs, as we'll talk about later, or or even for like

labor purposes. What happened was the patent was denied in two thousand four by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the rejection basically came because the government looked at it and they said, well, this includes within its scope a human being, which we can't legally patent a human being. So in and of itself, they sort of defined by law that trying to patent any kind end of species creation that it involves human cross breeding is unpatentable. So

we'll see. I mean, if it ever comes to comes to light that, you know, corporations do start designing human zase, we'll see how that plays out in courts. But that's an interesting point. Yeah, yeah, what can you say to the resulting hybrid, I'm sorry, you're in violation of patent? Yeah, exactly. And so Newman and uh and Riffkin, you know, they basically their whole goal was just to start a debate, right like, however it played out, I don't think they

particularly cared. They wanted the debate about what it means to be human, uh, to actually get in there in the legal you know jargon, especially when it came to patenting organisms with human genes. And I don't know if

you remember this. It's funny because as we're recording this last night with Barack Obama's last State of the Union speech, but in two thousand six, President George W. Bush during his State of the Union speech called for a ban on human animal hyber I was I remember watching it, and I mean this is ten years ago now, and I remember watching it and thinking where did this come from? It just it came out of nowhere, and I was like,

why is he worried about werewolves? And now I can kind of see where the you know where, where the origin of that came from. Clearly, Uh, the argument got

started by Newman. It's interesting to think of this in terms of breaking the species barrier, which is a phrase that I picked up in James Randerson's article in The Guardian where he's talking about um Richard Dawkins proposing a two thousand nine that the successful hybridization between a human and a champanzee would would be something that would change everything, a real a real game changer for for human civilization if that makes sense along Dawkins line of research and

thought too. Yeah, attack that. So I definitely challenger you want to keep thinking of this species barrier as we as we move forward, because in a sense it is a an artificial barrier, and since it is a but it's but still a barrier that is carefully maintained, and it has a lot to do with with not only the biological reality of of who and what we are, but also just are our existential understanding of Yeah. Absolutely, uh, And I think that we're going to keep coming back

to that with these research. The research that we're exploring too, is that that fear, that uh, confrontation of understanding of what being human means kept coming back throughout these and for good reason. Before we get into the like the meat of it, though, I just wanted to add a note here because I always have trouble with this and I wanted to make sure that the audience was with us. So chimpanzees, which would be you know, how we would produce a human z They're not monkeys. Monkeys and great

apes are separate from one another. Right this It feels like the Carl Pilkington, Uh, like I'm I'm, I'm Gervais trying to explain to my inner Carl Pilkington. A great eight is a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and orangutang, a bnobo and potentially humans, right, And here's the distinction. They don't have tails. They have larger bodies and bigger brains than monkeys. They're built for different kinds of locomotion and this includes walking by pedally on their legs like we do, but

also that swinging from branches that we think of. Right, So the anatomy of great apes is their shoulder blades are designed in such a way that allows that monkeys can't necessarily do all those same things. So that's what we're talking about here. And the distinction is important because of you know, the definition of species and how close we as human beings are too chimpanzees as a speeches as a species. Yeah, As a regular zoo visitor with my my son, this comes up a lot as I

hear other parents talk about the monkeys. At the monkey, look at him, go look at And because that's the other thing, like the gender of the the creature of being viewed as always male, and I always want to point out, do you see an elephant penis, because I do not see an elephant penis. Yeah. Yeah, but that's a that's a side tension. So let's do this. Let's line up what a hybrid is and what a chimera is so we can kind of define those before we get into it. This is uh, you know, fertile stuff

to blow your mind ground. We've covered this on multiple episodes before, but it's always good to have a primer. So, hybrid animals are created when the genetic material from different animals joined to form a single embryo. So a mule, for example, is the offspring of female horse and a male donkey. Every cell in the body of a mule contains genetic material from both parents. Yeah, and as we'll get into later, they're almost always infertile. Yeah, and if not,

other problems present. So chimeras are a little different in that they are two different sets of DNA that originate from the fusion of different zygoats or eggs. Right, So the first one of these was created actually in nineteen sixty one. That's uh quite a bit after a lot of the research that we're gonna be talking about today. At least the Russian research. Uh, and chimeras aren't always

a fifty fifty blend. The example I gave this in the X Files episode I'll give it again here is if you make a chimera of a sheep and a goat, Uh, it's not gonna be like half sheep half goat, like right down the middle. It's gonna look like a sheep maybe, but the hair will feel like a goat, right, Like it would be a little bit more briskly or chorus

than a sheep would be. Yeah, I mean, I've also read that you could make an argument that an individual who has animal tissue in their body, some sort of a transplant, that they are technically a chimera, but obviously not in a way that's really all that mythological and monster right, yeah, well right in the term chimera comes from the monstrous myth of what is it part dragon,

part lion, part eagle? Is that right? There's a goat on the tail coat in there too, So it's a mix of every everybody knows that monster from their D and d adventures. Um. The monster frequently seen in the Monster Manual, but I think rarely rolled out because it's hard to get excited about something with a goat for a tail. Yeah, it's just kind of a mishmash of animals and a little bit of dragon in there. So

what do we mean when we say species too? That's important, right, So most of us think, oh, a species is different kinds of animals, right, that look alike, act alike, and have babies together that follow the same paths that they do. But to biologists, there's a difference. They have a phrase biological species concept and by this they mean two animals are only the same species if they can interbreed and

produce offspring that are fertile. So that's crucial, especially when we're using the mule as the benchmark here, and it leaves out a lot of the plant kingdom and even some of the animal kingdom too. As we know from talking about lots of parasites and things on the show, there's plenty of beings species that can reproduced a sexually.

It's also worth noting that, as you know, as any given lineage within the within the animal kingdom makes its way across time, worms its way through the centuries, there's um there's a divergence. So you have you have what was once one species gradually become two species or more species, and some of those of those branches die off, others thrived, but there can still remain the ability for those branches

to reconverge ive only temporarily in the form of a hybrid. Well, it's funny that you mentioned that, because actually one of the studies that I read for this was from two thousand six h Scientists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, mass Massachusetts released a study where they were comparing human and primate genomes down to the letters of each base pair, and they came to the following conclusion, which is right in line with what you just said, Robert, Chimps and

humans likely diverged from the same ev oucetionary tree six point three million years ago. Now that's actually a lot more recent than was previously thought. Also, early humans and chimps probably interbred with each other for four million years before they split as species for good. So all of you out there that are really uncomfortable with that idea, our species are, or I guess like our proto human

ancestors were breeding with chimpanzees for four million years. That's a that's a likely possibility based on this study, So that implies not only are we descended from human zis, but like you said, it's possible we will become human zies again. Yeah. And you know, and also when you go back into and look at archaic forms of humanity, uh that you know, strip away the human taboos and and we have to remember that that humans have have

reread with other species as well. Um. Neanderthal genome mapping provides strong evidence to humans and Neanderthals in her bread between one and four percent of DNA of many humans living today likely came from Neandertala's. People of European and Asian heritage, especially, I'm more likely to carry those genes. Um. And there's some studies that that support the idea that such interbreeding may have made is stronger. We pick up some of the strengths of this slightly alien species that

we're breeding with. You know, it's not it's not all completely cut and dry. Experts go back and forth on the matter, but but there does seem to be compelling evidence to suggest that a certain amount of it occurred. Um. So in our in an archaic sense, interbreeding definitely occurred, and a lot of us are the hybrid results of that. Yeah, and so I guess there's just some kind of like uh uh like inner guilt that we're all carrying around. Maybe, Yeah,

you could you can make an argument there. I guess that it's some sort of uh, you know, a species a guilt that remains because of some uh slightly weird romantic trips back in the back of the day. Yeah, this brings us back around to the idea of the humanzie, the idea of humans and chimpanzees or some other um notable um um great ape species. Yeah, I think implied just based on any great ape slash human pairing, right,

it's not necessarily chimpanzees. Yeah, And a lot of experts have have commented on this and continued to comment on

this um uh. Jeffrey Borne, director of the the Yurkeys Primate Center here in Atlanta, one of the founding fathers of the Federal Program of Primate Research, wrote the following in nine quote, there seems to be very little physiological reason why artificial instamination could not be used between man and the apes with the possibility that a viable child might be reproduced, and it is surprising that this type

of hybridization has not in fact already taken place. Yeah, So now I'm fascinated because I've lived here for almost ten years, You've lived here for longer than that. I've never heard of or been to this place. So in find and then the news occasionally, and I feel like there's a friend of a friend who worked there. But but yeah, I don't know a tremendous amount about the facility. Seems like it would be a great resource for us for future episodes. Maybe we'll look into it. If anybody

out there works there, let us know. Now we could rattle off other individuals who have commented about the possibility and varying degrees of fear or wonder. But really the best place to go from here is to the study of a man who tried dearly and it nearly succeeded. It feels like in carrying out such an experiment, we're talking about Russian biologist Ilia Ivanov Ivanovitch ivan Off. Yeah, also known as the Red Frankenstein. Well, if I don't think at the time of his life he has known

that way. But when these stories broke Originally, my understanding is that there were some Russian documents that were found, technical documents about his work they are found and translated and kind of made a flurry like maybe in the eighties or nineties, and the meaning this the Red Frankenstein thing is important to to to discuss here and sort of keeps separate from the real ivan Off, because there's the real ivan Off who were going to discuss in detail,

and then there's the Red Frankenstein ivanof which very much stems from um from particularly in early nineteen nineties, when

certain individuals picked up on these existing documents. So sometimes they're misconstrued as having been um uh, you know, top secret KGB documents, But in reality, it sounds like these were all documents that were readily available in Russian either at the Suitcomb Russian Primate Center or in um Ivanoff's own you know, personal correspondences and records, his own archive, so that the material wasn't new, but suddenly new eyes were on them and it started spinning off varying holes

of unbelievable uh uh you know, modern urban myth about what he was up to. Yeah, And so as we approached the research for this to bring it to you, we tried to be very careful about distinguishing the real from the myth. With this guy uh. And you know, our best resource for this is actually an academic paper that came out in two thousand two by historian Careel Rosianoff, and it was published in Science and Context. It's called Beyond Species Ilia Ivanof and his Experiments on cross breeding

humans with anthropoid apes. And I think the crucial bit there is that Rosianoff spoke Russian and thus was able to actually read the documents firsthand and translate them and give us something a little bit as close to a

primary source as possible for US English speakers. And whereas like the articles that were showing up in the Chicago Tribune and and and other like fairly reputable sources were a little out there and extrapolated in their terms of like him making super soldier super soldier apes for stallar

sort of thing. Another source that I really liked was the paper the Russian Primate Research Center A Survivor, and this was by Dr m M. P. Fridman, and this is that he was the former chief of the Laboratory of Informational Analysis in Medical Primatology of the Russian Primate Center at Sukhum, which is which is gonna be a place We're gonna discuss linked there and it was also and it was co authored by Dr Douglas M. Bowden, m D. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences UH and

core staff scientist at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington and Seattle so UM and and their paper was what was he was even more skeptical than most of the material that have looked at. And I thought, thoughts supplied a wonderful breath of fresh air amid so many papers that that tended to to get into that red Frankenstein territory. Yeah, So I guess we should start with just a general kind of abstract overview of the Ivanoff story, which is that Ivanof was funded

by the Russian government. They gave him about two hundred thousand dollars to find out if it was possible to create a human z uh. And so he went to the past Tour Institute in France, where I believe that he had had some training previously, and used their primary primate facility in Kannakery, Guinea to conduct his experiments. And in ninety six he had artificially impregnated three chimpanzees, but the experiment failed and by sorry, I should clarify he

artificially impregnated three chimpanzees, female chimpanzees with human sperm. Well he had, he attempted, attempted to, didn't. There's no evidence that any of those pregnancies actually that anything actually right there. Um and in fact, one of them died on the way back to uh to Russia and to the than necropsy performed on the specimen that showed no sign of pregnancy. See so so and this is this is out of the Scotsman in two thousand five, that they were the

ones reporting on this. Uh and so again like we're gonna try to parse out the truth from the fiction here. Um well, I guess one of the important things to sort of start at the beginning of where guy came from, um so to his background, where he really initially made his name was in artificial instamination, particularly in the veterinary sciences, experimenting with with cows and horses in the like very

real world practical applications. Uh. But and this was like this is you know, in the nineteen twenties, Okay, right around the same time Lovecraft's writing yeah story, and he was a big fan of artificial instamination and he figured it would allow hybridization among a wide variety of species. But in and we see the first inkling of this, this idea to create a chimp hybrid at the International Zoology Congress uh in Graz and nineteen ten, and this

is where he mentions it as a possibility. But there's no there's no inkling that he was actually planning anything. It's just kind of like, hey, you could artificial intimination is great, you could even use it on a jump in a human. Yeah, I mean he didn't even have access to the resources to begin conducting experiments like this then, I mean, really what he was focusing on then was

creating superior horses exactly. Yeah. But then around this is during the revolution, many Russian scientists are losing their patrons and their support systems. They're forced to abandon old research, find new avenues, find new spins on their particular area of expertise, and so in a in several letters written to the American biologist Raymond Pearl, ivan Off indicates that he's thinking more and more about experiments on apes, and

in particular about hybridization between between man and chimpanzee. And then we see him discussing the possibility with the scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and it kind of builds up from there. Right, he begins talking to folks, he begins talking up this idea, he begins winning some support here and there among particularly among individuals at the Russian Science Academy. Yeah, and so we'll get into this. I think it's best to maybe approach it after we

go through the history of Ivanov. There are multiple reasons why he may have approached this research, right. It may not just have been oh, let's just make a half man half chimpanzee, right, right, So their political possibilities, uh, really weird devious possibilities for old men and their sexual rejuvenation. But we'll get into that after we finished the history

on him. Yeah, and even there's also it's worth noting that, you know, it's it's there's the work you do as a scientist, and there's how you sell it, how you get funded, and then just how your approach to a particular area of research. Really, something is as powerful as this may change over time the closer you get to it, and as you're exposed to different cultural attitudes concerning your uh,

the individuals and the creatures that you're going to experiment upon. Yeah, it's especially interesting to see as Ivanov goes from Russia to France to Africa, and then at one point you even approached supposedly an American uh woman who just was extremely wealthy, to see if she would back him up with resources, and the different cultural resonance and response to his his research from all of those areas is is very very fascinating. Yeah, that uh rosaninof article again Beyond Species.

It's the it's out there. It's available behind a paywall if you want to pay forty bucks for it. It is uh it's a great paper that goes into a lot of depth about the particularly about the cultural attitudes that are surrounding all these different pieces. Like, for instance, he goes into how on one hand, he ends up going to Africa and he's engaging in you know, very very racist imperial ideologies concerning the local population and ultimately

concerning apes as well. But at the same time he's he's received letters from the Kluflux Klan telling him not to come to America. It's so he's I'm surprised that he was on their radar. Yeah, because I mean, he's writing around about it. The stuff his work is making headlines and and pissing people off even at the time. But but yeah, back to this sort of the talking days.

So he ends up making a number of friends, uh, in the in the government at the time, people who who think that if nothing else, they may not be that into the particulars of his research. Go. But that but the idea of Russian scientists going to Africa carrying out some sort of big scientific expedition, that sounds good. That sounds like good pr for the Soviet Union. We'll see this in other episodes where we've we've talked about,

you know, early twenty century Russian science too. There seemed to be just a motivation to get out there and do it right, to try to break boundaries and make headlines. Yeah, and it does seem that he also factored religion into his early pitches for it, to say that, hey, we want to you know, religion, is this this this horrible force in the modern world. We want to completely remove it from from the you know, the higher levels of

modern civilization. This is a great project to help convince everyone. What better way to get two thousand dollars from the Bolsheviks, and then of course once he once he actually gets funding, he stops talking about the religion angle because ultimately that that seems to be less on his radar. He's more focused on on the scientific frontier here and his explored in Beyond Species that there doesn't seem to be a

lot of discussion of ethics at the time. Um, he's he's already he's talking about basically, we're gonna I want to go to Africa, I want to engage, to engage with these apes and are officially inseminate a female primate with with human sperm. He didn't have an i RB that he had to answer to and fill out ethical

forms before he conducted his experiments. Yeah, there seems to be some some notion that there were some critical rumblings and sort of rumors already, like not everyone who heard about this thought it sounded great, but it wasn't enough to actually derail the efforts. So, as you previously mentioned, he had already made friends with the Pasteur Institute. So

that's what he does. He sets out to the to the primate center there in French Guiana and sets about trying to carry out this work right and so one of his major goals is to get ahold of as many chimpanzees as possible so he can bring them back to Russia. Right, Yeah, and well ultimately, but during this initial phase, it's all about we're going to carry this out here. We're gonna we're gonna inseminate female. Question where

the human sperm came from. Yes, according to zian Off, they seem to have been very clear on that matter, that that it was not diving Off nor his son, both of whom were traveling from UM. But there are a number of problems that that immediately pop up. First of all, at this primate research center. This is you know, don't don't go into this expecting a modern primate research center. In order to obtain specimens, it involved local hunters going

out killing adult chimpanzees and bringing back the babies. So, on one hand, the primates that he was working with, we're almost all prepubescent, so that was going to prevent this from from happening. Also, the conditions were not great

and and and you know, surprise, surprise. In order for primates, particularly chimpanzees, to successfully breed, they need to be in at least semi comfortable surroundings, I know, like you hear about like today, like when they're trying to get pandas to breed, it's like you know, pulling teeth because they have to be like very comfortable and at ease with

their surroundings. And can you imagine the situation that these chimpanzees have had their family murder, They've been kidnapped and dragged over to this weird facility that can't imagine had very modern equipment or facilities. Yeah, and and it sounds like the handling of the animals was also really rough

and it was dangerous work dealing with them. Ivanov's son was apparently severely bitten on the hand and had to go to the UH seek medical tension over it, and UH in the whole time, Rosianov argues, they seem to be treating the chimps a little extra harsh, perhaps in order to establish more psychic distance between human and chimpanzee, because of what they're trying to do about this offspring

that they have. I mean, really, he's he had such a supporter of this idea and the powers of artificial exsemination. I mean, he considers it to be a done deal. They're going to create this offspring and bring it back. And but how's he going to feel about that? What's fascinating about that is like even ivanof who was like a dent behind this, this was his baby, no pun tented. Uh he he even seems to have carried that inner

fear of the species coming too close together. Right, Yeah, so he kept emotional distance, but the pregnancies don't seem to take hold. He's growing more and more frustrated with just how difficult this is, and so he begins to think about flipping, uh, the scenario. Right, so we're going to go the other way around. Now, we're going to

impregnate a human woman with chimpanzee sperm. Right. And he seems to approach this in a very cold and calculating way, and like very very much, I don't want to maybe not cold and calculating, but his mind seems to be firmly placed on the scientific goal here. And uh, and so if it's if it's extremely difficult and dangerous to deal with the chimp, better to deal with the human, right, because he's also experimented, you can just shoot the chump, a male chump. You can then get sperm from the

corpse and use that viable sperm in artificial insemination. So wait, was he planning on telling the human woman what he was going to be putting insider? That's that's where this gets really ethically shady, is that he apparently figured, all right, the best way to do this is to also not have the local woman, because that's the other thing. That's where you get into into a lot of the racist

imperial attitudes toward toward local Africans. Um he begins to think, well, the best way to do this is just to not tell her what you've done, because that's going to just endanger the whole process even more. And this is where we come to conakry, okay, because this is where he

tries to set this up. He had on the way to Guienna in November, he started talking to a feller to traveler, a doctor Dupey, who was head of the Colonial Health Service UH in the area, and he ended up inquiring with this guy for permission to inseminate native women with chimpanzee sperm in a hospital in the Congo without their knowledge or scent, as a means to streamline the process and um and apparently permission was initially granted, uh and he and he was all. They were going

to supply a patient. Everything was gonna be good to go. But then sainor has prevailed. They changed their mind, and the ivan Offics were apparently just really offended by by the whole host whole situation, so they turned around and went right back. Yeah, they basically the expedition. They ran out of time and funding. They had to go back to Russia. He hadn't packing it all up and heading

to suit him. This is in the southern Soviet Republic of Georgia where the Soviet This is where the Soviet government established a special primate station, mainly because this was a this is a subtropical area for the Soviet Union. This was a really warm tropical environment. It would be

ideal for the gas. As it turns out, they still had to acclimatize the any chumps and were rang of thanks that they brought there because it's it's actually kind of uh, kind of chilly, kind of northern for tropical chure. But but they ended up setting this this place up and succumb becomes a very important research facility in the decades ahead. It plays into the Russian space program, various

other scientific endeavors. It actually ends up enduring all the way up to the early nineties, when it ends up being destroyed during severe fighting between the Georgian and uh Bakizan param paramilitary groups. But this actually, like in terms of Ivanof's legacy, Yeah, I mean, this is really the thing that I guess he could have been proud of. So let's okay, let's try to um split the hairs

here and find the truth out on this part. So what I read in an article from the New Scientists was that uh supermb sorry not sucum Ivanoff brought twenty chimps with him from Africa to this nursery, but only four made it there. And I think there's some discrepancy there, right, The count I was looking at, I think was a little less than that, more in the lines of like ten different chimps, and then some died on the way, So I don't I don't know, maybe you split the difference.

But he still made it back with a number of chimps enough to establish this place and ultimately ends up with only one, an orangutan that was named Tarzan. Correct. Yeah, And this is worth stressing to This comes from the Uh, the Russian Primate Center, a survivor paper mentioned earlier. There they were really um. They really stressed the fact that ivanof helps set this place up, but he was never like a staff researcher there. Her only visited the place once,

so his involvement there was very limited. He's not a primate specialist. His his field of studies an artificial insemination exactly. Yeah. And and at this point the timeline becomes it begins to get really crunched to in terms of him still wanting to carry out this, uh, this strange, strange and ethically um question a Bowle experiment, because he still wants to impregnate a human being with with with chimpanzee sperm or vice versa. So another like a dubious account. I'm

not sure if this is true or not. That I read about this was that the human woman in Russia that they convinced to go about doing this, So it sounded like she was willing and knew what was going on. She went by the code name Woman G. Yes. Yeah, she was apparently from from Leningrad. Uh. And she wrote a letter saying like please accept me into this program, which, of course right, I mean get given the time in the setting. I mean, you can you can imagine easily

imagine an individual that's so hard up. Yeah, they would say, yes, take me. I need a place to go, so you know, I don't. And that's also this is a case that is mentioned uh by Razaniof in his paper Beyond Species. So I I I believe it. It It seems like that's probably true. Then yeah, and so he he thinks, all right, I have a lined up. We have Tarzan there. Uh. The sperm apparently seemed good. But then June nine, Tarzan dies of an unexpected brain hemorrhage and they have to

order some chimps. But it ends up being summer nineteen thirty before they arrive, and in the meantime, there's even more political uh revolution going on within Russia. Yeah, I have an office during this whole point. He's not in in uh. He's not at the Russian Primate Center. He is at the Experimental Veterinary Institute UH engaging in sort of his original research and just original artificial insemination with

a veterinary uh UM target. In mind that he's trying to set all this up, and there seems to be an upheaval there um, he's attacked by younger researchers, his key supporters that the at the scientific Academy, they lose their positions, and then to to just top it all off, December nineteen thirty, he's arrested by a secret police. And it has nothing to do with these these experiments. It doesn't it doesn't have anything to do with the hybridization

of apes and humans. Now he's charged with creating a counter revolutionary organization among agricultural specialists. Yeah, and this is interesting though, to get into the Red Frankenstein thing, you see varying levels of either authors not caring about the the the details here, ghosting over it, or maybe even making it seem as if it was connected, as if as if his superiors were like, this is too much, we're shutting you down. Yeah, at least two of the

accounts I read painted it that way. It made it sound like it was because of this research. Yeah. Now that being said, he was shut down after this. There were the individuals who in the Soviet system who found out the details about what he wanted to do, because he wanted to go back to Africa and do it again and attempt it. But they began to say say, well, this actually sounds like rather bad pr This could potentially

screw up our operations in Africa. This could make it difficult for other Russian scientists to go to Africa and conduct their work. We want no part of it. So anyway, he gets arrested, he he's exiled for five years to alma Aka, the capital of the Kazak Republic, and uh and oh and his one of his main accusers ends up succeeding him as head of the laboratory at the Veterinary Institute, which is apparently was pretty common at the time. Yeah, so the story I read was that when he's in

kazakh Stan he ends up with poor health. I don't know if that's because of like difference in the weather, maybe his age at that point in time. But I think it said something along the lines of like he

died on a cold train platform. I mean maybe, because the account I read here is that he his health deteriorated in prison because the conditions there, and uh, he he has he scheduled for release finally, and his release, it's worth noting he would not have come back and been able to work with Jimps and uh and human and he was gonna, if anything, he was going to go back into veterinary sciences of some something. Yeah. But then he dies and perhaps it happened on a on

a train platform, yeah, who knows. Uh. So there's some interesting, uh I guess, like discrepancies of between what his actual motivations were for doing this, right. So there's the mythical one, which is Stalin saying, let's let's make these super apes soldiers so we can use them as part of our great revolution. Right, But then that doesn't really seem to be true. In fact, like from what I saw, it doesn't seem like Stalin had any direct involvement with this whatsoever. Yeah,

I mean, Stalin had plenty to go. So then there's the argument, which is that ivanofs motivation was to prove that man evolved from apes so that he could prove that Darwin was right and that religion was wrong. And this is the Bolshevik rhetoric version, right, And based on what I've read, it sounds it sounds as if that played into his attempts to gain fund for the program, But it doesn't seem as if that actually played into his motivations. It didn't show up in his diary entries,

et cetera, and another one that I read UH. And this ties back into another controversial Russian scientists named Serge Voronoff, was that the aging Bolshevik leaders wanted him to discover ways UH to basically breed glands that they could use

for rejuvenation. So while he's doing the research in France, he gets together with Serge Voronoff, who's known for grafting slices of ape tests into rich old men so they can regain their quote vigor uh, and together the two of them purportedly transplanted a woman's ovary into a chimpanzee and then inseminated her with human sperm. But you know, again the myth fact and fiction not so sure about

all this stuff. Other than Voronov's reputation. My under standing of this particular incident is that it is more or less construction of a of a particular Russian sci fi writer who in the early nineties was one of the individuals, one of the primary individuals to unearth some of these

documents against doing stuff with them, and it UH. The criticism that is lodged in that UH that Russian Primate Center Survivor paper is that this guy basically, uh, did a little league of extraordinary gentlemen think the best of both worlds and made a narrative. Yeah, Like they argue that there was no connection between these very real um tissue grafting experiments, and certainly that is a whole ornof

did du Yeah, that was a real guy. This was real research, and that in that research is in and of itself very interesting. But it sounds as if basically the guy said, Hey, this character is cool and weird and interesting and kind of scary. So is this one. Let's make a meet up there with buddies. So yeah, I would definitely take that bit of the story with

a grain of salt. And then this last one that I read, and this this again seems like it fits too conveniently into the rhetoric of the political situation in Russia at the time, was that the whole idea behind this was to help transform society by transforming people using quote positive eugenics. Uh, And that the idea is they breed in desirable traits, which would be the willingness to work and communal living, and they would breed out primitive

needs such as competition, greed, and the idea of property ownership. Well, you know, given the time frame, I mean, you really can't look at this story without the shadow of eugenics falling on it here in degree. So yeah, I don't think you can write eugenics out. But on the other hand, it it doesn't seem like he seems to have been laser focused on on just the idea of breaking that species barrier. Yeah, I think he was just primarily interested in the wonder of science and whether or not it

could happen. But it also is it shows that if you were laser focused on something like that, uh, to the point to where you know your your ethics a road around that focus, uh, you can end up in a very scary place. So Ivanof isn't the only person to have attempted this. There's actually another story, and again there's a lot of Uh. This hasn't been, as far as I could find, uh, studied as much as the Ivanof incident, and the fact hasn't been separated from the

fiction just yet. But there's an article from the St. Petersburg Independent in one called the Chinese aim to implant human sperm in chimps, and it claimed by interviewing a guy named Dr g Young Shang that he was experimenting with fertilizing chimpanzees with human sperm in the nineteen sixties, so this is well after Ivan off. He must have been familiar with that research. I would think, oh, I

would imagine UM. And he said that they did actually impregnate a chimp and it was pregnant for three months before his experiment was halted. But again, there's no evidence of any of this. This is just this guy's word.

And apparently he was a surgeon who directed the Sun Giao Tien Hospital in Shenyang, and during China's Cultural Revolution in nineteen sixty seven, very similar to the ivanof situation, he was branded a counter revolutionary, his lab was smashed up, and that subsequently the chimp who was supposedly three months pregnant, died from neglect and the researchers were hounded away from their studies, so they were never able to complete these uh and he says this is where it borders on

the sci fi. He says, the research if it resumes, so this was in the eighties, Clearly it did not resume unless there's a secret history here that we're unfamiliar with. UM has the potential to develop creatures with a higher

animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. So what he was thinking of here is that they would be like laborers, that they would use him human z s for um, they would breed into them a larger brain and a bigger mouth, because chimpanzees have trouble imitating human sounds with their narrow mounths, So they would be used for hurting sheep and cows, driving carts, and exploring space, the bottom of the sea and mines, so really dangerous

stuff that we don't want. It's interesting here because he's he's definitely seems to be falling on the side of viewing the hybrid offspring as a non human or sub human. Yeah, like almost like it's a slave race. Yeah Yeah, it's just so still letting them explore space, which also sinks a little like that that seems like you're maybe giving them a really well like cushy job and they don't

forget about we we did send chimpans space. So maybe it's just like he's looking at like a more accelerated version of yeah, yeah, more like a yeah, an accelerated species accelerated test subject to anything else. So he he proposed in this article that U that they would provide solutions as well for transplanting animal organs into humans, so they would be better than artificial organs, which were kind

of the trending at the time. Uh. And he wanted to set up a factory that would provide these ape organs, and even thought that they would get to the point for head transplants, which you know we're we're talking about right now again in TWI. But his idea was that you would uh be able to transplant a human brain into a human z skull in case there was some kind of you know, problems, so full blown full body transplant ultra humanite. It's getting back to that DC comics

character I mentioned at the beginning. He would wanted to make an ultra humanite uh. And he claimed that there were other researchers at the time at the Harbon Medical University in China that we're doing the same thing, but with dogs. They were trying to see if they could transplant I don't think they were putting human brains into dogs.

They're trying to see if they could do head transplant dogs. Yeah, those those uh, those experiments are reasonably well documented Yeah, also that it's all another area of of scientific exploration that gets into the taboo. But this seems like another fertile area for an academic paper out there if somebody speaks Chinese and could get ahold of the documents from this period of time and really kind of pars out

what the actual facts were. But so so, there have been rumors, like if you go to the wiki page Wikipedia page for human z there's plenty of rumors about Russia trying to develop human zes and China trying to develop human zes. But as far as we can find with the research that we've done, neither actually did it, although these attempts were purportedly made. Yeah, so the facts seem to be as follows. It can theoretically be done right, but in order to do it, you it's you have

to have the right conditions. You have to have the right medical techno oology, you have to have the right funding. You have to be able to do it without objectionable parties disrupting your research. You need to be able to convince the politicians involved or the public if they're aware of it, that there's reasons for it that are beyond

the squick factor. Just breeding two species together. Yeah, and I think that's the thing, Like, you can make an argument for these various benefits, but ultimately crossing the species barrier lands you in a very ethically, existentially troubling area, and it's just a place that most people are not willing to go. Occasionally you'll have a scientist pop up who has the drive and maybe even the resources to get them to a certain point, but society as a

whole is not going to support that that momentum. Yeah, so far. So I would love to know actually from you our listeners, if you know what your thoughts are on this. So if you opened up you know, Facebook or your RSS reader first thing in the morning and you see a headline that says us to combine human and chimp DNA to make a human z Like, let's even leave out the breeding aspect of it. What what would your reaction be? You know, would you be comfortable

with that? What? What purpose would it serve? I'm curious or even this, like, imagine this scenario. We'll just go ahead and remove the research and the the experiment itself. Imagine that it comes out tomorrow, Hey turns out they actually conducted this experiment. We shut the experiment down. It's not taking place anymore. But here's the offspring. Here is the humanity. How are we so, how do we feel about the human ZY? Then? Is it? And is it a human? Is it a sub human? Is it? Do

do we give it personhood? I feel like we kind of rights? Does it have? Right? Yeah? That reminds me of um Oliver, which was the um I believe that the first like suppose was it instance, it was this kind of uh ape that had human like features, and I think that there was some distinction with its DNA. It's DNA was a little weird, but I don't think it was actually a human Z. But when but when it broke it was kind of like a National Enquirer

tabloid type thing. Yeah, because then for for a moment it I think for a lot of readers, then it seemed possible because as we discussed, it is possible. This is the human ZY is not a creature that it will or could emerge completely from the realm of the fantastic, but but a being that can emerge from the scientific realm of our of our real world. Yeah, I mean,

like of the DNA between humans and chimpanzees. Are the same, not much of a leap, although I wonder if a human ze would be fertile, because then that would be the real definition of of if it's a species or not. Well, that's why you need to factory, right exactly. You got to crank them out all right. Well, there you have it, UM. We will make sure that the landing page for this episode includes links out to some of the key resources

that we've discussed here. Again if you want to, if you want to explore the topics further, those are great

resources to check out. UM. In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com just in general for all the podcast episodes, the videos, the blog posts, list gallery SLINKs out to social media accounts, you name it, And if you want to let us know about how you feel about human z s and the possibilities of them either being used for artificial organs or some kind of labor use or or whatever even just the invention of a human zu, let us know

on social media Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and we're on periscope noon on Friday's Eastern Standard time, or you can always write us directly that blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. They